Earlier this year I wrote a series of columns about crowdfunding and the JOBS Act, which was signed into law last April with several goals, one of which was to help startups raise money from ordinary investors. Those columns were about the promise of crowdfunding and the JOBS Act while this one is about what progress has been made so far toward that end. For startups, alas, the news is not entirely good. Crowdfunding looks like it may not be available at all for the smaller, needier companies the law was supposedly designed to serve.
It’s one thing to pass a law and quite another to write rules to carry out that law. Title 3 […]

This is the third and final part of my series on crowdfunding. In
Companies go public for many reasons but the two that are most common are: 1) to raise capital for further expansion, and; 2) to secure the wealth of the founders. Some companies go public for different reasons, like Microsoft’s IPO back in 1986 that was literally forced by excessive secondary trading of company shares. Gates and Shirley decided to accept the burden of going public because it wasn’t all bad, but they didn’t seek it because they didn’t need the money.