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

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:

  • Exemption is available to