“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here.” Such was the lament of John Ray, the legendary restructuring executive tasked with the unenviable assignment of serving as the caretaker CEO of bankrupt FTX Trading Ltd. As
What do founders, employees and investors in privately held companies all have in
common? Limited opportunity to sell their shares. That’s because of various legal, contractual and market factors that impede the sale of such securities, so liquidity is usually limited to acquisition of or public offering by the company. In recent years, there’s been
The impact of the Coronavirus and COVID-19 on venture capital investment will likely be 
similar to what we saw in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and the 2001 dot-com meltdown. VC investors will redirect their attention away from sourcing new deals and toward managing their existing portfolios, trying to determine which should survive and
The Securities and Exchange Commission filed a complaint last week against the founder of venture-backed
mobile payments startup Jumio, Inc., charging him with causing the company to prepare false and misleading financial statements that inflated the company’s earnings and gross margins and with defrauding secondary market purchasers of his shares. The founder, Daniel Mattes, agreed
Lyft, Inc. last week completed its highly anticipated initial public offering, raising over $2.3 billion at a valuation of approximately $25 billion, and turning its co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer into near billionaires on paper. But that’s not the only reason they’re smiling. Despite owning only 7% of the outstanding pre-IPO shares, Green and
It’s not often that the House of Representatives votes nearly unanimously on anything noteworthy these days, but that’s exactly what the House did on July 17 in voting 406-4 for the “JOBS and Investor Confidence Act of 2018”, also known on the 
street as “JOBS Act 3.0”, which is the latest iteration of the effort
Dual or multi-class capitalization structures generally allow companies to sell large amounts of shares to the public while maintaining control in the hands of the founders and early investors. Popularized by the Google IPO in 2004, weighted voting rights have since been featured in the high profile IPOs of LinkedIn, Groupon, Zynga, Facebook, Fitbit and
Every founder of a growth startup dreams of a big, successful exit — a sale of the company for millions of dollars. But that dream could be shattered if the investors are able to cause the company to be sold prematurely with proceeds only equal to or barely exceeding the investors’ liquidation preferences, leaving little
The just completed IPO of Snap Inc. has received enormous buzz and plenty of press coverage, mostly about its eye-popping valuation and offering proceeds, the big winners among the founders and early investors and the millennials who bought shares. But not nearly as much attention has been given to Snap’s tri-class capital structure
The cost of launching an Internet-based startup has fallen dramatically over the last 15 years. This democratization of internet-based entrepreneurship resulted primarily from two innovations: open source software and cloud computing. During the dot-com era, Internet-based startups had to build 
infrastructure by acquiring expensive servers and software licenses and hiring IT support staff. So the