To make things worse, it's a mess to try to find former employees/contractors with .5% to try to buy them out. Can you imagine trying to find the 20 guys who each put in $250 and aren't answering their email? The jank required (and +1 for appropriate use of the word "janky") to derail a professional round may be nothing more than "can't find everyone".

I'm pretty sure the professional VCs and the law firms that represent them will find an efficient way to deal with the issue. That's what they do.

I would assume someone will try to come up with some standard language to wrap this type of investor together into something manageable. If they succeed, it will be a non-issue. But that is a big if. It only takes one difficult shareholder to torpedo a deal. This is all very new, so who knows what will happen. What I'm comfortable saying, though, is that nobody is going to want to deal with crowd funded startups until this is all figured out. It's just not worth it when there are clean deals out there.

No they don't. Any kind of complexity at all in M&A and major investment closings gets insane expensive no matter who's involved.

Have you ever closed a VC round? I did (with 2 cofounders) during the bubble. There was nothing remotely interesting about our paperwork. It was insanely expensive.

I didn't say anything about the cost.

I said they'd find an efficient (for them) way to deal with it.

The point was made that this could derail later rounds, and my response is that methods and approaches will be developed so that is not the case, because solving problems is what these people do.