At an open meeting on October 30, 2015, the Securities and Exchange Commission by a three-to-one vote adopted final rules for equity crowdfunding under Section 4(a)(6) of the Securities Act of 1933, as mandated by Title III of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act. The final rules and forms are effective 180 days after publication
In my last post, I blogged about online funding platforms. In that post, I described the typical model of indirect investing through a special purpose vehicle (“SPV”) with the platform sponsor taking a carried interest in the SPV’s profits from the portfolio company and no 
transaction fee, as a means of avoiding broker-dealer regulation.
The market for venture backed IPOs in the U.S. in the first quarter of 2015 was the weakest in two years, both in terms of number of deals and aggregate proceeds, according to pre-IPO institutional research firm Renaissance Capital, as well as a separate exit poll report by Thomson Reuters and the National Venture
The Regulation A amendments adopted by the Securities Exchange Commission on March 25 are 
being published tomorrow, April 20, in the Federal Register. That means the final rules and form amendments will officially become effective on June 19, 2015 (by rule, 60 days after such publication).
The new Regulation A, referred to widely as
The SEC yesterday issued its highly anticipated final rules amending Regulation A to allow issuers 
to raise up to $50 million in any 12 month period through public offering techniques but without registration with the SEC or state blue sky authorities. The 453 page rules release features a scaled disclosure regime to provide issuers with
Your company is invited by a local meetup group to present at demo day with other startups, and you accept. The group announces the demo day lineup of startups in an e-blast, on its website, on its Facebook page and through banner ads on a tech e-zine. On demo day, the room is packed and
SEC Chairman Mary Jo White gave her state of the Commission speech on Friday at the “SEC Speaks 2014” conference in Washington, D.C. But if you were distracted for a moment by the sight of hoodie-clad Mark Cuban live-tweeting at the conference, you may have missed this one paragraph in the speech:
“In 2014
My partner Steve Melore and I braved the latest New York snow storm to attend the Small Business Investor Alliance’s Northeast Private Equity Conference on January 22, of which Farrell Fritz was a sponsor. The SBIA is the leading professional organization for lower middle-market investment funds and the LPs that invest in them.
The
On January 2, 2014, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (“FINRA”) published its annual priorities letter for 
2014, chief among which will be IPOs, general solicitation in private offerings, crowdfunding portals and microcap fraud.
IPOs
In the area of IPOs, FINRA intends to focus on “spinning,” a practice in which an underwriter allocates “hot” IPO shares
The Securities and Exchange Commission released helpful guidance on some of the practical aspects of the new Rule 506(c) exemption for private offerings using general solicitation and advertising. The guidance comes in the form of Questions 260.05 – 260.13 in its Questions and Answers of General Applicability and include the following: