JOBS Act and the Crowd-Sourced Startup

In April 2012, the JOBS Act was signed into law, but the SEC has been slow to implement it. The first part of the act will finally become active tomorrow, which will allow startups to publicly announce that they’re fundraising. However, they will still only be able to raise money from accredited investors, i.e. rich people.

Phase III of the JOBS Act will allow crowdfunding – ordinary people will be able to invest small amounts of their income in startups (see Crowdfunding passes in the Senate). This will help many small companies and startups raise money from a large number of people. Currently, a person or company can raise money on a site like Kickstarter, but can only offer backers rewards (like their product or tshirts), but not equity in the startup. Imagine how many more people will be interested in backing startups if they can hope to get rich from doing so! This will raise the risk of scams though, which is why there will be various regulations on crowdfunding once it is (eventually) implemented.

Startups will be able to raise money from the public, and could also use their “crowd” of investors to help to do things for their company. For example, a company could perform market research with their crowd investors, or ask them to help promote the company’s product on social media. Quirky uses its crowd to help decide what physical products to create, so tech companies could consult with their crowd to help decide on new features for an app.

Perhaps a company’s crowd could  be consulted with to work on a specific task, such as creating some icons for a site or improving its SEO. Crowd investors will want to be compensated for large tasks that they do, but it could still be easier to hire someone already invested in the company than an external consultant. In fact, maybe this work could be an alternative form of crowdfunding – instead of investing in a company, people could contribute work and get a share of equity. This would differ from standard employment for equity since it the work would be distributed to a large number of people. While this could make collaboration more difficult, many open-source projects have been successful with a large number of contributors, so perhaps startups can do the same thing.

Paul Graham once said:

I don’t think crowdfunding is good for startups. For startups, having large numbers of investors is bad, and having inexperienced investors is bad. So having a very large number of inexperienced investors is the worst scenario possible.

 

While too many ordinary investors could be a nuisance, a large group could by filtered through a crowdfunding site and can offer more value than standard rich investors. This may be why Paul Graham accepted the crowd-sourced startup FundersClub into Ycombiantor. Startups may even start crowdfunding because of the product and marketing opportunities it will provide.