We had a fascinating week trying to get everything figured out on our FG Angels initiative with AngelList. Our syndicate, which we are going to max out at $450,000, is currently right at $300,000 after one week. We are humbled by all the support and interest. Geir Freysson, founder of Five Hundred Plus , did a super cool visualization of some of the top syndicates and how the participants in the syndicate relate to each other. ...
Did you know Twitter is going public? Of course you did – it’s all the mainstream media could seem to write about last week after the now infamous twitter tweet about it. We’ve confidentially submitted an S-1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale. — Twitter (@twitter) September 12, 2013 After all the speculation about valuation, who owns what, what it’ll price at, how much money will be made, is Twitter growing or shrinking, what is a tweet after all, will their stock symbol be TWIT?, and all the other nonsense that seemed to consume the business press, I noticed a perplexing thread from some people expressing how indignant they are they Twitter is going public in secret. ...
The JOBS Act , which was approved by Congress and signed by President Obama with much fanfare over a year ago, was intended to help small business. It is, after all, called the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. A number of the provisions have been slow to get written into law and the SEC has missed their deadlines on a bunch of stuff, including the often talked about equity crowdfunding activity . ...
I’ve always had mixed feelings about the importance of a company announcing a financing in the absence of any other activity. “Dear World: We Just Raised $X From Investors A, B, and C.” Ok, but so what? In my book, there is only one real reason for this – to a**ttract new potential employees: “We’ve just raised $X and are hiring 20 people including types A through types Q – see our jobs page at jobs.companyname.com and apply now.” ...
I considered titling this post “why RSS isn’t dead” but decided that was too easy. I don’t pay much attention to public markets. However, now that the IPO window for tech companies has opened back up there are some companies that I want to track. However, I don’t really care about the daily stock prices – instead, I’m focused on the actual SEC filings. I used to subscribe to several services for SEC filings (remember EDGAR Online and 10KWizard) but let them lapse a while ago. My partner Jason suggested I just use the SEC website . So I went there and discovered that it’s really good. ...
Over the past 24 months, a deplorable activity in the money management business came to light. It got the name “pay to play” but was just another form of bribery. The common description of pay to play is “the practice of making campaign contributions and related payments to elected officials in order to influence the awarding of lucrative contracts for the management of public pension plan assets and similar government investment accounts. ” Yup – sounds like bribery to me. ...
I’m far away from Washington DC today. Actually, I’m a lot closer to Russia than I am to DC and that makes me an expert on Russia. Wait, someone else said that (although the people next to me and Amy at dinner last night were speaking Russian.) But my friend the Internets (actually, the Web) brought DC closer to me today. While I’m only involved in a handful of things related to politics and DC, several of them popped up somewhere in my world in the last two days. So, I thought I’d share them with you. ...