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Re:SEC Greenlights One Style Of Equity Crowdfunding For Star... by michaelochurch on Thursday March 28, 2013 @05:39PM (#5457832)
My worry is that we'll get a race of people who have only seen (or read about) startups that when from a hundred thousand dollar investment into billions, dumping money they cannot afford to lose into these things. That would trigger a bunch of excess capital seeking outlet and result it being used inefficiently, and when these folks learned about the "9 out of 10 start-ups don't make money for their investors" truism, they will be angry and litigious.

Personally, I'd like to see a way for investors to put money into some kind of broad-based startup index fund. I agree that people shouldn't be putting their life savings into a single startup. We don't like taking on that kind of personal risk (that's why we raise money) and they shouldn't have to, either. They should be able to take, say, $10,000 and put it into startups, plural.

Also, given that you're going to have a "power law" distribution of returns where a couple black swans are responsible for a large amount of the return, it's good for most investors to be in the whole spectrum; otherwise you get a St. Petersburg Lottery phenomenon where median returns are much lower than the (presumably quite high) expectancy.

Re:SEC Greenlights One Style Of Equity Crowdfunding For Star... by jeffwass on Thursday March 28, 2013 @06:25PM (#5458081)
FundersClub offered exactly that, the YCS13 fund that invests in about 10 companies in the YCS13 batch, with a $10k minimum investment. It closed about two months ago.
Re:SEC Greenlights One Style Of Equity Crowdfunding For Star... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday March 28, 2013 @11:46PM (#5459148)
The best way to do this is probably a VC fund. Unlike public equities, a broad-market benchmark for startups faces low survival rates, limited liquidity, and ambiguous inter-round valuations - the tracking error would probably render the index useless.