The Internet serves a variety of valuable functions in this area. Regulation CF now allows private companies raising capital to engage in general solicitation, or the ability to advertise their offerings on the Internet. An investment portal can create marketable securities for issuers and an efficient digital process for raising money. The portal can also provide transaction processing and handle regulatory filings at a cost significantly lower than hiring a law firm for this purpose.
Advantages a portal provides to the advisor and client include a single source to research company investments, transact, communicate with company founders and manage a portfolio, with an investor dashboard providing real-time data.
Thanks to these innovations, the people who know these private market companies the best—customers, friends, family, fans and followers—can now invest.
Of course, early stage private companies entail greater risk. Not all companies succeed. In fact it may be a good assumption that many of them will fail. The proper way to build a private investment portfolio is to diversify in this asset class among a variety of companies.
For that reason investment minimums on portals are kept low, frequently on the order of $100. Most advisors would recommend clients allocate only a small portion of their investment portfolio to private companies. The regulations provide some guardrails. Non-accredited investors cannot commit more than 5-10 percent of their net worth or annual salary to private market securities; accredited investors have no limit.
Private markets also present the challenge of limited liquidity, although at Netcapital we are addressing that need by building a secondary transfer platform which allows shareholders to offer to transfer their shares to another willing investor. Through Netcapital if a buyer and seller agree on a share price the transaction happens instantly and digitally, although there can be no guarantee a seller will find a buyer at the asking price.
Clients also should be advised never to invest more than they can afford to lose, and to be patient; it’s not unusual for investments in a private company to take seven years or more before they start to pay off.
This world of accessing private market deals through investment portals is still in its infancy, but the opportunity addresses a fundamental, existential problem to which not enough people seem to be paying attention—the widening wealth gap in this country. Companies are staying private longer rather than issuing public stock, so higher returns during this growth phase have been isolated to the top one percent of the top one percent of Americans who have had real access to these investment opportunities—until now.
Articles have glorified the “Uber Rich,” the couple of dozen already rich investors who invested early in Uber, while in an ideal world the massive economic gains of Uber should have been shared by thousands, if not millions, of Americans. By opening the opportunity for more people to invest in the private markets, Congress addressed the dual purpose of creating more capital for job creation and more opportunity for investors to participate in the growth of new companies that create those jobs. That’s a good thing.
Jason Frishman is founder and CEO of Netcapital in Boston.