reply guys

I posted about this years before the IPO but Coinbase has never been our ally in as much as they never let us early crypto folk, who built their platform for them effectively, invest 

Instead they let professional basketball players in

It's pretty much illegal to allow retail to to invest meaningful amounts in private companies. 

I was in charge of this fundraising round (Series D, the one that Kevin participated in). We looked into a bunch of options but there are were too many complications.

Special purpose vehicles? Accredited investors?

SPVs are pretty extractive in most cases, especially at later stages.

Accredited investors is a thing, but Rule 12g has a bunch of reporting requirements if you have too many shareholders. So companies that aren't public are disincentivized to have a wider shareholder base.

Yeah that’s kind of what I mean though

If CB really wanted to let in these kinds of people they could have, but didn’t feel like it was worth it to them

So you get to invest $250 in a company at an $8B private valuation. 

Best case (<10% of outcomes) it's a 10x.

Most cases is it's 1.5-2x.

Years of illiquidity. No investor updates. Money seems trapped / gone.

A risk many would have been willing to take but instead companies decide for us

It would be performative to try to boost sentiment and Coinbase would get roasted for it. You and I would be part of the roasting. Why would Coinbase do all of this just to let people invest pennies? Obviously they’re just trying to manipulate their stock price we’d say. And the evil version of the SEC would agree.

I’d gladly have invested “Pennies” in 2013 or whenever Coinbase first came out and I became a user

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I feel ya but the fight is with the sec and really with congress. No company could fight on our behalf at any other time than now. Let’s not lose sight of who wins under the current laws. Coinbase is about as powerful as a retail investor when you consider who is on the other side (traditional banks and lobbying influence)

It’s like we forgot what the climate was like before the last election. @pmarca talks about it on one of his podcast tours. The invisible hammer of the SEC defending the banking cartel and debanking without warning. This was very real. The only reason Coinbase is alive is because it went 10x over compensating on the regulatory side. Even then they were getting sued at the end.

Brian Armstrong went all in on Bitcoin before you or I knew what crypto was. He’s an og. As soon as the regime changed we can see the stance change and he’s striking while he can. 

This is all hard enough without attacking our own allies just because we don’t completely agree with the methods.

I agree with you that a major issue is the SEC but at the same time there are ways to do this but companies refuse and simply hide behind the SEC

I would bet good money many companies are very happy to be able to blame the SEC, because many of these companies don’t want regular people owning parts of their company