Behind the Crowdfunding Curtain- StartEngine Goes Public

StartEngine, one of the first and most active crowdfunding platforms has filed the paperwork to offer stock under Regulation A. They are raising $5 million, offering 1,000,000 shares to the public at $5 per share.

If you follow my blog, you know that I have written about several other Reg. A offerings; Elio Motors, Med-X, Ziyen, etc. which I thought were essentially scams run by people with questionable intentions.  I have my issues with StartEngine, but I never thought the owners were dishonest or trying to scam investors. Nothing of that sort should be inferred here.

The fact is that crowdfunding platforms, like most businesses, are not public. This offering is the first I have come across where a company that is actually active in this marketplace has published audited financial statements and made disclosures about its business and the risks inherent in that business. For someone like me, who is working in crowdfunding with some of StartEngine’s competitors, looking through this information was irresistible.

First and foremost, StartEngine itself is a start-up and is losing money funding other start-ups.The company lost $1 million in 2015, almost $3 million in 2016 and another $1 million during the first 6 months of 2017. The company had initially raised a little over $5 million in venture capital and has essentially burned through it. It now wants another $5 million to continue.

StartEngine’s business is basically a website and has 13 full time employees. It has no cost for goods sold and the bulk of its expenses are for administrative purposes and marketing.

The core premise of equity crowdfunding is that it facilitates the sale of new issue securities without the commissioned salespeople who perform this function at traditional stock brokerage firms. The commission savings are passed on to the companies who list their offerings on the platforms and ultimately to the investors. It is certainly fair to expect that because the offerings do not have a commission expense more of the funds that are raised will go to the company that is funding its business.

The JOBS Act permits three types of offerings to be funded on a website. StartEngine offers all three; Regulation A, Regulation Crowdfunding (CF) and Regulation D offerings.  At the end of August StartEngine announced that it also intends to offer crypto-currency offerings(ICOs) on its platform. With a full menu, StartEngine can offer more flexibility to a company seeking funds and a larger selection of investments for potential investors.

Under Reg. D a company can raise an unlimited amount of money from wealthier, accredited investors, under Reg. A up to $50 million and under Reg. CF up about $1 million. Reg. A and Reg. CF offerings can be sold to any investor albeit in limited amounts.

StartEngine was one of the first movers in the Reg. A market. The offering document notes that they have hosted the Reg.A offerings of ten companies.  StartEngine’s first offering, Elio Motors, eventually raised $16,917,576 from 6,345 investors.

Regulation CF went into effect on May 16, 2016. StartEngine has acted as intermediary for offerings by 58 companies; raising $7,383,960. According to Crowdfund Capital Advisors, of the 26 platforms registered with FINRA, StartEngine was second in terms of the number of Reg. CF offerings. Overall, in two years of operations, the StartEngine platform has raised about $40 million for issuers from over 17,000 investors.

For a little perspective I write the legal paperwork for crowdfunded offerings being made under Reg. D that are listed on various competing platforms.  I am on target to write the paperwork for $50 million worth of offerings during calendar 2017 and probably more next year. I work part time, out of my home on a 5-year old laptop.

My advertising budget is zero dollars. I get all my business through referrals or because someone reads one of my blog articles and thinks that I have some common sense. I take the time to speak with a lot of people who are starting new businesses and are seeking capital. I have referred a few to appropriate crowdfunding platforms, even if someone else writes the paperwork.

With a six figure per year advertising budget StartEngine should easily be able to host and sell $100 million worth of offerings per year or more.  If they did, the company would be profitable.  So what is the problem?

There are three parties to every transaction, the company seeking investment, the investors and the platform that introduces the other two. The intent should be that all three will ultimately make money from each offering. If the investors make money they will be happy, come back again to make additional investments and recommend the platform to friends.

Roughly 1/3 of StartEngine’s entire customer base invested in Elio Motors. I questioned Elio at the time that StartEngine put Elio’s offering on its platform.  It was obvious to me that Elio was not likely to ever put out its vehicle or turn a profit and I wrote just that.  If that was obvious to me, it should have been obvious to StartEngine as well.

StartEngine’s offering document mentions that it may be liable if a company that lists on its platform gets sued for securities fraud.  It states that even if StartEngine is a party to the suit and prevails, being a party to these suits might cause “reputational harm that would negatively impact our business” in addition to the costs of its defense.

Regulators have just begun to catch up with Elio. Elio was recently fined roughly $550,000 by the State of Louisiana for taking deposits for its non-existent vehicle without a proper license to do so. The lack of a proper license should have come up in the pre-offering due diligence investigation conducted by StartEngine.

Even if Elio is never alleged to have committed securities fraud, the company is insolvent and is unlikely to ever produce a vehicle or operate profitably.  Investors will lose the money that they invested.

Reputational damage for a company like StartEngine also comes from listing any piece of crap that comes along. Why should investors be expected to come back to StartEngine a second time, or a third, if the companies that StartEngine lists on its platform are not likely to succeed?

StartEngine defines its mission as: “To help entrepreneurs fuel the American Dream.” Its long term objective for 2025 is to “facilitate funding for the startup and growth of 5,000 companies every year.”

Assuming that each of those companies raises only $500,000 StartEngine is projecting that it can bring in $2.5 billion in new money every year.  Given that most or all of that money will be lost, I think that is a fantasy. StartEngine is likely to become known as a place where investors flush their money down the toilet long before 2025.

Had I been asked to write this mission statement I would have said something like “the company’s objective is to match investors with worthy companies that offer new technology and new products.”  The key word is “worthy”.

There is no way to sugar-coat the fact that 90% of start-ups fail and that many fail very quickly, usually within the first two years.  No one who I have met in crowdfunding denies that fact and most just accept it as a fact of life, even if they really do not want to talk about it.

An intermediary like StartEngine should be able to discern which companies are more likely to be part of the 90% that will fail and which have a chance of being part of the 10% that will succeed. That is what broker/dealers and investment bankers do every day and have done for decades.

The mainstream stockbrokerage industry has no difficulty identifying or funding new technologies. Stock brokers raised money for Apple and Microsoft when very few people owned personal computers. They raised money for Genentech at a time when no investor had ever heard the words “genetically engineered pharmaceuticals” before.

The offering suggests that StartEngine intends to harness the power and wisdom of “the Crowd”. To be blunt, no one has ever suggested that the crowd has any wisdom sufficient to discern which companies are worthy of investment and which are not. If they did, I doubt anyone would invest in StartEngine.

The lawyers who prepared the StartEngine offering included this statement as a risk factor: “none of our officers or our chairman has previous experience in securities markets or regulations or has passed any related examinations or holds any accreditations.” That, in one sentence, is StartEngine’s entire problem.

StartEngine’s customers are the investors, not the companies raising money. StartEngine has no idea how to give investors what investors want, a fighting chance at making money from the investments that they make.

Some of the other crowdfunding platforms understand this. MicroVentures has a reputation for turning away potential issuers that do not meet its standards.  I have worked with WealthForge which crowdfunds offerings to institutional investors. They would not consider offering those institutions any company that lacked the substance to succeed. Both were founded by or employ people with backgrounds in mainstream brokerage or investment banking.

Running a crowdfunding platform and funding companies without someone trained in investment banking is like running an animal shelter without a veterinarian on staff.  You can round up the animals, but you may not really be able to help them.  People who adopt the animals will never know if the animal is sick or healthy and that is something that they want to know.

Investing in start-ups is risky. You can run your platform like  newspaper want ads taking any ad that comes along or you can use some judgment and refuse ads for bottled water that claims to cure cancer because you know that your readers will not be happy. It is incumbent upon any crowdfunding platform to mitigate the risk for the investors that look at the offerings it lists.

I have personally resisted the idea of working for one of the crowdfunding platforms although I have advised a few. If you seriously want to invest in a crowdfunding platform, I could assemble a team and improve upon what StartEngine has to offer, without the baggage of offerings like Elio Motors, for a lot less than $5 million, probably around $500,000 (maybe even less if I do not replace my laptop).  I could operate the platform profitably and offer a return on your investment probably within a year. Interested? You know where to find me.

 

Why the Panic of 1893 is Relevant Today

The difference between studying economics and economic history is simple. In the former you learn how markets work and how to work within markets. In economic history you study all the times that the markets failed to work, including the market crashes, depressions and panics. The latter are far more interesting.

When I was teaching economics I would throw in a discussion of a panic or depression just to keep the students awake.  A good financial panic can get and keep your attention in the same way that motorists will never fail to look at two cars parked along the side of the highway that have been involved in an accident.  The more damage to the cars, the more people just cannot look away.

I frequently discussed the Panic of 1893 because it was at the same time a relatively simple and complex affair.  It was the worst economic disaster in the US up to that time and it came at the end of a period of prosperity and expansion the likes of which the US had not previously seen.

The events that led up to the Panic of 1893 and the measures taken by the government to deal with it are all relevant today.  There was a lot being discussed back then that is still being discussed today.

A lot of people who favor crypto-currencies frequently tell me that our current financial system is flawed and doomed because of the crash in 2008. That our economy survived 1893 and was still around to crash in 2008 is an indication of the market’s resiliency.  The reforms that took  place in the century after 1893 only made the US financial system stronger.

During the period 1870-1890 the railroads opened the west and people moved onto the Great Plains.  Farmers, not the industrialists, were the foundation of the US economy and were apparently too busy farming to have children because the food supply actually grew faster than the population.  Wheat was the primary commodity and whether the farmers understood it or not, the price of wheat was very much determined by a global economy.

US farmers borrowed heavily to finance their own farming operations. As production went up, prices came down and the depressed prices made it difficult for them to pay back the banks that had lent them money.  The same was true of cotton farmers in the South. Cotton was a major cash crop both before and after the Civil War. By 1890 the price became depressed as growers in Egypt and India added more and more tonnage to the world markets.

Since the farmers could not sell their wheat or cotton, there was no need to ship it anywhere and railroad revenues also dried up. The Philadelphia and Reading Railroad went bankrupt as did the several other large railroads. All were big employers and unemployment started to climb.  Part of this was due to the fact that as the railroads had been building more and more track and added to capacity that outgrew their market.

A company called National United Cordage which made rope out of hemp also went bankrupt.  The company had sold bonds to finance its operation and used the money to try to corner the market on hemp.  National Cordage was the most actively traded stock on the New York Stock Exchange at the time until rumors that the company had over extended itself caused the lenders to call the bonds and the company collapsed.

As National Cordage and the railroads went under, the stock market became uneasy and crashed.  Somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 banks closed as did thousands of businesses and farms. Unemployment shot up.  By some counts as many as 50% of the able bodied men who had been working in factories in Ohio were out of work.

In 1890 there was a drought in Argentina which killed off the wheat crop. This should have been good for American farmers but was not, for reasons that few people saw coming.  Years later when there was a similar drought and famine in the Ukraine, Herbert Hoover engineered the purchase of wheat from US farmers and shipped it to Russia. That would have helped the farmers in 1893, but no one apparently had the foresight to come up with this solution until 30 years later.

The Argentinean farmers were largely financed by British and European banks. In order to obtain the investment, the banks in Argentina originally hired Baring Brothers, one of the oldest English merchant banks, to assist them.  When I was giving this lecture to my economics students in 1995-1996, Barings had just been put out of business by a single young trader on its derivatives desk in Singapore who had made huge bets with Baring’s money and lost.

Barings was a little smarter in the 1890s because at the same time it was steering its clients into Argentine bonds, it was also buying US treasury bonds which were backed by gold.  European investors, panicked by the losses in South America, began to cash in the US bonds and demand gold as repayment. Almost immediately the US gold reserves fell to 100 million ounces which, by law, they were not supposed to fall below. The government actually borrowed gold from JP Morgan to make up its deficit.

The US was in the midst of a decade long debate about fiat currency.  At the time, fiat meant anything that was not gold or convertible into gold. The primary alternative was silver and many economists disregarded it out of hand simply because it was not gold.  You can only imagine how an economist from in the 1890s would feel about Bitcoins as an alternative currency today.

In 1890 the Congress had passed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act which required the US to purchase silver from mines in Western states. The idea was to deflate that value of US currency so that farmers could re-pay banks with currency that was worth less than it was when they borrowed it.

This encouraged silver mining and an over-supply of silver which helped to reduce the price of silver in the marketplace. It actually got to the point where a $1 Morgan silver coin had only about $.60 worth of silver in it.

The Silver Purchase Act was passed in conjunction with the McKinley Tariff, a very protectionist law that caused taxes on imports to rise dramatically and prices on many common goods to increase.  Certain protected industries such as wool and tin plates did well but overall prices went up for ordinary consumers.

At the time tariffs were the primary source of tax revenue for the US Government because the income tax had not yet been enacted. Tariffs were taxes that impacted small people buying common goods and aided the rich industrialists whose businesses were protected.

One of the interesting things about the Panic of 1893 is that it happened very quickly.  The railroads filed for bankruptcy, the banks closed and the stock market crashed all in a period of about 10 weeks. It led to several years of a deep depression.

Just prior to the 1893 collapse there had been a growing Populist movement that supported an agrarian economy and chastised Eastern elites, banks, railroad interests and gold. The Panic should have helped their cause, but did not. The Populists won 5 states in the Presidential election of 1892 and 9 seats in the House of Representatives in 1894 but had largely faded away by the end of the decade.

Not much in the way of reforms came out of this Panic but it was not the last. The Federal Reserve Act followed the Panic of 1907 when a few hundred more banks failed and securities market regulation and the FDIC originated after the stock market crash in 1929.

What I personally find interesting is that the issues present in 1893, globalization of finance and trade, the over-extension of credit, over supply of commodities and services, droughts, tariffs and protectionism, fiat currency, railroads and transportation, Populism and regional politics and even hemp are still in the headlines and issues surrounding them still on the table.

The overriding lesson is that finance is about trust and value.  It took 100 years after this Panic and several subsequent panics until the phrase “irrational exuberance” entered the economic lexicon but that phrase only explained what we should already have known.  The best lesson of 1893: “Do not build what you cannot use. Do not borrow what you cannot re-pay”.