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Last week I attended a panel discussion with angel investors and venture capitalists hosted by Refresh Miami. Almost two hundred entrepreneurs and tech professionals attended the summer startup series to learn the inside scoop on fundraising from panelists Ed Boland, Principal Scout Ventures; Stony Baptiste, Co-Founder & Principal, Urban.Us, Venture Fund; Brad Liff, Founder & CEO, Fitting Room Social, Private Equity Expert; and (the smartest person under 30 I have ever met) Herwig Konings, Co-Founder & CEO of Accredify, Crowd Funding Expert. Because I was typing so fast on my iPhone, I didn’t have time to attribute my notes to the speakers. Therefore, in no particular order, here are the nuggets I managed to glean from the panel.

1) In the seed stage, it’s more than an idea but less than a business. If it’s before true market validation you are in the seed round. At the early stage, there has been some form of validation, but the business is not yet sustainable. Everything else beyond that is the growth stage.

2) The friend and family round is typically the first $50-75,000. Angels come in the early stage and typically invest up to $500,000.

3)…

Love him or hate him, you can’t deny that President Obama has had an impact on this country. Tomorrow, I will be a panelist on the local public affairs show for the PBS affiliate to talk about the President’s accomplishments and/or failings. The producer asked the panelists to consider this article as a jumping off point. One of the panelists worked for the Obama campaign and another worked for Jeb Bush. Both are practicing lawyers. The other panelist is an educator and sustainability expert. And then there’s me.

I’ve been struggling all week with how to articulate my views because there’s a lot to discuss about this “lame duck” president. Full disclosure—I went to law school with Barack Obama. I was class of ’92 and he was class of ’91 but we weren’t close friends. I was too busy doing sit-ins outside of the dean’s house as a radical protester railing against the lack of women and minority faculty members. Barack Obama did his part for the movement to support departing Professor Derrick Bell by speaking (at minute 6:31) at one of the protests. I remember thinking then and during other times when Barack spoke publicly that he would run…

As I earlier noted, on June 23rd, I moderated a teleconference on proposals to shorten the Section 13(d) reporting period, currently fixed by statute and regulation at 10 days.  If you don’t mind registering with Proxy Mosaic, you can listen to the program.  The link is here.

The discussion was lively–as you might well imagine, given that one of the participants represents activist shareholders and the other represents public companies.  A number of interesting things emerged in the discussion, many (most) of which also have been raised in other public forums on Schedule 13D, including those referenced and summarized here, here, and here, among other places.

  • Exactly how does the Section 1d(d) reporting requirement protect investors or maintain market integrity or encourage capital formation?  Or is it just a hat-tipping system to warn issuers about potential hostile changes of control, chilling the potential for the market for corporate control to run its natural course?  Of course, the answer to many questions about Section 13(d) depends on our understanding of the policy interests being served.  It’s hard to tinker with the reporting  system if we cannot agree on the objectives it seeks to achieve . .

…

SEC Commissioner Kara M. Stein provided remarks at the Brookings Institute’s 75th Anniversary of the Investment Company Act on Monday, June 15th.  Now if that isn’t an exciting introduction to a post, I just don’t know what is.  She addressed a topic that is of great interest to me and a focus of my research:  retail/retirement investors.  I tend to call them Citizen Shareholders in my writing, and it is sentiment shared by Commissioner Stein:

“By retail investor, I mean the everyday citizen or household that is investing – not institutional investors or pension funds.  Eighty-nine percent of mutual fund assets are attributable to retail investors.” (emphasis added).

In her remarks she detailed several troubling aspects of the mutual fund industry–a primary investment source for retail investors– liquidity, leverage and disclosure.  She also highlighted future SEC rule making initiatives related to these issues.   For example, the Commission recently proposed new rules to enhance data reported to the Commission by registered funds. The proposed rule is available  here (Download SEC proposed disclosure rules) and received comments can be tracked on the SEC’s website here.

Noting that a major function of the 1940 Investment Act was transparency and…

My recent scholarship (e.g., Outside Investor & Retirement Revolution) has focused on retirement and institutional investors. On the retirement investor side, I frequently address the impact that fees have on retirement investment returns, in part, as a critique of the opacity and lack of choice in the defined contribution plans (i.e., 401K and 457 plans). A focus on fee reduction (as well as simple diversification) has driven growth in the index and electronically-traded (ETF) funds, which charge lower fees because they are passively managed.  These simple lessons in finance are not just relevant to the individual investor.  Earlier this week, CalPERS announced that it would cut fund management fees by reducing (nearly in half) the number of active fund managers overseeing the investment of its over $300 billion in assets.  The New York Times reported that:

Eliminating some external managers will help Calpers shore up its investments by reducing fees. Last year, it paid $1.6 billion in management fees, $400 million of which was a one-time payment for its real estate managers, a Calpers spokesman said.

With larger pools of assets shifted to the remaining asset managers, CalPERS should have more leverage to demand lower fees and cost…

I was reading an article on securities crowdfunding in China and came across this description of Chinese practice:

Generally, in China, equity-based crowdfunding capital-seekers rely on the strength of experienced, leading investors to advise “follow-up” investors in locating investment projects. Leading investors are usually professionals with rich experience in private offerings and label themselves as holding innovative techniques in investment strategies and possessing sound insights. On the contrary, follow-up investors usually do not have even basic financial skills, but they do ordinarily control certain financial resources for investment. When a leading investor selects a target investment project through an equity-based crowdfunding platform, the leading investor usually invests personal funds into the project. Crowdfunding capital- seekers then take advantage of the leading investor’s funds to market the project to follow-up investors.

(This is from a recent article by Tianlong Hu and Dong Yang, The People’s Funding of China: Legal Developments of Equity Crowdfunding-Progress, Proposals, and Prospects, 83 U. CIN. L. REV. 445 (2014).)

This is not unique to China. Private offerings to accredited investors in the United States often follow a similar path. Smaller investors are more likely to commit once a well-known, sophisticated investor has made a commitment. But…

Earlier I blogged (on the BLPB here and CLS Blue Sky Blog here) about my co-authored piece, Institutional Investing When Shareholders Are Not Supreme–a 30-year empirical and case review study analyzing institutional investors’ response to constituency statutes as one lens into the question of institutional capital available for alternative purpose firms, like benefit corporations.  On Monday, I wrote a short post on our article for the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Reform, which is available here.  

-Anne Tucker

This week I have found myself reading the co-authored, empirical piece by C.N.V. Krishnan, Frank Partnoy, and Randall Thomas titled, Top Hedge Funds and Shareholder Activism.  Through their sample they observe that top hedge funds have repetitional capital in that the market responds more positively to announcements by certain hedge funds with certain features, like a longer track record, larger assets under management and management participation through board of director seats.  Its an interesting and insightful article on the role, and value, of hedge funds. The authors conclude that 

The market appears to anticipate the superior performance of these top hedge funds even before announcement of intervention. Moreover, post-intervention target-firm operating performance associated with these top hedge funds is significantly superior to that of other hedge fund activists.

The focus on reputation reminded of Elisabeth de Fontenay’s good work on reputation in private equity.  Her article, Private Equity Firms as Gatekeepers, 33 Review of Banking & Financial Law 115-189 (2014).  de Fontenay argues in her piece that: 

private equity firms act as gatekeepers in the debt markets. As repeat players, private equity firms use their reputations with creditors to mitigate the problems of borrower adverse selection

…

Some of you may recall that I blogged last summer about a SEALS (Southeastern Association of Law Schools) discussion group on “publicness.”  That post can be found here.  My contribution to the discussion group was part of a paper that then was a work-in-process for the University of Cincinnati Law Review that I earlier had blogged about here.

That paper now has been released in electronic and hard-copy format.  I just uploaded the final version to SSRN.  The abstract for the paper reads as follows:

Conceptions of publicness and privateness have been central to U.S. federal securities regulation since its inception. The regulatory boundary between public offerings and private placement transactions is a basic building block among the varied legal aspects of corporate finance. Along the same lines, the distinction between public companies and private companies is fundamental to U.S. federal securities regulation.

The CROWDFUND Act, Title III of the JOBS Act, adds a new exemption from registration to the the Securities Act of 1933. In the process, the CROWDFUND Act also creates a new type of financial intermediary regulated under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and amends the 1934 Act in other ways. Important among…

Last week, I looked lovingly at a picture of a Starbucks old-fashioned grilled cheese sandwich. It had 580 calories. I thought about getting the sandwich and then reconsidered and made another more “virtuous” choice. These calorie disclosures, while annoying, are effective for people like me. I see the disclosure, make a choice (sometimes the “wrong” one), and move on.

Regular readers of this blog know that I spend a lot of time thinking about human rights from a corporate governance perspective. I thought about that uneaten sandwich as I consulted with a client last week about the California Transparency in Supply Chains Act. The law went into effect in 2012 and requires retailers, sellers, and manufacturers that exceed $100 million in global revenue that do business in California to publicly disclose the degree to which they verify, audit, and certify their direct suppliers as it relates to human trafficking and slavery. Companies must also disclose whether or not they maintain internal accountability standards, and provide training on the issue in their direct supply chains. The disclosure must appear prominently on a company’s website, but apparently many companies, undeterred by the threat of injunctive action by the state Attorney…