crowdfunding

Crowdstreet- Fool Me twice?

crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding, Investors ,
Crowdstreet

More than two years ago I published an article about a real estate scam that had been funded on a crowdfunding platform called Crowdstreet Capital. CrowdStreet had raised $58 million from investors for two real estate funds sponsored by a real estate firm in New York City called MG Capital.

Much of what MG told the public in order to induce them to invest was untrue. I wrote that article soon after the SEC brought an enforcement action against the principal at MG Capital, pointing out some of the false and misleading statements.

The MG Capital Scandal

MG had claimed to have raised over $1 billion in two earlier funds but neither of those funds actually existed. CrowdStreet claimed to evaluate to track record of each sponsor. Had they done so with MG Capital, Crowdstreet would have known MG was lying because non-existent funds have no track record.

MG also claimed that investors would be “100% protected from loss”. I pointed out that this statement was a red flag for any capable due diligence officer. Crowdstreet’s compliance officer apparently had no issue with it.

New Management- same problems

Crowdstreet Capital is a registered broker/dealer and member of FINRA. It is required by FINRA to verify the claims made by the companies they are funding.  Crowdstreet’s handling of the MG Capital offering was a compliance disaster.

At the time I wrote that article Crowdstreet Capital was recruiting candidates to be its new President and Chief Compliance Officer. With a new management team coming on, I thought that Crowdstreet might get its act together.  If it didn’t I suggested that CrowdStreet might turn out to be a huge, multi-year, multi-million dollar scandal.

I recently got my answer and it isn’t the one I would have hoped for.

Compliance issues persist

Under its new management Crowdstreet Capital raised about $63 million for another real estate syndicator called Nightingale. Crowdstreet raised more than $54 million from over 650 investors for a Nightingale sponsored purchase of the Atlanta Financial Center office complex and raised $9 million from 167 investors tied to an eight-story office building project that Nightingale sponsored  in Miami Beach. Both deals have yet to close. 

The two entities created to fund the purchase of these properties are in bankruptcy. These were the companies which the investors intended would buy the two properties. None of those funds reached either entity. Crowdstreet sent the funds, $63 million, to Nightingale and it appears that Nightingale just stole the investors’ money.

The investors’ funds were stolen because good compliance and industry accepted procedures still eludes the new management at Crowdstreet. For some reason Crowdstreet released the funds that investors had put up to Nightingale and got nothing in return.

There can be no dispute that Crowdstreet should not have released the investors’ funds to Nightingale.  Either Crowdstreet was remarkably reckless with the investors’ funds or Crowdstreet was in on the scam. I will reserve judgment until the bankruptcy progresses.

Proper procedure would have saved investors

I have personally helped clients syndicate hundreds of properties around the US and in several foreign countries. The procedure is almost always the same regardless of which broker/dealer is syndicating the property. .

Investors’ funds are held in a segregated account as they are being raised. Once the full amount of the offering is raised the funds are transferred to an escrow account. The seller provides the escrow agent with documents to transfer the title to the purchasing entity. The contingencies are satisfied and adjustments are made, the mortgage company notified and a closing scheduled.

At the closing, and not before, after the title transfer documents are executed and the mortgage lien perfected, does the seller get the purchasers’ money. Apparently, no closing took place. Investors’ funds were just sent to Nightingale.

I suspect that transferring the investors’ funds out of Crowdstreet required the signature or approval of someone in authority. For a small broker/dealer like Crowwdstreet, I think it fair to assume that either the President or Chief Compliance Officer was aware of the transfer and approved of it.

Crowdstreet’s Liability

The investors’ representative charged with investigating this scam has said that the funds were “misappropriated” after they were transferred to Nightingale. I think the misappropriation took place when the funds were transferred to Nightingale by Crowdstreet.

 If Nightingale did, in fact, misappropriate the investors’ funds they will certainly be seen as the culprit here. If Crowdstreet had been operated correctly, Nightingale would never have had the investors’ funds in the first place.

The Impact of Crowdstreet on the Crowdfunding Industry

Between MG Capital and Nightingale more than $120 million in investors’ funds were washed down the toilet in these four real estate offerings hosted on Crowdstreet.  This is grossly unacceptable.

It is not like the financial markets are devoid of thieves and scoundrels. Compliance officers are expected to be vigilante and skeptical.  In the case of the compliance officers(s) at Crowdstreet,  it seems more to me like he/she does not realize that Crowdstreet was the patsy at the poker table.

There are really three losers in situations like this.

The investors, who are out of pocket that $120 million, will take the brunt of the financial loss. FINRA does have a robust arbitration program where investors might make a legitimate claim against Crowdstreet and its personnel. I have considerable experience in those arbitration forums and would be happy to educate any investor who lost money or assist their counsel.

There have been similar scams at the big wire houses.  Prudential paid out over $1 billion to investors in the early 1990s because a series of real estate programs that it sponsored had some questionable disclosures. If the facts prove that Crowdstreet failed to protect its investors from Nightingale, some investors who file arbitration claims will get their money back.

Crowdstreet certainly took a loss to its reputation with two scandals in two years. Real estate investments are not hard to find. Some investors will certainly go elsewhere rather than risk a third strike at Crowdstreet.

The crowdfunding industry as a whole also takes a hit to its reputation when the platforms allow issuers to lie to the investors and get caught. It is hard enough for the industry to attract investors when they can invest at similar real estate offerings through the large, national stock brokerage firms.

The crowdfunding industry will never reach its full potential if it keeps giving investors its middle finger.

If you’d like to discuss this article or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE

How an IPO works- and Why Using Reg. A+ to Raise Funds Doesn’t

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding, Issuers , ,
How an IPO works

I have spent a lifetime helping people who want to raise some capital for their businesses. It has never been easier and less expensive to do so.  The JOBS Act took care of that.

Most companies, especially those who want to raise $10-$50 million or more, will use a standard private placement. Many more companies elect to raise funds in the private market every year than in the public market because it is easier and less expensive than a public offering (IPO).

The SEC has provided for a stripped-down version of an IPO under Regulation A+.  It allows a company to raise up to $75 million from public investors.  Reg. A+ is intended to allow companies to manage the offering themselves, without the help of a Wall Street firm.

Many of the people who encourage small companies to use Reg. A+ believe that going public is easy. Most of those people have never worked at a Wall Street firm.

When Wall Street takes a company public it rarely fails to raise the capital it seeks. Using Reg. A+ without a Wall Street firm to underwrite the offering has resulted in many companies failing to get the funds they seek.  What is Wall Streets’ secret? 

Wall Street starts with the idea that no one really buys investments, but rather people sell them. Wall Street is built on the efforts of thousands of top-notch salespeople and a top-notch support system. 

Before any company goes public the investment bankers spend months getting it ready. Most importantly, they spend time introducing these companies to larger, institutional investors who will purchase a significant amount of shares in any public offering.

Dog and Pony

Those “dog and pony” shows help the company’s management address the questions investors want to ask.  Some of those institutions and hedge funds will be guaranteed to make a profit.  More on that below. 

About a week before the offering goes live the underwriters will turn the offering over to the sales department.  If a good stockbroker is trying to sell shares in an IPO, the conversation might go like this:

“Hello Charlie, this is Fred from Goodbroker and Company. I promised to call you when we had a red-hot IPO. We have one coming to market tomorrow.

The company is called the “Flavor of the Month” Co.  It uses blockchain to treat erectile dysfunction.  It is going to be a $20 billion global market in 5 years.

I spoke with one of the investment bankers who gave it two thumbs up.  He expects it to be priced at $30 per share.

I also spoke with the research analyst who covers this industry and he says this stock will be selling for $45 by the end of next year. That is why this IPO is hot.

It’s a 10 million share deal. My office was only allocated 120,000 shares. I can try to get you 1000 shares if you say YES right now. You have $30,000 in your money market account waiting for a good opportunity to make money. This is it.  Will you take 1000 shares? ”

A good stockbroker will have that conversation over and over until he gets to yes several times. Thousands of stockbrokers making thousands of calls will sell out the issue, every time. 

And then the secret that never appears in the textbooks, the underwriters will sell more shares than they have to sell. “Over-subscribed” is the most important attribute ever assigned to an IPO. Wall Street firms do it all the time.

The conversation that will take place the following morning, after the offering closes, illustrates the point: 

“Charlie, this is Fred. I was only able to get you 700 shares in the underwriting at $30 per share. They filled the remaining 300 shares in the aftermarket at $33 per share. You don’t have to take those 300 shares at that price. I can send them back to the trading desk. But the stock is already trading at $37 and like I said yesterday the analyst is predicting $45 per share. So please tell me you will do the smart thing and just keep those 300 shares.” 

So all the shares get sold and the underlying company gets the funding it needs. After that, as the shares trade, the underwriters provide research reports and trading support.   

You just have to follow the money, and the shares, to fully understand why it works and how it works.

This offering for 10 million shares was sold at $30 per share. On the morning of the underwriting, those shares were delivered to the accounts of the purchasers and the book closed. When the shares begin to trade, the first orders will fill the demand created by selling more shares than were available.

Retail investors who buy into an IPO tend not to sell it the same day. Those who do are frequently not invited to participate in the next IPO. To satisfy those customers who wanted to buy shares but were allocated less than they wanted, the underwriter needs to find a few large blocks for sale. 

I referred to dog and pony shows where the investment bankers would assure institutional investors that by investing in the IPO, the institution would make money. But not always as you may think.

When an IPO is over-subscribed it means that there are more willing buyers in the market and few sellers. That will cause the price to shoot up quickly. That “pop” in the share price has value and is treated as just another tranche in the cash flow. 

An institution that bought 100,000 shares in the IPO might be promised a quick profit of $ 3 per share for helping to fill those orders. Flipping those shares quickly might earn the institution a profit of 10%, with no risk to capital, in less than one hour. Hedge funds especially like to play this game. 

By helping to provide market liquidity for the underwriter the institution will be allocated some shares in a better underwriting later on. Shares that it will want to hold and not flip.

Scratch My Back

Can you say “scratch my back”?

Many of the firms that advocate the use of Reg. A+ lack investment bankers, research analysts, and most importantly, stockbrokers who already have established relationships with millions of investors. Most of these firms cannot trade the shares or provide liquidity for an aftermarket.

Practitioners who advocate the use of Reg. A+ as a useful tool for corporate finance will need to demonstrate that these offerings attract enough investors to sell out the offerings every time. Nothing indicates that is about to be true or that the advocates of Reg. A+ are even moving in that direction.   

When someone comes to me thinking that they want to go public using Reg. A+ I tell them to stick with Reg. D and do a private placement of their securities.  They will save a lot of money upfront and are likely to have the investors’ funds in their account months sooner.

And just to drive home the point, as an attorney, I charge a lot less to walk a client through a Reg. D private placement and to prepare the necessary paperwork than any lawyer charges for a Reg. A+ offering.

If you want to go public and cannot emulate what Wall Street firms do to get your offering sold, stick with the private placement market. It is always a much better place to find the investors you need.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE

Republic’s Restaurant Razzle Dazzle

Capital Markets, crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding, Issuers , ,
Republic’s Restaurant Razzle

A pizza restaurant in Houston filed for bankruptcy last week. While that might get a yawn from people who think that 90% of restaurants fail anyway, there is a story here that is a little different; one centered on its crowdfunding campaign.  

There is a world-renowned cooking school in San Francisco, the California Culinary Academy (CCA). It offers professional chefs a semester-long course in restaurant management. It includes how to price menu items, how to sell the menu items that produce a higher margin (typically appetizers and desserts), how and where to advertise, and items of “kitchen economics”. The latter includes how to select and deal with vendors and manage multiple chefs in a kitchen.   

There are established formulas regarding the ratio of food/beverage sales that guide restaurants to greater profitability. There are myriad case studies reviewing both successful restaurants and failures available for review.   

Pizza restaurants are used as a basic example of a simple and profitable restaurant operation. I offered the same breakdown of a pizza restaurant to my students when I was teaching Economics to business school students. It is a simple demonstration of superior efficiency and profitability. 

The owner of a pizza restaurant can stop by the market in the AM and pick up everything needed to make enough pizzas for one day’s business.  Your one-day inventory will be turned back to cash by the end of the day.

Very few businesses offer the opportunity to profit from that type of high-speed inventory turnover.  Too much Inventory in the freezer can impact a restaurant’s cash flow. 

Selling pizza and beer together is almost always a winning combination.  A $30 check for a large pizza and a pitcher of beer might cost the restaurant less than $5.00-$7.00 in ingredients, a very high mark-up, combined with the very high turnover. 

The Houston pizza restaurant that filed for bankruptcy was called Shoot the Moon. It opened in the middle of the pandemic which clearly increased the difficulty of filling the seats. But that is not what killed it.

NextSeed

The crowdfunding campaign for Shoot the Moon, and several other Houston-based restaurants, was hosted on a crowdfunding portal called NextSeed. NextSeed is now part of Republic, one of the largest crowdfunding portals.  

Shoot the Moon was trying to raise $535,000 to finish construction of its restaurant, purchase equipment and train its staff.  The offering was structured to give investors 10% of the revenue, that is, $1 for every $10 that rang through the cash register.

This type of revenue-sharing agreement is common in crowdfunding. NextSeed used it over and over to fund other restaurants. With proper marketing, Shoot the Moon’s offering might have sold out quickly.

Instead, the offering initially stalled at $140,000. According to the owner of Shoot the Moon, NextSeed suggested that he offer “perks” such as free beer to investors as an inducement to invest. NextSeed had used this same gimmick to help at least one other tap room in Houston raise capital.

The owner of Shoot the Moon apparently told NextSeed that he thought that he was not allowed to offer free beer because it was illegal. NextSeed advised him to offer free pizza instead.

Let me stop the narrative at this point. If one Houston restaurant that is selling food and beer can accept NextSeed’s advice and give away free beer and another selling food and beer thinks that it cannot, it should certainly raise a red flag that one or the other is incorrect.

Mr Chu

One of NextSeed’s founders, Mr. Abraham Chu, has an MBA from a very fine business school. I would think that something like this might have gotten his attention and the correct answer ascertained. 

Put aside for a moment the fact that no business school teaches that modern finance requires that you should give investors “perks” in order to raise capital. Business schools still teach that investors seek ROI more than anything else. The owner of Shoot the Moon says that supplying all the free perks that NextSeed advised him to offer negatively impacted his working capital.

The perks were enough to increase the total amount raised to $410,000. The owner of Shoot the Moon has said it paid a total of $80,000 to raise $410,000 which is more than a Wall Street firm would have charged to raise the same amount as a private placement. Wall Street firms don’t require issuers to give away free beer or pizza.

The raise netted Shoot the Moon closer to $330,000. The offering was clear that it was trying to raise $535,000, the amount it said it would need to get its business off the ground. That too should have been a pretty big red flag, which NextSeed ignored as it permitted the offering to close and took its fee. 

Shoot the Moon did open its doors and it made sales, 10% of which should have been paid to the investors. Its owner acknowledges that the payments were due from day one, but that he has not been able to make them.

NextSeed, for its part, interposed itself between the restaurant and the investors as the “collateral agent” for the transaction. I haven’t reviewed the exact paperwork, but it does raise some questions why the portal thought that it needed to do so. 

It seems that the only “collateral” supporting the offering from which investors might recoup their investment if the restaurant fails, would be the used restaurant equipment, some of which might be sold at $.10 on a dollar; the rest simply discarded. Calling it “collateral” is somewhat misleading.

It is clear that NextSeed was supposed to monitor the payments and notify the investors if there was a default. NextSeed was clearly aware of the default at Shoot the Moon and at other restaurants it had helped to fund but decided not to notify investors or declare a default. 

Mr. Chu has been quoted as saying that NextSeed’s policy regarding defaults was changed several times after offerings had closed.  Republic, which purchased NextSeed in 2020, apparently thought this was a good idea because it did not begin to send out notices of the defaults until April of this year.

In the real world, if you can negotiate the deferral of a payment that has come due, there is usually a penalty to be paid. I have seen nothing to indicate that NextSeed/Republic negotiated any additional payments to the investors to compensate them while waiting for their payments. Had there been a formal contract providing for a deferral of payment by each of the restaurants, they might not be in default today, and Shoot the Moon might not be in bankruptcy. 

Two things stood out to me.

First, If Shoot the Moon had an initial capital requirement of $535,000 but settled for $410,000 the first question should be: “what got cut from the budget?”  In all likelihood whatever got cut from the budget increased the risks of failure of the venture.

One item that was apparently absent from the budget was any cash reserve.  Even if Shoot the Moon sales were $10,000 in its first week of operation, it could not spare $1000 to pay investors.  Because the smaller raise probably added to the risk of failure, Shoot the Moon might have been better advised to up the ROI rather than provide free pizza to attract investors. 

Second, was the question of whether it was legal to give away free beer in support of the offerings.  Confronted with that assertion that it was not, NextSeed did not say that it was legal, or even, “let us check with our lawyers” but rather advised that the restaurant give away pizza instead, which was much more costly. 

NextSeed has clearly advised other restaurants that free beer was okay.  Did NextSeed’s failure to help Shoot the Moon understand that free beer was permissible to torpedo its opportunity to raise more money? Should NextSeed have told Shoot the Moon that there were less expensive ways to attract investors?

Crowdfunding

Let me repeat something that I have been saying for quite a while now: every well-run crowdfunding campaign should be able to raise 100% of the funds it seeks, 100% of the time.  The idea that a company should offer free beer, pizza, or other perks in order to have a successful campaign is simply false.

NextSeed apparently gave that very bad marketing advice to a number of companies. I wonder how many companies spent their money foolishly following the advice and who now wish that they had never engaged in these expensive, unnecessary promotions.

Republic has positioned itself between the restaurants and the investors. Does Republic intend to act as the investors’ champion or is this just damage control on Republic’s part?

If investors begin to question Republic’s financial responsibility for the very bad advice that NextSeed gave, again and again, they are likely to get stone-walled.  With reports that investors in NextSeed offerings may have already lost $2.4 million, I suspect that Republic will tell those investors to go cry in their beer. 

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE

KingsCrowd – Again

Capital Markets, crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding, Investors , ,
kingscrowd-again

A few weeks back I wrote an article about KingsCrowd, a company that claims to have an algorithm that can “rate” the offerings that are listed on the Regulation CF funding portals. I called KingsCrowd’s ratings bullshit. In my mind, I was being charitable.  I wanted to call them “scam artists of the first magnitude” but my editor calmed me down.

Investment crowdfunding is still in its nascent stages. As I have written before, all of the mechanics are in place for any issuer to use crowdfunding to raise capital.  With an adequate budget, some professional assistance, and a little common sense, every crowdfunding campaign should successfully raise the funds that it seeks.

KingsCrowd’s ratings do little more than stroke the egos of the founders who bask in their artificial light.  They support the absurd claims of many founders that because they spent a year staying awake all night writing code they will be able to turn that code into a profitable business that will disrupt this or that industry.

Over the years, I have helped quite a few professional chefs raise funds for a restaurant. Several of those chefs had egos that would make Elon Musk blush.

Year in and year out, restaurants have the highest failure rate of any small business. Good food and good reviews will get people in the door. Chefs are frequently proud of their signature dish. The number of beverages, appetizers, and desserts they sell will actually dictate their profitability.  I would tell the chefs that profit margins are not on the menu but that is where their focus needs to be. Some get it, some do not.

These are some of the things that people brought to my attention about my last article. These are the issues that they raised and these are my thoughts:

1) You cannot fund a start-up without some type of valuation.

I have helped all kinds of companies raise capital from investors for over 4 decades. Only the large bond offerings were rated by Standard and Poor’s and Moody. Investors in both the public and private (Regulation D) market have never had a problem parting with their funds to invest in a company that was not “rated”. A rating would, in fact, be an anomaly.

Investors are universally concerned with one metric and one metric only, the return that they can expect on their investment (ROI). One of the true benefits of crowdfunding is that it allows a company great latitude and creativity when it prepares its offering. If the investors’ funds will help a company generate revenue, then the company can share that revenue with the investors.

Again, using crowdfunding, every campaign can be successful, every time. It starts with structuring an offering that investors will find attractive and then putting that offering in front of as many investors as it takes to obtain the funds the issuer needs. You do not need to lie about your company’s prospects, fantasize that it will disrupt an established industry, or come up with a phony rating. End of story.

2) There are no other metrics to value a start-up or small business. 

The SEC mandated that all but the smallest issuers using Reg. CF funding portals have their financial information audited so investors get the facts about the company’s finances.  Those financial reports are presented using what are called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP). There are GAAP rules that cover valuations of a myriad of balance sheet items and they apply to all companies.

At the same time, there are business brokers all over the US who help people value, buy and sell businesses every day.  Over the years I have heard many of those business brokers say that a good business is “worth” roughly 3 times next year’s projected earnings. Many of the highest-paid research analysts at the largest investment banks use a similar formula when projecting the future price of a publicly-traded security.

Suddenly all those professionals are wrong and KingsCrowd’s new method of valuation is right? That does not hold water. 

3) KingsCrowd’s ratings are patterned after what VC’s do

I moved to San Francisco in 1984 to join a small boutique law firm that represented a European-based VC fund. The fund was actively investing in some cutting-edge Silicon Valley tech companies and some more run-of-the-mill consumer product companies as well.

I sat in on a lot of pitches that were made by a lot of really interesting and intelligent people. The Managing Director of the VC fund told me that he liked to include me because I asked a lot of questions that cut to the bottom line. I still do.

VCs have been playing a game with each other to reach the insipid valuations that they claim for the companies they hold in their portfolio. VC No. 1 buys 1,000,000 shares in a start-up for $10 per share in the seed round.  His good buddy VC No. 2 invests in the next round buying shares for $20 per share. VC No. 1 can now claim that the “value” of his investment has doubled, even though in many cases the value has been diluted.  

Their good buddy VC No. 3 buys into the next round at $30 per share making the first two VCs look like geniuses by claiming the value of their holdings in the first two rounds have gone up. The roles of these VCs reverse in the next deal that comes down the pike and people rain praise on the VCs for their “vision”.

There is no liquidity in this market. Those “valuations” are meaningless. Once I understood the game, it was pretty easy to spot. Peel back the VC funding for WeWork and similar scams and you will see what I mean.  I call it “frat-boy finance”.

Worse, companies funded this way claim to be “unicorns” a cynical description that too often means the valuation is a fantasy. It creates a false reality in the minds of the people the VCs will screw when they ultimately take the company public.    

4) Normal valuations do not apply to tech firms like Microsoft.

If you develop an essential software package, license it to IBM for $100 a box, and put the sales power of IBM behind you, you may be right. Professional analysts who follow MSFT, of course, use the same metrics as all securities analysts everywhere, using the same methods and formulas taught in all business schools.

If your background is in tech, I promise to never, ever comment about your ability to write code. This article is about finance. Please consider that I have the home-court advantage.  

More importantly, I have the ears of the investors you want, angel and accredited investors, family offices, etc. I can get your company in front of those investors, but they will place their own value on your company no matter what KingsCrowd says. 

5) The new generation of investors needs new methods of valuation

From the beginning of investment crowdfunding, people suggested that the crowd can evaluate the offerings listed on a funding portal. That was never true.

If we learned anything from the Robinhood fiasco it is that young investors are motivated by the same thing that motivates all investors, they invest money to make money.

In the mainstream markets, most small investors do not even try to analyze a company’s financial reports or attempt to determine its true value.  Smaller investors most often buy mutual funds or work with a stockbroker or investment advisor.  I am not suggesting that these professional advisors necessarily know what they are doing. I am suggesting that most small investors realize that they need help.

Why do I even care? 

Working in the crowdfunding industry it has been my pleasure to work with some extremely bright and hardworking people. Day in and day out they roll up their sleeves to help start-ups and businesses of all sizes get the funds they need to grow and prosper. I consider these people to be the unsung heroes of modern capitalism.

Every week I take calls from business owners and entrepreneurs who want to raise a few million or more based upon a “valuation” they computed based upon some article they read, a conference they attended, or a company like KingsCrowd. In many cases, people seeking capital through crowdfunding do so because traditional sources of capital are unavailable to them.

If you can qualify for an SBA loan you will take it. If not, investment crowdfunding is a viable alternative to get the capital that you need. Just send me an e-mail or fill in the form on my blog.

When someone calls and tells me that their pre-revenue start-up, with no assets, patents, or customers should be “valued” at $10 or $20 million I think “yeah and my you-know-what” is 12” long. (Yes, my editor revised my original number.) I am not trying to be inappropriate.  I am just looking for an analogy that will drive my point home.

What is to be done about these fraudulent and misleading valuations?

These false claims about valuations proliferate right out in the open and the primary regulator, FINRA, does nothing.  FINRA (and I choose my words carefully) often has its head up its ass.     

Some scams are difficult to spot. Enron was sophisticated accounting fraud. To uncover it required knowledge of specific inside information. 

Elio Motors, a Reg.A offering hosted by StartEngine a few years back was easy to spot with a modicum of due diligence because its claims could easily be investigated and debunked.

Phony valuations like the ones issued by KingsCrowd are just false advertising right out in the open that anyone at FINRA could easily spot. FINRA does have specific advertising rules that funding portals are expected to follow. The compliance director of any portal that signs off on KingsCrowd’s valuations should be banned from the industry.

Case in point:

StartEngine, which itself has never shown a profit, perpetually raises capital to fund its operations. It needs to pay its spokesperson, Mr. Wonderful, (who was recently accused of defrauding the founders of multiple start-ups) several hundred thousand dollars per year.

This year, as part of one of its several fundraising campaigns, StartEngine claimed a valuation of over $780 million based upon KingsCrowd’s algorithm.  Someone suggested to me at the time that valuation would make Warren Buffet puke.

I did some shopping and found that you could buy a fully licensed and operational broker/dealer for about $200,000, perhaps $2 million if the firm had a few stockbrokers who would agree to stay on with new management.

It is not like StartEngine has a stable of stockbrokers to sell investors other products. I suspect that very few of the people who have invested once on StartEngine’s funding portal have come back and invested twice.

Both StartEngine and Republic that use KingsCrowd ratings are conflicted. Each has benefited from its relationship with KingsCrowd. These ratings, even if they were valid are not independent and no disclosure of that fact is made anywhere.

At the heart of this problem is that in terms of dollars raised, StartEngine and Republic dominate the Reg. CF portion of the crowdfunding industry. I consider these valuations to be a cancer on the crowdfunding community. They scare away serious investors that the crowdfunding industry desperately needs. They unfairly compete with the many hardworking people in the crowdfunding industry who are trying to help companies raise capital honestly. 

Perhaps FINRA will eventually step in and put an end to KingsCrowd’s ratings.  FINRA has previously expelled only 2 funding portals, uFundingPortal and DreamFunded. In both cases FINRA questioned valuations that were much, much lower than KingsCrowd spits out. 

This is the third article I have written about KingsCrowd in short order. I have no intention of going away. Hopefully, FINRA will intercede before I need to pick apart individual offerings that advertise these ratings that they do not need to raise capital in the first place.  Hope springs eternal.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please book a time to talk with me HERE

 

KingsCrowd- selling ratings for fun and profit

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding , ,
kingscrowd

The thing about crowdfunding is that it attracts people who are paid to introduce investors to companies that have little to offer. The worst, of course, are those who know that the companies have little chance of success and hype the hell out of them anyway.

So I was particularly interested in a Reg. A+ offering filed by KingsCrowd, a publication that covers the Reg. CF marketplace and companies that are seeking funds.  KingsCrowd has a “patent-pending AI-driven startup rating algorithm” from which it intends to rate the various offerings on the Reg. CF funding portals.  

In its own words, KingsCrowd will “empower individual investors to make intelligent startup investment decisions on platforms like Republic, Wefunder, SeedInvest, Netcapital, etc., by providing institutional-grade research tools for assessing the thousands of investment opportunities available to investors at any one time.”

Given that 90% of start-ups will inevitably fail, any algorithm that can sort likely winners from likely losers would be welcome.  Even if unable to identify the 10% that will succeed, eliminating the bottom 10% or more that have no chance at success would benefit investors as well. 

KingsCrowd already tracks and rates “every Reg. CF investment opportunity in the United States.” It has a system to research and rate Reg. CF issuers. The only question is does their algorithm work?  How good is their research? What constitutes “institutional-grade” research anyway?

CalPERS, the largest public employee’s pension fund manages a multi-billion dollar portfolio.  It employs several hundred research analysts to oversee that portfolio and to make specific buy/sell recommendations. Other funds and money managers around the globe use much the same data and much the same methods to analyze that data.  Generally accepted methods of securities analysis are taught in business schools and have been for decades.

If that is “institutional-grade” research and analysis then I needed no more proof that KingsCrowd does not provide it than the fact that it gave itself a “pre-money” valuation of $45 million.  There is no way that analysis that produced that valuation can be called “institutional-grade”. The numbers just do not add up.

KingsCrowd says that it collects “more than 150 data points on each issuer, including information relating to its team, its market, financial statements, traction with consumers, and competitors. Our investment research team collects data from multiple sources such as the issuers’ pitch decks, capital raise pages on all of the funding portals (including all Reg CF funding portals such as Wefunder, Republic, Netcapital, SeedInvest), news articles and announcements, social media, founder profiles and resumes, recruitment websites, the SEC filings, growth data provided by the companies and information derived from alternative data sources.” 

I do not think that I need tell you that data in “pitch decks” and “growth data provided by companies” is often exaggerated. Information on the funding portals is often unverified.  What I was hoping for was for KingsCrowd to bring some amount of real financial analysis to this marketplace.  To even begin the process it would be necessary for the data used on Reg. CF funding portals to be accurate.  It isn’t.

KingCrowds’ “algorithm uses a comparative modeling approach to rank and score all companies actively raising capital from the markets across the various key dimensions deemed notable in the rating algorithm and traditionally utilized by venture investors to make informed investment decisions.” 

Forget for a minute that the phrase that ties “venture investors” with “informed investment decisions” is itself an oxymoron.  I worked for VC funds and I have dealt with them as a representative of a company being funded, repeatedly, beginning in the 1970s. Funding has always been more about who you know than what you were selling. The days of an MBA as a requirement to be a “venture capitalist” are a receding memory.

I would think that if KingsCrowd’s algorithm really identified better investments, one of the VC funds would have scooped it up.  When you break down what they do, you can see that it is more smoke and mirrors than mathematics.

At the end of the day, KingsCrowd’s patent-pending AI-driven startup rating algorithm yields a rating that is a number between 1 (lowest score) and 5 (highest score) for every aspect of the issuer, including price, market, differentiation, performance, team, and risk, as well as an overall score for the issuer at a specific funding round.

Given that many of the start-ups being funded have neither income nor profits, the metrics of “performance” may be more subjective than one might expect. KingsCrowd seems to intimate that what they are identifying are companies that had a successful capital raise, not successful companies.  If that is true, they are on a fool’s errand. And, while I always help clients structure their offering to present an investment that will be attractive to investors, success in crowdfunding is often about how you market the offering and how much money you put into your marketing campaign.

Giving a numerical score to a “team” also seems quite subjective. KingsCrowd itself has only 3 employees and a “team” of outside advisors. Christopher Lustrino is a founder of the Company, Chief Executive Officer, President, Chief Financial Officer, Treasurer, and also a member of the Board of Directors. If these positions had been filled with qualified people would the “pre-revenue” valuation have been $60 million? More?

Some VCs and angel investors like a founder to have some skin in the game and invest their own money. Lustrino is selling $1 million worth of his stock in KingsCrowd as is one of the early investors. The fact Lustrino needed to sell his shares costs the company an equal amount.

KingsCrowd is also concurrently offering the same shares to investors in a private placement offering under Regulation D. They are raising a total of $15 million which, if the company had something to offer, would have been cheaper and easier to accomplish using only the private placement.

Under current law, however, Lustrino cannot sell his shares or those of the early investor, using Regulation D. To sell his shares, Lustrino needed to have the company prepare and file the offering using Regulation A+.

In the normal course, the shares being sold under Reg. A+ would be the subject of a commission, here 7%.  Shares sold on a crowdfunding platform using Reg. D do not pay a commission unless the platform is a licensed broker/dealer.

Lustrino arranged to have this offering placed with a broker/dealer affiliated with one of the Reg. CF funding portals, Republic. He has agreed to pay that broker/dealer 7% of the entire $15 million or more than $1 million. That is the fee the company will pay to liberate 2,000,000 shares being sold by Lustrino and his partner.     

The issue is more than the fact that KingsCrowd is spending money that it did not need to spend. The funds would certainly be better spent hiring a CFO to watch over the investors’ money.

KingsCrowd is essentially giving $1 million to a company whose offerings it will rate. This kind of conflict of interest would, in my opinion, negate any rating KingsCrowd issues on a company listed on Republic and likely its competitors as well. As importantly, by selling his shares, Lustrino gives the impression that he has one foot out the door, ready to ditch the algorithm with little utility and ready to fund his next company.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please book a time to talk with me HERE

Start-ups, are you buying investors online?

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding, Investors, Issuers , ,
Start-ups, are you buying investors

I have been writing a lot about crowdfunding lately and speaking with other people in the crowdfunding industry.  From our conversations, it is obvious that most do not share my perspective on the entire business.  I see crowdfunding as continuing an evolution of the capital markets already in progress when I started on Wall Street in 1975.

In 1975 the stockbroker was king. People did not buy investments, I was told early on, stockbrokers sell investments.  Good stockbrokers, especially those on their way up, aggressively sold stocks. The sales pitch was often about one particular stock, frequently supported by a report prepared by research analysts.  Analysts were “ranked” every year and firms paid the “1st, 2nd and 3rd All-American teams”, handsomely.

While there were certainly stockbrokers who met their clients for lunch or at the club for golf who came back to the office with orders in hand, much of the “selling” was done over the telephone.  Young brokers were encouraged to stay into the evening and engage in a ritual known as cold calling.

During my training, I spent an evening with a single page from the NYC phone directory, script in hand, dialing for dollars. Most people had those old, heavy rotary phones.  I swear, I could hear the receiver sucking in air as it was being slammed down onto its cradle.

What cold calling teaches us is that some percentage of the calls you make will respond favorably, and buy what you are selling.  If you want to make more sales, you need to make more calls.

I mention this only as a backdrop.  This “sell-side” focus has shifted, significantly. Today, a great many retail stockbrokerage customers, make their own decisions about what to buy and what to sell in their stock or retirement accounts.  These customers are enticed by lower costs. They respond to advertising, and they will rely upon information delivered to them online.  Without these investors, crowdfunding could not exist. 

If I were teaching Law and Economics today, I would look back to 1975 and say that is where it all started.  Changes in the law, a new one enacted and an old one discarded, were the catalysts for enormous changes in the way the capital markets operate. The market responded to those changes by bringing in millions of new people who were affirmatively looking to invest and who brought trillions of new dollars with them.   

ERISA, enacted in 1974 created the tax-deferred Individual retirement account (IRA).  It was intended to incentivize millions of small savers to put their money into a bank or the stock market and to leave it there for the long term. 

In response to this new market of small investors who might start small and add a few thousand dollars every year, John Bogle opened the Vanguard Mutual Funds. Mutual funds provided a simple way for small investors to participate in the market.

Mutual funds had been around for a long time by then.  They were commissioned products sold by many stockbrokers.  And while an IRA account was the perfect vessel for mutual funds, what I would stress to my students would be the shift in the way mutual funds were advertised and sold directly to investors.

Vanguard and the other mutual funds actively advertised for investors seeking to make direct purchases.  Instead of dealing with a stockbroker who would call whenever they had, something that they wanted you to buy or sell, with a mutual fund, an investor could just put their money into a fund and the fund will do it all for you.  Somebody called it “passive investing”. Instead of touting the skill of their analysts to pick winners, these mutual funds sold convenience.

In 1975, both the State of New York and the City of New York were functionally bankrupt. The stock market had tanked and lending had ground to a halt.  The economy was in the midst of abnormal inflation.  People responded to the idea that they take some risk to grow their retirement funds in the stock market rather than save it in a bank so they could keep up with inflation.

Also in 1975, the New York Stock Exchange repealed its long-standing rule that had fixed the commissions that NYSE Members charged for each trade.  Mainframe computers were being installed up and down Wall Street. The costs of everything from executing trades to sending out confirmations and monthly statements were going down.

When commissions were fixed, the customer was charged a commission that reflected both the costs of execution and the “other” services that the brokerage firm provided, most notably, research that would tell the customers what to buy and when to sell. As commission costs became a source of competition, Charles Schwab and others were already talking about “unbundling” the cost of executing a trade from the research component that had always come with it. 

Schwab and its “discount” competitors demonstrated that a great many investors were happy to sit at home and make decisions on what to buy and what to sell, based only on what they read themselves. And while Schwab and other discount brokers now offer research reports, very few customers of discount firms are exposed to the type of research available to institutions. 

The stockbrokers’ response to this unbundling can be encapsulated in their advertising slogans of the time: “Thank you, Paine Webber”; “When EF Hutton talks, people listen” and my personal favorite: “Smith Barney makes its money the old-fashioned way, they earn it”.  The mainstream industry doubleddown; they were selling advice and they were proud of it. 

Without good advertising and a lot of it, the full-service stockbrokers, the discount firms like Schwab, and the entire mutual fund industry would not have grown into the behemoths that they are today.  The result of all of that advertising is a market full of millions of investors who are comfortable making their own investment decisions.  This includes a significant number of baby boomers who still represent a very large pool of capital that is available for investment. 

What does this have to do with crowdfunding in 2021?

If I have learned anything from watching the growth and evolution of this market since 1975, the one thing that stands out is that for companies that are selling investments, good advertising works. There is a cost, certainly, of acquiring investors for any given offering, but if you pay that cost, you will get enough investors to pony up the investment that you seek.

The best people in marketing who are working in crowdfunding understand that it is very much a “numbers game” just like “cold calling”, although now much less expensive and efficient. Modern data mining techniques enable each company that is seeking investors to present its offering to an audience that is more and more specifically targeted. 

I call it “buying investors online”. What do you call it?

I have sat in marketing meetings for various players in the financial services industry many times. Depending upon what these companies are selling and to whom, the marketing and sales strategies differ greatly.

The common denominator of these varied strategies is that they are all measured by the same standard, CAC, the cost of acquiring each customer or investor. The object of any marketing campaign is to attract the most customers (and their ‘orders’) from every dollar spent on any advertising directed at those customers. 

In crowdfunding, while statistics are few, it is obvious that the costs associated with acquiring investors varies greatly, offering to offering. Some offerings fail because investors do not find them attractive, most, I think, because they lacked marketing muscle.  

Personally, I find it painful to watch a company that has hired me to prepare the paperwork for their offering fail to acquire the investors they need.  Often, these company’s campaigns fails because they hire the marketing company that was the lowest bidder.  I try to steer my clients to a marketing company that may not be the least expensive, but gets the job done.   

The Regulation D, private placement market has found enormous success using crowdfunding for investors.  Even now, a sponsor can identify potential investors for the purchase of an office building who can afford to invest, who have an interest in real estate, and who live close enough to the property, to drive by if they want to look at it. And the data mining techniques that created these targeted mailing lists are still in their infancy.

Crowdfunding for capital has become a simple process.

Step one: create an investment that will be attractive to investors

Step two: create advertising copy that can be pre-tested and shown to be effective

Step three: put those ads in front of your pre-targeted lists of prospective investors.

Step four: Repeat step three until you raise the money you need.   

I have written elsewhere that I believe that crowdfunding has reached the point where it will now quickly grow to be a major source of capital for start-ups and small businesses.  A major reason will be that companies seeking funding can now approach crowdfunding with a high degree of certainty that they will get funded. With the proper perspective, those companies can appreciate that they are buying investors online. 

 

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or, you can book a time to talk with me HERE

 

Crowdfunding Professional Association – An Open Letter

crowdfunding, equity crowdfunding, Investors, Issuers ,

Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA)

To: The Board of Directors

I appreciate that I am a person who no one wants to hear from; a New York lawyer with an attitude and a big mouth.  Fortunately, I have made it work by finding clients who appreciate not only my advice, but the reasoning and experience behind it. Still, I know that people would rather suck an egg than listen to a lawyer.

I worked on Wall Street and helped finance companies for 20 years before I understood finance. That understanding came from teaching finance to college students. There is nothing like going back to the textbooks to create a framework for understanding the nuances of any subject.

I have made no secret of my dislike for the CfPA. I see nothing of value being discussed and certainly nothing of value produced by your organization.

I have been invited to make some practical recommendations to the CfPA Board of Directors. I have no illusions that most of the CfPA Board will simply ignore me. I have been saying many of the same things since 2015. 

To soften the discussion, I think it better that you think of me not as a lawyer but rather a college professor, albeit one who does not give credit for wrong answers. These are my thoughts.

What is best for the investors is best for the crowdfunding industry

There is a great pool of capital available for investment into all kinds of projects and businesses. The job of the crowdfunding industry is to connect companies looking for capital with investors who will provide it.

The JOBS Act was intended to provide capital for small businesses to expand and grow. The Regulation D Title II platforms have demonstrated that investors will invest $25,000-$50,000 or more based largely upon information they learn from a website. Crowdfunding, as a method to source investment capital clearly works. 

Crowdfunding operates in a unique niche market. It competes with banks and commercial lenders for companies seeking funds. At the same time, crowdfunding competes for investors with the mainstream stockbrokerage industry. Those are huge markets full of tough competitors.

Title II private placements went online and immediately competed with the traditional stockbrokers who sold similar offerings to investors face-to-face. There are Title II platforms and broker/dealers using crowdfunding to raise billions of dollars. At the same time there are Title III funding portals where issuers have difficulty raising $50,000 and where their offerings languish for months. 

In place of stockbrokers, crowdfunding offers increasingly sophisticated digital e-mail marketing campaigns and advertisements aimed at highly targeted lists of potential investors. While I was originally skeptical of this approach, it has been demonstrated that it works.

If the content of the e–mails manage to send some investors to review the offering itself, and some percentage of those become investors, then a company can continue to send out e-mails and advertisements until it attracts all the investors it wants. If some people will invest in an offering based upon what they see on the website, others will invest as well.

Effective marketing will press the right rational or emotional buttons that will result in investors investing. A good campaign will reach out to more potential investors than it needs.

Funding a crowdfunding campaign has become just a simple numbers game. As marketing costs for raising $1 million on any crowdfunding platform or funding portal continue to come down, it has reached the point where any company that can afford a good marketing campaign, can “buy” $1 million in investment or more. 

That conclusion, which I reached after countless hours speaking with campaign marketing specialists, caused me to stop and ponder the consequences for crowdfunding, for banks and for small business. I believe that this crowdfunding marketplace is about to explode with the post-pandemic need for small business capital.  

I covered much of my enthusiasm for crowdfunding in a whitepaper I published last week.I promised some more practical advice and recommendations today. 

Crowdfunding is corporate finance, do the math  

The JOBS Act was specifically intended to operate within the framework of existing federal securities laws and an established universe of corporate financing techniques. The crowdfunding industry can only exist if investors are willing to invest. The crowdfunding industry needs to respect investors. The CfPA needs to lead this effort. 

The industry has foisted scam after scam on the investors it cannot survive without. It consistently offers investments into companies that have no reasonable expectation of success. FINRA requires a certain amount of quality control for the funding portals it regulates. Many of the funding portals just ignore that requirement.

I appeared on a podcast recently. The host made me so comfortable that I blurted out something that I probably would have said differently. I said that one of the main problems with the crowdfunding industry was that too many people in it thought Ben Graham had invented a cracker. 

Graham’s textbook has been the basis for analyzing investments for decades. It has, and continues to be used in business schools around the world. Trillions of dollars are invested every year by decision makers who are trained to apply fundamental analysis to investing and corporate finance transactions.

There are very few MBAs in crowdfunding. I do not think that is a requirement, but I do think that to advise a company seeking financing requires some amount of knowledge and experience. I have helped hundreds of companies raise money over the years and I have taught finance at the university level. Still, I collaborate with two colleagues, one a retired investment banker, the other a retired commercial banker on almost every offering I prepare.   

Financing can be nuanced; terms matter; mistakes can be costly; there are always other companies competing for the same investors. If you accept that crowdfunding is a form of corporate finance, then people experienced in finance are a pre-requisite. If you think crowdfunding is just another form of gambling, you need to be doing something else.

There are clearly crowdfunding platforms that get an A in Finance by helping to structure the offerings they host intelligently. Sadly, most of the industry, especially funding portals, have no clue.

Any investment offered to investors via crowdfunding is a speculative investment. The crowdfunding industry wants investors who understand the risks and who can afford to absorb the loss if the worst happens.

Crowdfunding syndicates risk. Higher risks should yield higher rewards. Risk, if you can get your head around it, is what crowdfunding sells. 

Too often, the risks are buried in the boilerplate. The CfPA should bring the discussion of risk out in the open. It should encourage industry participants to help issuers to mitigate those risks and to adequately compensate the investors willing to take those risks to fund these companies. 

The larger marketplace quantifies risk every day. For example: Pre-pandemic, a small business seeking a loan guaranteed by the SBA, with adequate collateral and a personal guarantee from the business owner, would pay about 8.5% interest on the loan. Today, while the pandemic has raised the risks for all small businesses, there are offerings on funding portals offering investors 6%, without the collateral or guarantee, wondering why they are having difficulty attracting investors.   

The funding portals are in the business of helping issuers get funded. There are way too many issues being offered that make no economic sense. If a company cannot demonstrate that it can execute its business plan with the funds it is seeking, no platform or funding portal should agree to host its offering. The CfPA needs to help its members to step up their game. 

Rather than purchase those skills, some prominent people in the crowdfunding industry have conjured a new type of mathematical masturbation to stroke the egos of the issuers by selling a delusion of value to investors. I have not heard a single word from the CfPA questioning this practice.

A lot of start-ups are still in the late stages of development. They have burned through $500,000 in seed capital. They do not have a final product, so they have no sales to report and at most a limited test of the market they intend to serve. They have no assets and even their IP is not finished or protected. 

This company put an offering on a funding portal offering 5% of the company for $2 million. If successful, they claim that because 5% of the company was worth $2 million, the entire company must be worth $40 million. There is no excuse for this bullshit.  

In addition to the standards for analysis evidenced by Ben Graham there are GAAP accounting rules governing valuations. There are experienced business brokers around the US who help to buy and sell businesses every day who could not place anything close to a $40 million valuation on this business.    

That some VC might adopt this math is not relevant. VCs have a different agenda. They are looking for growth, not the profits that majority of investors who might invest via crowdfunding look for. An offering on a crowdfunding platform or funding portal should not mislead potential investors that a VC valuation is correct. There are no reasonable mathematics to support it.

It is also misleading to suggest “we expect to cash out in 5 years by doing an IPO or selling out to a Fortune 500 company”. That is not a fact, it is wishful thinking.  In many cases, the odds are actually better over the next 5 years that one or more of the top executives will go through a divorce and lose focus and productivity.

The CfPA has been talking about writing best practices for the crowdfunding industry for years and produced nothing. And, no, I do not want to participate in drafting them at this time, but I do have some suggestions on how the CfPA can make itself useful.

Recommendation: It has been suggested to me that the CfPA is considering creating a “test” to certify some individuals as “qualified” to perform certain tasks regarding an offering. I think that a waste of time. There are plenty of qualified people in finance who would come to crowdfunding if properly incentivized. There are qualified consultants available who could offer the issuers and the industry everything it needs. 

The CfPA first needs to define the talents needed.  The reality is a far cry from anything I have seen from the CfPA to date.  I have written about the crowdfunding process. I have offered to allow the CfPA to post or re-print anything that I have written. A more definitive guide telling issuers and investors what to expect should come from the CfPA. 

Shine light on the scams 

The JOBS Act was adopted to facilitate capital formation under the Securities Act of 1933. It specifically incorporates the anti-fraud provisions of the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934. Operators of crowdfunding platforms, funding portals and virtually anyone else involved in the crowdfunding industry should have at least a working knowledge of what can be said about a company offering its securities to investors, what cannot be said, and what must be said to potential investors. The crowdfunding industry simply ignores these requirements.

Several of the crowdfunding marketing companies insist that issuers pay me to review their final offering materials and especially the marketing materials and adsbefore the offering goes live. I have performed this task, reviewing advertising content, for large wire houses. Like these marketing companies, the Wall Street firms want to have their advertisements reviewed by a lawyer, to protect themselves and their clients from regulators and litigation. 

The Reg. A+ market has been a cesspool from the get-go. By now, I suspect that you could fill up a stadium with people who have invested in a Reg. A+ offering.  Ask that crowd for a show of hands from those who have sold their holding at a profit and very few hands will go up, even though we have been in the midst of a raging bull market.

My very first blog article that discussed crowdfunding was about ELIO Motors which was the very first Reg A+ offering.  The company purported to have a 3 wheeled, electric car.  ELIO brought one prototype to a crowdfunding conference and the crowdfunding “professionals” in attendance went into a sugar shock over it.

I read the prospectus thinking I might write something positive about it. I did not believe what I read to be true and made a single phone call to confirm my suspicions. Once I knew that ELIO Motors was a scam, I wrote it up in no uncertain terms. 

I was thinking, foolishly, the honest people working in the crowdfunding industry would do the same and shine light on ELIO and some of the other obvious frauds since then. I should have known better.

There is a saying in the mainstream markets to the effect that “no one hates to see a stockbroker being dragged out of his office in handcuffs more than the honest stockbroker across the street.”  I have not seen anything from the CfPA that even cautions prospective investors. Given the fact that the Reg. A+ market is going “show biz” to reach a wider, uneducated audience, more and more scams, enforcement actions and bad publicity is inevitable.

There is no shortage of scam artists in the Title II and Reg. CF markets either. The platforms and funding portals need to reject every offering where the issuer cannot support the claims it is making. Too many of the platforms and funding portals claim that they thoroughly “vet” each offering they host. Most have no idea what that actually takes.

When the SEC brought the first enforcement action regarding crowdfunding, Ascenergy, I discussed it with an attorney who had reviewed that offering and rejected it. It was the right call; one that I would have expected an experienced SEC attorney to make. But four platforms were mentioned in the Ascenergy order as having listed the offering. That would not have happened if every platform had access to that first attorney’s report or was at least aware of her concerns.

If a scam artist gets rejected by one platform or funding portal, they just move on to the next one. That is what happened in Ascenergy.That could have been avoided, with a little bit of intra-industry communications.

When I was a young lawyer, the compliance officials for the Wall Street firms would have lunch once a month, bring in speakers and schmooze. It was a venue where lawyers at competing firms could get together for the common good.

Recommendation: The CfPA should sponsor a simple bulletin board where lawyers working in crowdfunding and compliance officers at the platforms and funding portals can post questions to each other. Had the due diligence attorney who rejected Ascenergy posted something simple like: “Regarding the offering for Ascenergy. I spotted some red flags that I could not resolve. Call me for details” likely the offering would not have gotten off the ground, investors would not have been burned and four crowdfunding platforms would not have found themselves discussed within the pages of an SEC enforcement action.

The cost to the CfPA for this is nil. The benefit to the platforms, funding portals and crowdfunding industry is immeasurable. Reducing fraud increases investor confidence and the amount of money they will invest which is the crowdfunding industry’s first and common goal. 

Warn investors by telling them the truth

Let me suggest that the very last thing the CfPA needs to do is to form a committee to discuss investor education. Let me offer instead a homework assignment for the CfPA Board of Directors. Create a list of 10 things that an investor who is thinking about making an investment on a crowdfunding platform or funding portal should consider and publicize the hell out of it.

Let me help:

Crowdfunding Investors Beware:

1) Avoid any company that claims a value many times its projected sales, unless supported by an appraisal from a licensed business appraiser. 

2) Avoid any company that claims it will conduct an IPO or be bought out in the future unless it has a letter of intent in hand.

You get the idea. The CfPA Board of Directors should be able to supply the rest. This assignment is due before Labor Day. I will be happy to review your list and make suggestions before you publish it. And remember, I don’t give credit for wrong answers.

Respectfully,

Irwin Stein

Reg. CF – Will Fools Rush In?

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding, Investors, Issuers , ,
Reg. CF – Will Fools Rush In?

I have written a lot of articles about crowdfunding in general and specifically about crowdfunding to accredited investors under Regulation D.  I have largely ignored the much smaller financings that are accomplished under Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg. CF) that accept investments from all comers. The time has come to fill that void.

REG CF

Reg. CF was the last of the regulations issued by the SEC under the JOBS Act.  It embodied much of what proponents of the Act had wanted….a sanctioned method for community funding for start-ups and small businesses. 

The first Reg. CF offerings began in May 2016. Despite a few success stories, the Reg. CF marketplace has yet to mature.  I do not see that coming at any time soon, despite the out-sized need for small business capital.

Reg. CF created a new class of financial intermediary called “portals” which are essentially websites where companies seeking investors are displayed.  But the portals are more than just websites.

The SEC wanted this market to be regulated, in part to protect investors from fraudulent offerings and in part to provide the companies seeking capital with a way to interact with investors in a regulated environment. The SEC required the portals to register with FINRA, the stock brokerage industry’s regulator, and to adhere to FINRA’s regulations.     

Until recently only about 50 portals had been registered with FINRA, a number that had been fairly static for a while. A small handful of the portals handle the bulk of the transactions.  Some of the earlier portals have quietly gone out of business. The rest quietly grind out only a few offerings at a time. 

Top Ten REG CF Portals Ranked By Capital Raised 2020

Reg. CF required that investors be given specified disclosures about each company.  It set baselines for the presentation of financial information and set limits on how much any small investor could invest every year in these very risky ventures.  A required filing gives the SEC specific information about each offering. 

Reg. CF allows companies to raise no more than $1,070,000 in a single year. For reference, the average loan guaranteed by the SBA is closer to $600,000. The SBA guarantees about 40,000 loans per year and rejects a similar amount. There are many thousands of small companies that do not come up to SBA standards.

A great many companies would have their capital needs satisfied with much less than $1,000,000.  These companies should be looking to Reg. CF portals but are not. The portals have not demonstrated that every listing will get funded which is what any company should want.   

A very large percentage of the offerings that list on Reg. CF portals raise very little money.  Still, a great many start-ups and small businesses ask for very little.  Many of the offerings seek less than $100,000. 

Many of those small offerings do not employ a specialized marketing company or even an organized crowdfunding advertising campaign.  Too many of the campaigns rely solely upon the company’s existing social media contacts which are rarely enough to get the company funded. 

Portals

Very, very few of the portals are wildly profitable, if at all, even though the compensation structure is patterned after the wildly profitable mainstream stock brokerage industry.  Most portals charge close to 7% of the funds every company raises. The very best portals raise a total of less than $1 million every week.  This against a backdrop of so many companies in need of capital.

Five new portals were registered this month and the scuttlebutt around the industry is that another dozen portals more or less are in various stages of the registration process. Many anticipate that the SEC will raise the limit to $5 million. That may or may not happen and it will have little import since most of the portals have no idea how to raise even $100,000.

Just in the last few months, I have spoken with several people planning new Reg. CF portals. With one exception, none of these new portal owners knew anything about selling securities which is the business of any portal. None seemed particularly interested or focused on helping the listing companies raise the funds that they seek, even though the portals get paid a percentage of the funds that are raised.

FINRA

FINRA has always been a fairly lax regulator.  Notwithstanding, like many regulators, FINRA can get their teeth into you. They especially like to tangle with smaller firms that would rather settle than fight. 

Reg. CF – Will Fools Rush In?

I expect FINRA to get more involved as it is aware that the investors themselves have little recourse. If an investor invests in a Reg. CF offering that is a total scam no lawyer is going to file a suit against the portal if the loss is only $500.  Even a $1 million Reg. CF offering is likely too small for a class action.

FINRA has its own set of portal rules and an established set of standards and practices.  FINRA views the portals as being in the business of selling securities to public customers and should be expected to act accordingly.

Several people in the crowdfunding industry have suggested to me that crowdfunding platforms and portals have no real liability if an offering they host uses fraudulent or deceptive means to attract investors.  At least with portals, that is categorically not true.

FINRA’s Rules for Portals specifically forbids the portals from engaging in fraudulent conduct with the same language it prohibits the mainstream stock brokers. As the portals do not have trading desks, the only place the portals might engage in fraudulent conduct is regarding the offerings they host.

FINRA expects each of its Members to have some system in place to verify the information that the listing companies provide to the public investors.  FINRA has warned its members to not accept the self-serving statements of the founders of these companies at face value.  In many ways, this is the antithesis of the approach that many portals take, especially with start-ups. 

I have said before: when a portal lists an offering for a pre-revenue company, with negative or minimal book value, and allows the company to claim a “valuation” of tens of millions of dollars it is a fraud.  What some VC might think or say about the company is not regulated in the same way as a firm registered with FINRA.  The lawyers who allow the portals they represent to make a misrepresentation as to the “value” of a company are not doing anyone any favors. 

There are very few lawyers who work with Reg. CF portals. Every one of the lawyers that I have met or spoken with was a very competent professional.  But not all of them could really see Reg. CF offerings from the investor’s point of view which FINRA is likely to adopt as its own.

I recently spoke with an attorney who represents one Reg. CF portal and who is in the process of helping a client set up another.  His new client writes a blog with a lot of followers. The blog features articles about specific start-ups.  His client frequently appears on podcasts that get a significant amount of viewers. The client hopes to leverage his notoriety to help the companies that list their offerings on his new portal.

Rules Are Rules

FINRA expects portal owners to follow its rules regarding communications with the public.  When you are selling securities much of what you can and cannot say is regulated.  There is also a list of things that you must say when talking about an offering where you expect to collect a fee if the offering is successful.

Reg. CF – Will Fools Rush In?

FINRA has already expelled one portal owner for what he said about an offering in an interview away from his portal. There will be others.

I asked the attorney if the portal he was working on had an in-house compliance officer with experience to check all the scripts and the advertising copy for compliance before it is released.  He told me that his client had not even thought about it.

That is the nub of the problem.  Only one of the new portal owners with whom I spoke had a clear idea of how they would find companies to fund or how to make certain that there were always more investors available than securities to sell.  And that is really crucial to the success of this business.

Adding 20 new portals to a market where most of the portals are not profitable is likely to result in a race to the bottom rather than the top.  Adding more portals whose operators lack essential experience and trained compliance officers is not going to get more small businesses funded correctly.

Ideally, there would already be 50 portals each supplying $1 million per week or more for start-ups and small businesses.  Another 20 would be welcome, especially now when the need for small business capital is great.

With Reg. CF the SEC offered a truly new and relatively simple method of corporate finance for small business.  FINRA offers a roadmap to compliance and respectability. The road to success will come when the portal owners start acting like they are in the business of selling securities and focus on doing exactly that. Sadly, I do not see that happening any time soon.

If there are any portal owners out there who are ready to give up because they cannot run their portal profitably, I have some clients who would be interested in acquiring your registration to help you to salvage something from your efforts.  Serious inquiries only.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE

Start-ups Don’t Have to Fail

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding, Issuers , ,
start-ups don't have to fail

I think that it is patently absurd for people to accept the fact that 90% of start-ups will fail in their first year or two.  That number screams that the market for new business formation is not efficient.  Economics teaches that markets hate inefficiency and always strive to do better. But this is one statistic that never seems to change.

I have read quite a few books and a lot of articles written by so-called experts dissecting why start-ups fail and how to make them succeed.  Much of it is nonsense.

There are really only three primary reasons why a new business will fail; 1) the owner lacks basic business acumen; 2) the business is under-capitalized and 3) the business misread the market. All can and should be avoided if the entrepreneur knows what he/she is doing.  Usually lack of experience and the ability to run the business profitably is what leads to the failure.  There are a lot of would-be entrepreneurs who do not know what a successful business looks like or how to run one.

It is hard to find an article that discourages entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. But some people need to be discouraged because they do not have what it takes.  Fortunately, most of those people could learn what they need to know even though most will not.

Economics

When I was teaching economics I used the example of a restaurant, specifically a small pizza parlor, as a way of demonstrating how profitable a restaurant or any business can be.  Of all start-ups, restaurants often top the list of those that fail most often and more quickly than other businesses. That should not be.

In the example, the restaurant’s owner stops on his way to work to buy the ingredients that he needs, flour, cheese, tomato paste, pepperoni, etc. to make the pizzas.  If he opens his shop at 11AM, he can convert all of those ingredients into pizzas and back into cash, at a healthy mark-up, by the time he closes that evening. That type of rapid inventory turn-over is almost impossible to get in any other business.

Start-ups Don't Have to Fail

Customers at a pizza parlor are not expecting table cloths and fancy décor so overhead can be kept to a minimum. Since the pizzas come out of the oven one or two at a time, the wait staff can handle more tables than the staff at other restaurants. They may use paper plates and paper cups eliminating the cost of a dishwasher. In most cases, advertising can be done cheaply with signage, flyers and coupons.

Couple that with the fact that the other product the restaurant sells, fountain soft drinks, has a huge mark-up and you can see why a small pizza restaurant can make a lot of money.  If he owner is really smart, he will add a soft serve ice cream dispenser as well because it also has a very high mark-up and will substantially increase the total amount of sales and profit per customer.

The further away the restaurant gets from this simple model, the greater the chance that it will fail.  Nothing about this discussion has a lot to do with the pizza or how good it is. It is all about the numbers, especially money in and out; how to maximize the former and minimize the latter.

The problem with most people who start a restaurant is that they plan the menu around what they want to serve or what they think they need to serve to attract customers, not on how much money they will make. Likewise, most start-ups focus on their product. But they also need to keep their eyes on the numbers. That is where start-ups succeed or fail.

The real lesson here for any business and especially start-ups is that what you are doing is a business. To make it work you need to be focused on the bottom line. If you cannot operate the business at a profit, it cannot succeed.  So why do 90% of start-ups fail: because their expenses are greater than their income.

When someone asks me what I consider to be essential for any new business, I always include an adequate bookkeeping system so the business owner can easily keep track of cash flow, inventory turn-over, etc. It is very difficult to find that suggestion on the list of start-up essentials in any of the hundreds of articles on the subject in Inc. or Entrepreneur Magazine.

Start-ups Don't Have to Fail

The best advice for any start-up would be to “work smart and spend your time and your money wisely”.   That is especially true if you are looking for investors. Investors are expecting you to make money and they are expecting that you have what it takes to run a business and that you know what you are doing.

There are still thousands of articles about how to pitch VCs for funding. Over all VCs fund very few companies each year and many thousands of entrepreneurs are trying to get their attention because that is what the articles tell them to do.  Pitching to VCs may be the single biggest waste of time and money that any start-up does, especially so if you have to get on an airplane to make your pitch.

On the other hand, boot strapping can be very hard and the lack of cash can hold you back, delay your progress and cause you to fail just when you were beginning to succeed.  It is a lot easier to focus on your business when there is money in the bank to pay the bills.

Being able to raise seed capital so that you can focus and move forward is also an indication of other people’s evaluation of you and what you are attempting to do.  Feedback from potential investors on your seed round is important. Comments and suggestions, especially negative ones, will help you move forward.

Fund raising for start-ups has become remarkably easy with the JOBS Act and equity crowdfunding.  There is a lot of money available. It works for most start-ups because they can control the process and make it work.  I started walking companies through the process 3 years ago. Feel free to contact me if you are considering raising capital through crowdfunding or are raising capital and never considered crowdfunding.

A start-up is not a start-up until it starts-up.  Every business begins when it makes its first sale. It is a lot more difficult to raise funds for a pre-revenue company versus one which has a product already being sold. Pre-revenue you need a great business plan and a team to carry out your plan.  A good idea for a new business is important but execution is everything.

Given that financing a pre-revenue company is difficult, no one should plan on doing it twice; once to build your prototype product and again to launch it.  So an article that suggests that should raise money to create a  MVP (minimum viable prototype) and then again to take it to market is not really not helpful.   If you are going to raise seed capital to get your company off the ground, you should raise enough to get your product into the market, sustain your company until it is profitable, cover the costs of raising more money to help it grow and usually a small reserve in case things do not go exactly to plan.

There seems to be another stream of start-up gospel that suggests if you want to succeed you need to disrupt the market or solve a problem that nags the market. It is vitally important that you understand your market but you do not have to disrupt anything.

Nothing about the pizza parlor solves any specific problems that cannot already be solved in the marketplace. There is no new technology; no bells and whistles; no Blockchain.  While in a competitive market like New York City everyone knows a good slice from a not so good slice, I have waited on line at pizza parlors in small college towns around the US for some really mediocre pizza.

I look at a lot of pitch decks and I speak with a lot of entrepreneurs. Sometimes I can tell that the person just does not have what it takes to operate a successful business.  When that happens, I usually ask a lot of questions. How will the business operate post-launch? What are the sales goals month to month and where will the sales come from?  Where is your break-even point?

From day-one, the focus needs to be not on just starting up but staying open. The reason that 90% of start-ups fail is a lack of execution by the founders. If every entrepreneur focused on running the business well, that number would plummet.

If you are thinking about opening your own business, take a moment to have a slice a pizza and consider why that pizza parlor is successful.  Do that for fifty businesses. Look at what they are doing right and what you would do better.  Quantify how much more money the business would make if they did things your way.

Once you can analyze what makes other businesses successful, you will on the road to making your own business successful as well.  Sadly, the vast majority of people who are considering their own start-up would fail at this exercise. That, more than anything is why the 90% failure rate for start-ups is with us year after year.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE

The “Real” Costs of Crowdfunding for Capital

Capital Markets, equity crowdfunding, Issuers , ,
the real costs of crowdfunding

Most people who consider crowdfunding to raise capital for their business are first-timers. A great many have never even been investors themselves nor considered investing in any of the companies whose offerings are currently on any of the crowdfunding platforms.

Economic downturns always present opportunities for people with the capital to exploit them. I get more calls from CEOs and CFOs interested in crowd finance every week. Many have become interested because the banks they would normally turn to are not lending.

A crowdfunding campaign, if executed correctly can be an excellent source of capital for most businesses. Like any other corporate task, it requires preparation, an adequate budget, and professional execution. Not surprisingly, everyone wants to know what a successful campaign to raise capital from investors will cost.  

The “Real Cost”

Most companies will rely heavily on their CFO or outside financial advisor to execute this financing. The CFO needs to consider how the financing will affect the company’s balance sheet, cash flow, and capital structure. The company will need to decide if it should offer investors debt, equity, or another form of financing instrument.

The question of “what do we offer the investors” necessarily comes up early in the planning stages of every offering. The right terms can save a company a lot of money and make subsequent financing easier. The wrong terms can result in an expensive or failed campaign now or may erupt into a costly mess, years later.

For many CFOs the desire to offer investors as little as possible is at odds with the reality that if you do not offer investors enough, they will put their money elsewhere. This is where the “real cost” of any financing is determined.  

Investors in every Regulation D offering are always advised that the securities they are purchasing are “very high risk” or “speculative” to the point that investors should be prepared, both mentally and financially, to lose their entire investment. When the risk is high, investors expect to receive a high return as well. Some risks can be mitigated and should be. 

The process of deciding the terms investors will be offered usually starts with a series of spreadsheets. How much the company can afford to pay is in the revenue projections. How much the company may need to pay to attract investors requires a good idea of the cost of capital from other sources and a good idea of what other companies are offering in the crowdfunding universe. 

I frequently participate in this process. This is because most of the platforms fail to offer this type of advice which most companies sorely need.

I like to ask the questions that investors are likely to ask. I try to help each company see the investment from the investors’ point of view. Wall Street firms sell billions of dollars worth of these private placements every year. They know what needs to be said to get investors to invest.

Regulation D securities will only be sold to US “accredited” investors, mostly those who have a net worth above $1 million (excluding their primary residence). For years the mainstream stock brokerage industry has conditioned these same investors to look at the return that is being promised to them first, and most do. 

Investors want to know how you will use their money to make the returns you are promising come true. How you price and present your offering tells serious investors a lot about how serious and professional you are. 

What to look for in a lawyer (if you don’t hire me).

Once you have decided on the terms you will offer to investors you will have 3 major out-of-pocket expenditures. The first is a securities lawyer to draft the offering documents. What you say to potential investors in the offering and marketing materials is regulated. A good lawyer will keep you within the regulators’ white lines.

The standard disclosure document for a Regulation D offering is called a private placement memorandum (PPM). The overriding requirement is for full, fair, and accurate disclosure of the information that an investor would need to make an informed decision of whether or not to invest. 

PPMs have been presented as a bound booklet for decades. The bound booklet PPM is the normal format for disclosure that most practitioners still use.  In booklet form, the cost for a PPM is typically $50,000 and upwards.

Crowdfunding websites have begun to change the format and have started to use landing pages to spread out the information about offerings rather than present it as a standard booklet. This format makes the offerings more readable and investor-friendly while still making all of the necessary disclosures.

The landing page will provide investors with the terms of the offering, a description of the business and its principals, and a table showing how the company will use the money it is seeking. Most include links to current financial statements and revenue projections. The same information about the business, its competitors, and the particular risks of the investment that would appear in a bound booklet is all laid out. Key documents can be viewed with a “click”.

It usually takes less drafting and less time for a lawyer to use the landing page to “lay it all out” which is one of the benefits of crowdfunding. I usually bill in the neighborhood of $20,000-$25,000 for a Regulation D offering done in this manner rather than the traditional booklet form.

Paying for the Platform

Many crowdfunding platforms advertise that tens of thousands of investors have invested in at least one offering that they had hosted. Unless the platform can deliver those investors to you, such claims are irrelevant. You are going to need to execute a marketing campaign sufficient to bring in the capital you seek.

Platforms usually charge a “hosting fee” that covers two or three months for you to use their platform to attract investors to your offering and process them.  The processing will include a vendor to verify that your investors are actually “accredited” and an escrow agent to hold the investors’ funds until closing.

Key individuals at each company are required to get a background check to verify that they are not “bad actors” who cannot use the JOBS Act to raise money. Platforms charge for this and the better platforms charge to conduct due diligence on the company as well. 

Most platforms charge more the longer your offering is live.  A well planned and executed marketing campaign should get you the funding you want faster. Expect to spend $10,000 more or less for the platform hosting and the background checks.

Never Take Marketing Advice from Your Lawyer

the real costs of crowdfunding

Working in financial services where so much of what you must say and cannot say is regulated; I came in contact with a lot of advertising and marketing professionals over the years. In the 1980’s, when stockbrokers went searching for accredited investors they would buy subscription lists from “Yachting” magazines.

A modern-day marketing campaign is skillfully targeted at a pre-selected group of prospective investors. Content is pre-tested and the campaign will target more potential investors than you should need. 

The costs of setting up the landing page for an offering can vary greatly. I think that $10,000 is reasonable for setting up the website and preparing the marketing campaign.

Many Regulation D offerings have a minimum investment of $25,000. This equates to a maximum of 40 investors for every $1 million raised. A rule of thumb suggests that for Regulation D offerings, an expenditure of $10,000 on the marketing campaign for every $1 million raised seems reasonable.

So for a crowdfunding raise of $3 million, you might spend $20,000 for a lawyer, $10,000 for the platform and related fees, and $40,000 for the marketing campaign for a total of $70,000 more or less.  I always tell clients to keep a little in reserve as well, just in case the marketing campaign needs to be extended.

If you borrow $3 million from a bank, the bank will charge 2 or 2.5 points (percent of the loan) as well which is roughly the same.  And in truth many of the companies that chose crowdfunding did so because bank financing is not an option for them.  

The crowdfunding world has evolved from “put the offering on the platform and see who invests” to a world populated by legal and marketing professionals who get the job done and the money raised.  If you want your crowdfunding to be successful, be prepared to pay for them.

If you’d like to discuss this or anything related, then please contact me directly HERE

Or you can book a time to talk with me HERE