2013

Farrell Fritz and our Emerging Companies and Venture Capital Practice Group are proud to launch the New York Venture Hub blog, a resource for entrepreneurs, emerging companies, the investors who invest in them and the professionals who serve them. This is an exciting time for the innovation ecosystem, with renewed legislative and regulatory efforts to reform capital markets to make it easier for private companies to raise capital and for small companies to go public. There has also been a proliferation of regional efforts to accelerate the commercialization of home-grown technologies through university spinouts and other technology transfer arrangements with local job creating companies. Accelerate Long Island is one such initiative, created to promote the local commercialization of inventions produced at Long Island’s world-renowned research institutions. Farrell Fritz has been playing, and will continue to play, a key role in this effort. Just across the East River (or literally, on it), Cornell University and Technion are building a world-class applied engineering campus on Roosevelt Island that is predicted to result in the creation of 600 spinouts over the next three decades. Farrell Fritz believes that technology innovation will transform our economy nationally and regionally, and we hope the New York Venture Hub blog will prove to be a useful resource to the developing innovation ecosystem. We invite you to link to our blog.

New York Emerges as Tech Powerhouse…
Continue Reading New York Emerges as Tech Powerhouse

In perhaps the only successful bipartisanship effort in 2012 to remove barriers to economic growth, Congress passed and the President signed on April 5, 2012 the most comprehensive set of laws to facilitate small company capital raising since the Federal securities laws were first enacted in the 1930s. In a nutshell, the JOBS Act (acronym for the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act) creates an on-ramp for small company IPOs, removes the prohibition on general solicitation and advertising from the most commonly used private offering, creates a new equity crowdfunding exemption, sharply raises the cap for the small company offering exemption under Regulation A from $5 million to $50 million in any 12-month period and significantly raises the shareholder number trigger for Exchange Act registration. Some provisions are immediately effective, but others require SEC rulemaking.
Continue Reading Startups’ Guide to JOBS Act

Using finders, instead of investment bankers that are registered broker-dealers, involves significant risks that could threaten a company’s ability to successfully raise capital now and in the future.

The biggest risk is that if the finder is deemed to be an unregistered broker-dealer, under federal and some state securities laws an investor may have the…

            The debate over the taxation of “carried interest” has been percolating for years and the release of Mitt Romney’s personal tax returns in connection  with his presidential campaign  generated more wide-spread interest in the subject.  And while the relatively preferential tax rates that fund managers pay on these investment profits survived the “fiscal cliff” budget…