The Venture Alley - A blog about business and legal issues important to entrepreneurs, startups, venture capitalists and angel investors.

CONTRIBUTED BYMegan Muirmegan.muir@dlapiper.com  The Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (the JOBS Act), enacted in April this year, makes a variety of significant changes to securities laws, some of which relate to early-stage entrepreneurs, startup companies and venture capitalists concerned about fund raising with respect to their portfolio companies. In this article, I address provisions of the JOBS Act most applicable to startup companies and venture capitalists that fund them. In this piece, I will not be covering other changes in the Act such as broker/dealer regulations, “Reg A+”, or the changes to research reporting and analyst rules.  IPO On-Ramp The... More

CONTRIBUTED BYAndrew Ledbetterandrew.ledbetter@dlapiper.com In today’s age of social media success stories, there is something superficially interesting about crowdfunding as a high-level idea.  There has certainly been no shortage of attention to crowdfunding in the press and from business people.  But in looking at the new JOBS Act exemption for crowdfunding, I see lots of reasons why many companies will avoid it.  While this list could be expanded – and will need to be revised as the SEC adopts rules to implement the new exemption – to get things started I offer up these ten reasons:... More

CONTRIBUTED BYTrent Dykestrent.dykes@dlapiper.com John Melloy’s article entitled “The Dictators of Silicon Valley: Facebook, Google Stripping Shareholder of Power” highlights an interesting trend among tech companies that have gone public in the past several years – implementing dual-class voting structures. The general idea behind these dual-class voting structures is to keep control in the hands of the individuals (usually the founders) who supposedly know what is best for the company and to shield a company from potential public company shareholder activism and hostile takeovers. Control is maintained by either giving the founder shares more votes per share than the shares issued to... More