Brad Feld: The 99 Investor Problem

brad-feldBrad Feld is a venture capitalist with the Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado. He invests in software and Internet companies around the United States. The following post was shared with permission.

When the JOBS Act was finalized, one of the rule changes that had a lot of fanfare around it was the increase in the number of shareholders a private company could have. Prior to the JOBS Act, it was 500, after which point the company had to register and report to the SEC just like it was a public company (even if it hadn’t gone public.) This was a major issue for many fast growing companies that either went through strange contortions not to have 500 investors, or filed with the SEC to get no-action letters. There were plenty of nuances around this rule and I was in the middle of several situations that structured around it legally. Each time it was a lot of overhead for the company in question, none of which added anything to the system except fees to the lawyers.

Lifting the number of investors to 2000 seemed to make sense. In the situations I was involved in it would have immediately solved the specific problem. So that’s good.

But ever since we started working with AngelList on FG Angels, we’ve been wrestling with something called we’ve been referring to as the 99 Investor Problem. We structure our investment in companies via an LLC that has all the individual FG Angels syndicate members in it. This simplifies life for the company as they only end up with 1 investor – the FG Angels syndicate LCC – rather than a bunch of individual investors. At this point we have 217 backers in our syndicate, so with us each company would end up having 218 separate investors if we didn’t use the LLC.

angellist-logo2If everyone was on the cap table, the company would have to chase down 218 signatures for everything. Instead, using our approach, they have effectively two investors – our FG Angels syndicate (one investor) and Foundry Group (another investor). Two signatures. Much easier. We handle the Foundry Group signature. AngelList handles the syndicate signature.

Except it doesn’t work that way. The SEC limits an LLC to having 99 investors. So we can only have 99 of the 217 syndicate members participate. Now, there’s a nuance that excludes “qualified purchasers” (QPs) – individuals with $5M in assets and firms with $25M in assets – from the 99 investor count. Overall our QPs + the top 99 investors in our syndicate represent $321,000 based on committed amounts to FG Angels. If you include the balance of the 237 members, we end up at a syndicate of $439,000. The company then gets our commitment of $50,000 on top of that.

As a result of this 99 investor limitation, we have two disappointing problems. First, we have over 100 investors who would like to invest in our syndicate with us who get excluded because of the 99 investor rule. Next, there is $118,000 per investment that we’d like to include in each syndicate that the companies we are investing in won’t get. Bad for the companies and bad for the investor.

We’ve spent lots of time over the past 60 days trying to solve the 99 investor problem. At this point, we’ve run into a dead end. We’ve tried multiple LLCs – that doesn’t work as they end up getting viewed as a single entity. We’ve tried other structures – that doesn’t work. We’re certainly open to ideas at this point.

In the mean time, until we solve this, AngelList is making the following changes to their Syndicates product.

– Qualified Purchasers: AngelList will include all Qualified Purchasers (individuals with $5M in assets and firms with $25M in assets) in each syndicated deal as they are exempt from the SEC’s 99-investor limit. We will soon email your backers to determine if they are Qualified Purchasers (QPs) and we will update your syndicate management interface to indicate the QPs.
– Top 99 Backers: The next time you syndicate a deal, we will include all QPs and the top 99 non-QPs by commitment amount. You can override this default to include specific backers who are not in the top 99. The top 99 backers will change dynamically as backers adjust their backing amounts.
– Funds: We are working on new funds products to allow additional investors who are not in your top 99 backers or QPs to participate in your syndicated deals.
– Notifying Backers: Finally, we will notify your backers of the SEC’s 99-investor restriction this week and give them the opportunity to change their backing amounts.

We are bummed about this because part of our goal is to build a very large angel network as a result of the FG Angels activity. The 99 investor rule directly undermines this, and limits the amount of investment and support for the companies we are investing in. It’s another example of the challenges of the JOBS Act and another discovery on our part of the “miss” between the goal of the new law and the implementation.


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