Fundrise co-founder and CEO Ben Miller has released a letter commenting on final rules for retail equity crowdfunding which were revealed today by the SEC. Fundrise is a leading real estate crowdfunding platform that trailblazed non-accredited investing with their utilization of the old Regulation A.
The letter is reproduced below.
A Letter from Fundrise CEO Ben Miller on Regulation Crowdfunding
This is a tremendously important day and I applaud the Securities & Exchange Commission for the adoption of Regulation Crowdfunding.
Many doubt the significance of the regulations adopted today. These critics are wrong.
Crowdfunding will fund a new era of super-innovation. The historic initiatives about to be put in place by the SEC and Congress address a fundamental flaw in capital markets: no one funds high risk – high reward endeavors and the sort of initiatives that results in innovations like the space program, penicillin, or the Internet — what I call the “Golden Swanicorns”.
The nature of super-innovation is a barbelled risk curve, where the vast majority of investments fail and the few that succeed revolutionize humanity. Much of this high risk/reward innovation has been abandoned as deep research has been de-funded and government and big business shift to prefer incremental over revolutionary change.
The crowd is a fundamentally new mode of investment and because of it, all sorts of wacky, out-there, and thus truly revolutionary projects will receive funding they otherwise would not have. There will be plenty of failures, but the successes will be fantastic and world-altering.
I truly believe that crowdfunding will fund a cure for cancer.
