Oxford Valuation Partners, Crowd Valley and KPMG featured experts, Kim Wales, founder of Wales Capital, Douglas Ellenoff, senior attorney with the firm Ellenoff, Grossman & Schole, Nicolas Hodge, Partner at K&L Gates, Alejandro Cremades, founder of RockThePost, Vamsi Sistla, CTO of CrowdValley and an Angel Investor with the ARC Angel Fund and Daniel Miller, Co-Founder of Fundrise, who are at the cutting edge of this new field, Crowdfund investments. Together they discussed and debated the landscape of funding options and how quickly it changing. Driven by new SEC no-action letters and changes stemming from the JOBS Act that is permitting a broader scope of activity in the space outside of the traditional networks.  The current focus seems to be on platforms that link Accredited Investors and investment opportunities, while more retail options are being developed since the final rulemaking process for Title III remains underway.

http://crowdfunding-university-baruch-newyork-57.eventbrite.com/

White, who became SEC chairman on April 10, 2013, has suggested the commission pass the existing plan without major changes and add additional protections later, said the people, who declined to be identified because the deliberations are private. The approach would placate congressional Republicans who have complained the SEC has slow-walked the rule, which was required to be completed by July 2012.

http://mobile.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-26/sec-s-white-said-to-push-to-lift-ban-on-hedge-fund-advertising.html

Google led a $125 million deal to buy a stake in the Lending Club from existing investors valuing Lending Club at $1.55 billion – nearly triple the valuation of the last fund-raising round that closed last summer. This is a defining moment for the crowdfund investing industry; if you are not aware, it is this new alternative asset class that is positioned to democratize the capital markets under the Jumpstart Our Business Startup Act.

Click here to read the full WSJ article:  http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2013/05/02/google-makes-strategic-investment-in-lending-club/

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) — On today’s “Money Moves,” Bloomberg Television focuses on alternative assets and places where investors are investing their money outside of the traditional stock and bond markets. Live with Kim Wales, the founder of Wales Capital, a strategic business advisory firm and Candace Klein, founder of SomoLend, a debt based crowdfunding platform.

Kim is the Chair of the Crowdfunding Professional Association (www.cfpa.org).  Candace Klein is the Co-Chair of the Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (www.cfira.org)

(Source: Bloomberg)

Watch live:

Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) January 31, 2013

FINRA’s information request brings optimism to the crowdfunding industry’s leading trade organizations CFIRA and CfPA.

On January 25, 2013 Goldman Sachs and LaGuardia College hosted its 7th, 10,000 Small Businesses Funders Panel and invited Kim Wales, the founder of Wales Capital, a thought leader in Crowdfund Investing as a panelist.

Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses is a five-year initiative to unlock the growth and job creation potential of 10,000 small businesses across the United States through greater access to business education, financial capital, and business support services. The initiative is currently active in New York City, the greater Los Angeles area, the greater New Orleans area, and Houston, and will expand to communities across the country.

Objectives

10,000 Small Businesses is designed to help firms grow and create jobs. Small businesses play a vital role in creating jobs and growth in America’s economy and during the past 40 years, small businesses have created two-thirds of the net new jobs in the country. According to the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) and other research, these businesses are essential assets for the communities in which they operate.

Eligible Small Businesses

The program is designed for underserved small businesses which have the potential to grow. Broad characteristics of qualifying business owners include, but are not limited to: business revenues between $150,000 to $4 million in the most recent fiscal year; in operation for at least two years; at least four full-time employees; operations in economically disadvantaged areas; and a business model that can scale to create more jobs NYC Business Express. An online source, NYC.gov/BusinessExpress, takes the edge off of obtaining licenses, permits and certifi cations. At this continually updated website, entrepreneurs can fi nd step-by-step instructions for meeting all of those pesky government requirements. — Phyllis Furman

For more information,  Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses

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By ROBB MANDELBAUM

When the Jobs Act became law in April, supporters proclaimed a new era for small businesses seeking to raise money.

The “game changer,” as President Obama put it in the Rose Garden as he signed the bill, was a provision to let small companies “crowdfund” — that is, sell stock and other securities over the Internet directly to the public. “For the first time,” the president said, “ordinary Americans will be able to go online and invest in entrepreneurs that they believe in.”

But it now seems that dawn will break late on this new age of democratic investing. The Securities and Exchange Commission appears certain to miss its end-of-year deadline for issuing regulations to put the provision into effect. And with the departure of the S.E.C. chairwoman, Mary L. Schapiro, and three of her top deputies — including two who manage the offices writing the regulations — some in the nascent equity crowdfunding industry worry that it could be 2014 before their line of business becomes legal.

The delay has frustrated many crowdfunding backers. The 270 days that Congress gave the S.E.C. to write the rules “is not a suggested timeline; it is a Congressional mandate,” said Kim Wales, an organizer at Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates, a lobbying group formed in April to represent the new industry, in an e-mailed statement. “The S.E.C. answers to Congress, not the other way around.”

Read more…
 
Originally published in the New York Times on December 27, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/27/business/smallbusiness/why-the-sec-is-likely-to-miss-its-deadline-to-write-crowdfunding-rules.html

By Chelsea Dommert

As AnnMarie explained last week, equity-based crowdfunding has huge potential to help startup or small business owners raise capital from lots of supporters. Crowdfunding can also validate a business idea and simultaneously build a customer base. Creating a successful campaign, however, requires some savvy, and savvy comes from experience. For many, the first crowdfunding campaign has to succeed – small business owners can’t spend time running multiple semi-good campaigns just to gain experience. Luckily, it is possible to learn from other people’s experiences instead of relying on our own.

There are some really excellent case studies out there. I could throw a hundred at you, but we’re going to start with just one from England–Righteous– where crowdfunding for equity is already legal.  In the U.S., crowdfunding for equity is expected to be legal in 2013.

Righteous used a crowd investing campaign to raise £75,000 (about $121,000) for supermarket outreach.  The CEO, Gem Misa, recently did an interview with BBC radio(Gem’s interview starts at 9:13). The interview points out three crucial aspects of a successful crowd investing campaign:

1.    Gem started validating her idea before she started the campaign.

Gem already had some supporters before she started her crowd investing campaign. She had asked strangers whether they would buy a vegan, chemical-free, great-tasting salad dressing. She had already tried the product in a few stores. People had already tested the product, and supported the brand. Guess what? Those were the people who invested first in the company.

That surprised Gem. “I was thinking it was more of friends and family that were going to be participating, but I was so amazed that people have heard about the brand and wanted to be able to be part of it.”

 2.    Gem’s company idea was easy to explain and easy to understand.

Everybody gets the idea of an all-natural salad dressing. Crowdcube CEO Darren Westlake explains, “People invest in things that they can understand.” He says, “We’ve had a lot of success in consumer products that have been in supermarkets…people can understand those; they’re very simple.”

Take note: crowd investing isn’t for all companies. Westlake explains, “We’ve had a few kind of scientific, more complicated businesses on the site and people just don’t understand them; if you don’t understand them, you’re probably not going to back them because you can’t feel confident in your investment.”

3.    Gem had planned what she would do with the crowd’s investment. 

Righteous intended to launch a TV and radio ad campaign with the crowd’s invested capital. The comapany’s clear vision made it easy to take quick, cost-effective action after the crowdfunding campaign was over. The advertising campaign made listeners want to try the product and helped Righteous break into more supermarket chains.

There was never any question around the destiny of the crowdfunded money. It wasn’t just for administration or odd projects around the office. Gem had a plan, and Righteous executed on the plan once their crowd funded it.

In summary: Righteous had a simple, easy-to-understand idea. They tested that idea in the market before pursuing expansion, and their crowd investment campaign was only part of their larger strategy.

The Righteous example offers some great lessons for designing your own crowd investing campaign; soon, business owners in the United States will be able to seek crowd investment just like Righteous did. Any startup or small business owner can go start preparing their pitch right now at one of many companies including earlyshares.com. Also, anyone, regardless of income, can sign up to invest so that when crowdfunding for equity is legal in the U.S., they are ready to get in on the ground floor of innovative new businesses.