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. |