5 ms·

Republic – Now everyone can invest in startups

123 points by jrbedard 10y ago

agconti 10y ago
Startups as investments are very risky with long payoff horizons. With their limited funds, this is a poor investment for the average investor. I can't help but feel like this will hurt more people then it will help.
- crypto5 10y ago
  I think it is healthy strategy to dedicate 5-10% of investment portfolio to high risks investments like this, even for average investor.
  - notfromhere 10y ago
    "SAFE holders do not have any voting or information rights". With this kind of agreement, it's basically gambling since most info on start-ups is basically PR fluff. At least public companies have to publish annual reports and real investors get information rights.
    - crypto5 10y ago
      Most of the startups have negative cashflow anyway. Early investors invest into potential, idea, team, tech, know how, market share.
- smacktoward 10y ago
  > With their limited funds, [startups are] a poor investment for the average investor They're not great for institutional investors either: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/venture-capital-is-worst-performing-asset-for-calpers http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/venture-ca...
twblalock 10y ago
You don't get shares if you invest -- you get something called a "crowd safe": https://republic.co/learn/investors/crowdsafe https://republic.co/learn/investors/crowdsafe More info here: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/06/87034-republic-adds-creates-crowd-safe-investing-vehicle-for-reg-cf-issuers/ http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/06/87034-republic-adds-... I'm a bit leery of these. According to the article, "unless specifically negotiated, SAFE holders do not have any voting or information rights." I also suspect that the shareholders get taken care of before crowd safe holders in legal or bankruptcy proceedings. The rights of crowd safe holders haven't been tested in court. I think the lack of rights and additional risk inherent in crowd safes would need to be compensated for by some kind of discount relative to what investors pay for shares. Otherwise, the risk-adjusted return is lower. I would also be skeptical of the potential of a startup that can't convince normal VCs to fund them. If people who do this for a living don't think a startup is worth investing in, why should I?
- leesalminen 10y ago
  > I would also be skeptical of the potential of a startup that can't convince normal VCs to fund them. If people who do this for a living don't think a startup is worth investing in, why should I? There are plenty of SaaS companies that are naturally limited in revenue potential. In my experience, VCs are not interested in a company with a conservative forecast of 10MM ARR in 5 years. These are still viable businesses that need capital to actualize the plan. Alternative lending sources are crucial to these companies. While the terms of this particular idea are not ideal, I think we will see a lot of new ideas in this realm over the coming years and some will be great!
  - mdorazio 10y ago
    How is an investor in such a company supposed to actually get a return? Unless the company is paying dividends or something similar, the only payout comes from selling your shares or if the company is acquired at a premium. But who is going to buy these companies with a conservative "slow and steady" growth rate and market share?
melvinmt 10y ago
oops, never mind :)
- tspike 10y ago
  Wrong article.
tspike 10y ago
The general counterargument to the "we're in a bubble" observation has been that it's all private equity, that people aren't risking their houses or 401(k)s on startups this time around. This would appear to be a move in that direction.
- fullshark 10y ago
  It's the modern day equivalent of public investment in penny stocks.
jonpaine 10y ago
It appears that the Startup/issuer sets a static offering price [0]. When I envision how crowdsourced investing would reinvent this space, a huge component of the value added would be a degree of price-elasticity and feedback. It doesn't have to be a full-on auction, but getting the pricing right (for the issuer) seems like THE killer feature here... (thinking back to the concept of how Google priced their IPO )[1]. Offering a product that facilitated more innovative pricing structures at offering would be extremely compelling - and would greatly increase Republic.co's target market as well. [0] https://republic.co/learn/issuers/how_it_works https://republic.co/learn/issuers/how_it_works [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108328345314098183 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108328345314098183 (potential paywall)
illyism 10y ago
In the USA, of course
HillaryBriss 10y ago
Is this a signal to the smart money that it's time to get out?
- clock_tower 10y ago
  I think it is. (But personally -- although I can't prove that I'm smart money just yet -- I'd recommend avoiding tech stocks in the first place. Don't just think of the fate of Myspace and Netscape; think of Iomega and Sun Microsystems...)
LordHumungous 10y ago
Better investment plan: Send me your money via paypal and I'll call you an idiot.
- astrange 10y ago
  Those are called findoms, but you'll have to try advertising somewhere else.
astrange 10y ago
> Crowdfunding investing is highly speculative and every investment may result in a loss. By investing small amounts across multiple companies, you can reduce your risk compared to a large investment in a single company. But there's only four companies. > Do your own research. Read the documents provided by each company you plan on investing in. Get independent legal, accounting, financial advice. If you have any questions or need more information, ask the company. Sounds expensive. Maybe we crowdfund the advice too? Is someone going to make a robo-VC like lendingrobot?
skrebbel 10y ago
Wow, I'm blown away by the negativity in this thread. I know Silicon Valley is conservative but this is killing it. In Europe (of all places), this sort of stuff has been going on for a number of years now. The first startup I worked for had gathered its €150k preseed funding from over 20 people. Not even with a convertible note, they really all went to the lawyer's office together. It was pretty nuts, but it got the product out (and then tanked miserably but hey, people knew what they were getting into). Sites like Leapfunder (https://www.leapfunder.com/ https://www.leapfunder.com/) have been doing what Republic does for years, but then in Europe. As far as I can see, the only reason the US is behind on this one is the "accredited investor" rule that European countries don't appear to have. I wonder how Republic works around that but I guess it's a good development. I have a hard time understanding how any "you're only allowed to X if you're rich" law can be fair (and I'd assume that especially libertarian HN would be with me on that one). But still, HN's conclusion is that it's stupid to do this? What? Why is it stupid to invest $5k in a startup but not to invest $500k in a startup? If you ask me, that's irrational to the bone. If you really can't imagine some good reasons why a company wouldn't want to raise from a VC but would prefer to crowdfund, you didn't really try very hard. I can't find it back but did HN react the same when Kickstarted got launched? Is there really that big a difference between "first to get a Pebble" and "first to get some Pebble shares"?
- twblalock 10y ago
  > Why is it stupid to invest $5k in a startup but not to invest $500k in a startup? Because if you invest $500k, you get information rights, and a significant number of votes. If you invest $5k, you get nothing, and you just have to hope the company makes good decisions. It's like buying a $5k lottery ticket -- it's an investment based entirely on trust without any information, accountability, or influence over the outcome. I suspect that the real reason companies want to crowdfund is to raise money without giving information and voting rights to their investors.
  - burrows 10y ago
    > it's an investment based entirely on trust without any information, accountability, or influence over the outcome Assumes that an investor's extra-monetary 'influence' on a company is +EV.
inputcoffee 10y ago
There are a number of similar sites (wefunder was YC, and Angellist dominates the space). We shouldn't treat the "public at large" like kids, and they have the right to do what they want with their money. HOWEVER, I do hope that people don't get hopped up on TechCrunch stories about gazillion dollar exits and then cash out their 401k to invest in some company or another. They should know that the vast majority of startups fail, and that the chances are any particular one will fail. They should also understand that it isn't worth the due diligence for $100 or something, so you're really taking a flier unless you piggyback off someone else's diligence (which you should).
philippnagel 10y ago
Why is a US bank account necessary while being a US citizen is not required?
- ch4ch4 10y ago
  Probably due to anti-moneylaundering requirements...
Animats 10y ago
Interesting. These appear to be JOBS act short-form mini-IPOs.[1] That's something new, which just became possible this year and hasn't been used much. Here's Farm from a Box's SEC filing.[2] Typical crappy terms - no voting rights, no anti-dilution, no transferability for one year, insiders have control. Nobody associated with the project has a farming background. They have two employees. One is a liberal arts majors from UC Berkeley and one has an unspecified degree from UCLA. They do not have a working prototype farm according to the SEC filing. The filing for Youngry [2] is more interesting. They want to start a glossy web site for young entrepreneurs. They claim lots of good contacts. (Miss Las Vegas?) They're only asking for $50K, which isn't enough. Two-person business. Republic takes a 5% cut; that's how they make their money. This is a reasonable concept, but the current set of deals isn't very impressive. These are people looking for Series A funding and would probably be rejected by YC. The idea behind the JOBS act short-form IPO was supposed to be that when your startup got too big for angel/friends and family/Kickstarter funding, there was a next level and an exit strategy for the original funders. It wasn't intended for startups this early. You can look up these companies on the SEC's EDGAR system. If you scroll down all the way to the end of Republic's pages, there's a link. [1] https://media2.mofo.com/documents/120416-pli-quick-guide-jobs-act.pdf https://media2.mofo.com/documents/120416-pli-quick-guide-job... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679373/000167937316000001/FFABFormC.pdf https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679373/000167937316... [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679372/000167937216000002/YoungryFormC.pdf https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679372/000167937216...
- jliptzin 10y ago
  Regardless of the terms, all of these companies appear to be just terrible investments.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    Never stopped terrible products on Kickstarter from goosing thousands of dollars from naive backers.
  - justrossthings 10y ago
    "Youngry" - A newsmedia property built a supplement entrepreneur and professional "entrepreneurial-advice" entrepreneur that aims to make money by creating sponsored content and e-commerce products (webinars, digital books) for early-stage, young entrepreneurs.
minton 10y ago
How is this different than wefunder.com?
- astrange 10y ago
  This really does seem the same. Actually, I invested in one there just so say I could. But there's some weird things on this site: - there's something called investment clubs where you can recommend companies to nearly-passive investors and get 10% of something out of it. But there's no inventory on this site either so why are they being paid for no work? I'm sure I could guess every investment just from the name of their club and skip the middleman. - several companies are just selling you bonds ("revenue share" and "loan money"). Seems strictly worse than buying some regular bonds, and why does a startup want to return capital anyway?
justrossthings 10y ago
Republic - Invest in the startups real investors won't invest in
- ryandrake 10y ago
  That strikes me as a very cynical view, and I consider myself to be a pretty cynical guy. You could also make the same argument about other market platforms: "Ebay - Buy things real shoppers won't" "Uber - Get a ride somewhere real taxis won't go" "Monster.com - Hire people real employers won't" Is it really that different?
  - clock_tower 10y ago
    I'd call the appraisal justified. At least from where I sit, I'd say that the equivalent to eBay or Uber would be listing stock from startups that also have VC funding, and selling actual shares in the company.
  - justinlardinois 10y ago
    eBay and Uber cater to the same folks that use competing services. No one on Sand Hill Road is going to use Republic. As for Monster...that's a little too accurate.
- harigov 10y ago
  This is actually a great way to test your idea. If lots of people find it promising, it will at least remove one concern when building a startup.
tptacek 10y ago
Don't current Title III rules make it legally risky for companies to crowdfund like this? The last thing I read about this suggested that crowdfunding like this could put a startup in a position of having to effectively go public very early in their life --- which would suggest that none of the best startups would crowdfund, which would create a major adverse selection problem for Republic.
- pmen 10y ago
  You're right -- a company with $25M in assets and 500 unaccredited shareholders is essentially forced to go public. That's why traditional security instruments are poorly suited for investment crowdfunding. We created and open-sourced a derivative of the YC Safe called the Crowd Safe to solve for this (more at https://republic.co/crowdsafe https://republic.co/crowdsafe).
bArray 10y ago
One of the tags for projects is "Women Founders". In theory that shouldn't make a difference as to how investable a project is or isn't? It seems as ridiculous as giving the founder's favourite colours or ethnicity. I just don't understand what they were thinking when they put that feature in.
justinlardinois 10y ago
I can see this having all the same problems Kickstarter has with video games: - A bunch of people whose only experience with the industry is as consumers, with no real knowledge of how investing or the field they're investing in works - Companies that have little more than an idea and big promises, lacking the skill, manpower, and knowledge of how to see a product through from conception to release (plus a lack of knowledge on how to obtain those things) - Companies that stop updating and eventually just run off with the money - People who think they're entitled to a refund if what they invested in fails Will "Angel Investor at Republic" overtake "CEO and Founder at Company That Is Literally Just A Facebook Page" as the job title of choice for wannabe tech bros?
bandrami 10y ago
What could possibly go wrong?
Osiris30 10y ago
Jared Friedman, YC Partner, post from 3 days ago, on raising money online and the differences between the various crowdfunding services, Angellist syndicates and YC: http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/raising-money-online-advice-for-startups/ http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/raising-money-onlin...
akhatri_aus 10y ago
It's not 'now' that it's suddenly possible. CrowdCube (European startup) has been doing this for years.

123 points by jrbedard 10y ago

Startups as investments are very risky with long payoff horizons. With their limited funds, this is a poor investment for the average investor. I can't help but feel like this will hurt more people then it will help.

crypto5 10y ago
I think it is healthy strategy to dedicate 5-10% of investment portfolio to high risks investments like this, even for average investor.
- notfromhere 10y ago
  "SAFE holders do not have any voting or information rights". With this kind of agreement, it's basically gambling since most info on start-ups is basically PR fluff. At least public companies have to publish annual reports and real investors get information rights.
  - crypto5 10y ago
    Most of the startups have negative cashflow anyway. Early investors invest into potential, idea, team, tech, know how, market share.
smacktoward 10y ago
> With their limited funds, [startups are] a poor investment for the average investor They're not great for institutional investors either: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/venture-capital-is-worst-performing-asset-for-calpers http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-10/venture-ca...

twblalock 10y ago

You don't get shares if you invest -- you get something called a "crowd safe": https://republic.co/learn/investors/crowdsafe https://republic.co/learn/investors/crowdsafe More info here: http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/06/87034-republic-adds-creates-crowd-safe-investing-vehicle-for-reg-cf-issuers/ http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/06/87034-republic-adds-... I'm a bit leery of these. According to the article, "unless specifically negotiated, SAFE holders do not have any voting or information rights." I also suspect that the shareholders get taken care of before crowd safe holders in legal or bankruptcy proceedings. The rights of crowd safe holders haven't been tested in court. I think the lack of rights and additional risk inherent in crowd safes would need to be compensated for by some kind of discount relative to what investors pay for shares. Otherwise, the risk-adjusted return is lower. I would also be skeptical of the potential of a startup that can't convince normal VCs to fund them. If people who do this for a living don't think a startup is worth investing in, why should I?

leesalminen 10y ago
> I would also be skeptical of the potential of a startup that can't convince normal VCs to fund them. If people who do this for a living don't think a startup is worth investing in, why should I? There are plenty of SaaS companies that are naturally limited in revenue potential. In my experience, VCs are not interested in a company with a conservative forecast of 10MM ARR in 5 years. These are still viable businesses that need capital to actualize the plan. Alternative lending sources are crucial to these companies. While the terms of this particular idea are not ideal, I think we will see a lot of new ideas in this realm over the coming years and some will be great!
- mdorazio 10y ago
  How is an investor in such a company supposed to actually get a return? Unless the company is paying dividends or something similar, the only payout comes from selling your shares or if the company is acquired at a premium. But who is going to buy these companies with a conservative "slow and steady" growth rate and market share?

melvinmt 10y ago

oops, never mind :)

tspike 10y ago
Wrong article.

tspike 10y ago

The general counterargument to the "we're in a bubble" observation has been that it's all private equity, that people aren't risking their houses or 401(k)s on startups this time around. This would appear to be a move in that direction.

fullshark 10y ago
It's the modern day equivalent of public investment in penny stocks.

jonpaine 10y ago

It appears that the Startup/issuer sets a static offering price [0]. When I envision how crowdsourced investing would reinvent this space, a huge component of the value added would be a degree of price-elasticity and feedback. It doesn't have to be a full-on auction, but getting the pricing right (for the issuer) seems like THE killer feature here... (thinking back to the concept of how Google priced their IPO )[1]. Offering a product that facilitated more innovative pricing structures at offering would be extremely compelling - and would greatly increase Republic.co's target market as well. [0] https://republic.co/learn/issuers/how_it_works https://republic.co/learn/issuers/how_it_works [1] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108328345314098183 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB108328345314098183 (potential paywall)

illyism 10y ago

In the USA, of course

HillaryBriss 10y ago

Is this a signal to the smart money that it's time to get out?

clock_tower 10y ago
I think it is. (But personally -- although I can't prove that I'm smart money just yet -- I'd recommend avoiding tech stocks in the first place. Don't just think of the fate of Myspace and Netscape; think of Iomega and Sun Microsystems...)

LordHumungous 10y ago

Better investment plan: Send me your money via paypal and I'll call you an idiot.

astrange 10y ago
Those are called findoms, but you'll have to try advertising somewhere else.

astrange 10y ago

> Crowdfunding investing is highly speculative and every investment may result in a loss. By investing small amounts across multiple companies, you can reduce your risk compared to a large investment in a single company. But there's only four companies. > Do your own research. Read the documents provided by each company you plan on investing in. Get independent legal, accounting, financial advice. If you have any questions or need more information, ask the company. Sounds expensive. Maybe we crowdfund the advice too? Is someone going to make a robo-VC like lendingrobot?

skrebbel 10y ago

Wow, I'm blown away by the negativity in this thread. I know Silicon Valley is conservative but this is killing it. In Europe (of all places), this sort of stuff has been going on for a number of years now. The first startup I worked for had gathered its €150k preseed funding from over 20 people. Not even with a convertible note, they really all went to the lawyer's office together. It was pretty nuts, but it got the product out (and then tanked miserably but hey, people knew what they were getting into). Sites like Leapfunder (https://www.leapfunder.com/ https://www.leapfunder.com/) have been doing what Republic does for years, but then in Europe. As far as I can see, the only reason the US is behind on this one is the "accredited investor" rule that European countries don't appear to have. I wonder how Republic works around that but I guess it's a good development. I have a hard time understanding how any "you're only allowed to X if you're rich" law can be fair (and I'd assume that especially libertarian HN would be with me on that one). But still, HN's conclusion is that it's stupid to do this? What? Why is it stupid to invest $5k in a startup but not to invest $500k in a startup? If you ask me, that's irrational to the bone. If you really can't imagine some good reasons why a company wouldn't want to raise from a VC but would prefer to crowdfund, you didn't really try very hard. I can't find it back but did HN react the same when Kickstarted got launched? Is there really that big a difference between "first to get a Pebble" and "first to get some Pebble shares"?

twblalock 10y ago
> Why is it stupid to invest $5k in a startup but not to invest $500k in a startup? Because if you invest $500k, you get information rights, and a significant number of votes. If you invest $5k, you get nothing, and you just have to hope the company makes good decisions. It's like buying a $5k lottery ticket -- it's an investment based entirely on trust without any information, accountability, or influence over the outcome. I suspect that the real reason companies want to crowdfund is to raise money without giving information and voting rights to their investors.
- burrows 10y ago
  > it's an investment based entirely on trust without any information, accountability, or influence over the outcome Assumes that an investor's extra-monetary 'influence' on a company is +EV.

inputcoffee 10y ago

There are a number of similar sites (wefunder was YC, and Angellist dominates the space). We shouldn't treat the "public at large" like kids, and they have the right to do what they want with their money. HOWEVER, I do hope that people don't get hopped up on TechCrunch stories about gazillion dollar exits and then cash out their 401k to invest in some company or another. They should know that the vast majority of startups fail, and that the chances are any particular one will fail. They should also understand that it isn't worth the due diligence for $100 or something, so you're really taking a flier unless you piggyback off someone else's diligence (which you should).

philippnagel 10y ago

Why is a US bank account necessary while being a US citizen is not required?

ch4ch4 10y ago
Probably due to anti-moneylaundering requirements...

Animats 10y ago

Interesting. These appear to be JOBS act short-form mini-IPOs.[1] That's something new, which just became possible this year and hasn't been used much. Here's Farm from a Box's SEC filing.[2] Typical crappy terms - no voting rights, no anti-dilution, no transferability for one year, insiders have control. Nobody associated with the project has a farming background. They have two employees. One is a liberal arts majors from UC Berkeley and one has an unspecified degree from UCLA. They do not have a working prototype farm according to the SEC filing. The filing for Youngry [2] is more interesting. They want to start a glossy web site for young entrepreneurs. They claim lots of good contacts. (Miss Las Vegas?) They're only asking for $50K, which isn't enough. Two-person business. Republic takes a 5% cut; that's how they make their money. This is a reasonable concept, but the current set of deals isn't very impressive. These are people looking for Series A funding and would probably be rejected by YC. The idea behind the JOBS act short-form IPO was supposed to be that when your startup got too big for angel/friends and family/Kickstarter funding, there was a next level and an exit strategy for the original funders. It wasn't intended for startups this early. You can look up these companies on the SEC's EDGAR system. If you scroll down all the way to the end of Republic's pages, there's a link. [1] https://media2.mofo.com/documents/120416-pli-quick-guide-jobs-act.pdf https://media2.mofo.com/documents/120416-pli-quick-guide-job... [2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679373/000167937316000001/FFABFormC.pdf https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679373/000167937316... [3] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679372/000167937216000002/YoungryFormC.pdf https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1679372/000167937216...

jliptzin 10y ago
Regardless of the terms, all of these companies appear to be just terrible investments.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Never stopped terrible products on Kickstarter from goosing thousands of dollars from naive backers.
- justrossthings 10y ago
  "Youngry" - A newsmedia property built a supplement entrepreneur and professional "entrepreneurial-advice" entrepreneur that aims to make money by creating sponsored content and e-commerce products (webinars, digital books) for early-stage, young entrepreneurs.

minton 10y ago

How is this different than wefunder.com?

astrange 10y ago
This really does seem the same. Actually, I invested in one there just so say I could. But there's some weird things on this site: - there's something called investment clubs where you can recommend companies to nearly-passive investors and get 10% of something out of it. But there's no inventory on this site either so why are they being paid for no work? I'm sure I could guess every investment just from the name of their club and skip the middleman. - several companies are just selling you bonds ("revenue share" and "loan money"). Seems strictly worse than buying some regular bonds, and why does a startup want to return capital anyway?

justrossthings 10y ago

Republic - Invest in the startups real investors won't invest in

ryandrake 10y ago
That strikes me as a very cynical view, and I consider myself to be a pretty cynical guy. You could also make the same argument about other market platforms: "Ebay - Buy things real shoppers won't" "Uber - Get a ride somewhere real taxis won't go" "Monster.com - Hire people real employers won't" Is it really that different?
- clock_tower 10y ago
  I'd call the appraisal justified. At least from where I sit, I'd say that the equivalent to eBay or Uber would be listing stock from startups that also have VC funding, and selling actual shares in the company.
- justinlardinois 10y ago
  eBay and Uber cater to the same folks that use competing services. No one on Sand Hill Road is going to use Republic. As for Monster...that's a little too accurate.
harigov 10y ago
This is actually a great way to test your idea. If lots of people find it promising, it will at least remove one concern when building a startup.

tptacek 10y ago

Don't current Title III rules make it legally risky for companies to crowdfund like this? The last thing I read about this suggested that crowdfunding like this could put a startup in a position of having to effectively go public very early in their life --- which would suggest that none of the best startups would crowdfund, which would create a major adverse selection problem for Republic.

pmen 10y ago
You're right -- a company with $25M in assets and 500 unaccredited shareholders is essentially forced to go public. That's why traditional security instruments are poorly suited for investment crowdfunding. We created and open-sourced a derivative of the YC Safe called the Crowd Safe to solve for this (more at https://republic.co/crowdsafe https://republic.co/crowdsafe).

bArray 10y ago

One of the tags for projects is "Women Founders". In theory that shouldn't make a difference as to how investable a project is or isn't? It seems as ridiculous as giving the founder's favourite colours or ethnicity. I just don't understand what they were thinking when they put that feature in.

justinlardinois 10y ago

I can see this having all the same problems Kickstarter has with video games: - A bunch of people whose only experience with the industry is as consumers, with no real knowledge of how investing or the field they're investing in works - Companies that have little more than an idea and big promises, lacking the skill, manpower, and knowledge of how to see a product through from conception to release (plus a lack of knowledge on how to obtain those things) - Companies that stop updating and eventually just run off with the money - People who think they're entitled to a refund if what they invested in fails Will "Angel Investor at Republic" overtake "CEO and Founder at Company That Is Literally Just A Facebook Page" as the job title of choice for wannabe tech bros?

bandrami 10y ago

What could possibly go wrong?

Osiris30 10y ago

Jared Friedman, YC Partner, post from 3 days ago, on raising money online and the differences between the various crowdfunding services, Angellist syndicates and YC: http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/raising-money-online-advice-for-startups/ http://www.themacro.com/articles/2016/08/raising-money-onlin...

akhatri_aus 10y ago

It's not 'now' that it's suddenly possible. CrowdCube (European startup) has been doing this for years.