Crowdfunding Professional Association reposted this
CEO | Entrepreneur | Inventor | Testing boundaries of "Work Anywhere" | Regulated Investment Crowdfunding
A number of people have asked for my opinion about Kevin O'Leary’s recent announcement -- that he intends to use Regulated Investment Crowdfunding to raise money to acquire #TikTok. I have mixed feelings about it. First, I think it’s a PR stunt. The most he can raise from the crowd (using Tier 2 Reg A) is $75M per year. I doubt Bytedance will sell TikTok but if they do, some estimates put the value at nearly $100 billion. Kevin’s crowdfunding plan would raise less than 1/10th of 1% of the required funds to purchase TikTok. It doesn’t seem like a serious plan to me – but I see that it is getting him headlines. Perhaps that's his intent. Second, as the current President of the Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA), I’m glad that someone famous is raising awareness about the opportunity to use Regulated Investment Crowdfunding to finance acquisitions (in particular, for media or social media businesses). Imagine every local newspaper being owned by the readership in their local geography or subject-specific social media verticals being owned by their users. This is the future. Unfortunately, the person making the case for the industry was also the face and an advocate of FTX -- and we know how that turned out. For people that want to learn more about how Reg A can be used to help acquire or fund businesses, I recommend attending Dealflow’s Regulation A & Crowdfunding conference which will be June 20th at the Westchester Country Club (Rye, NY). At that event, serious people will be exploring the world of opportunity that is being opened up with crowdfunding. I’ll be there to speak as will a number of other accomplished and knowledgeable board members of the CfPA. Join us in NY next month - https://regaconference.com DealFlow Events Jason Fishman Benji Taylor Jones Etan Butler Phillip LoFaso Andrew Dix Rebecca Szkutak Devin Thorpe Howard Marks https://lnkd.in/e4A5Vahg
Paul Lovejoy
1mo
Agreed, it's a publicity stunt for StartEngine. It could help with a paradigm shift of how people view investment crowdfunding.
Eve Picker
1mo
Is this worth paying attention to? Just saying ...
Scott McIntyre
1mo
perfect assessment, Brian. Mr. Wonderful is a showman, but under that straight-talking-guy is a dyed in the wool extractive capitalist. Smart guy, but not my fave shark.
Sean Levine
1mo
See you there Brian!
Brian. he can certainly crowdfund this deal, as long as its governed under REG D and not the limitations of RegCF or A+. We did this at OffRoad. Even if he had a tranche of CF or A+ money, which would include non-accredited investors, it makes sense, as I have stated that consumer-oriented products/services within crowd investing is quite strategic as the offeror gets both money and a customer base. So TikTok given its constituency makes great sense. But the limitations on how much can be raised just pushes it under a different reg structure, namely Reg D. So, yes he hypes himself rather fatuously, but he does come up with some decent calls - this is one.......