UPDATED 15:28 EDT / OCTOBER 23 2012

Disruptive Funding Ideals Need Not Fear the SEC

Wall Street is getting excited over two relatively new trends that are just starting to make a real impact in their respective segments. One of them is FundersClub, which recently raised $6 million in funding for a platform that allows the Average Joe to buy into tomorrow’s Facebook or Twitter.

SiliconAngle founder Jon Furrier went in depth about this latest update, looking at the big picture during a recent NewsDesk interview.  FundersClub offers early stage startups a venue for growth, giving fund raising a whole new dimension that stretches behind the elite VC community.

On the flip side, FundersClub managed to bring some of the biggest Silicon Valley venture capitalists on board with its fresh ideas.  Andreessen Horowitz, Y-Combinator and Intel’s VC arm are among the many high profile investors that participated in the company’s recently announced seed round.

Furrier stresses that while the company is not the first of its kind, it does differentiate itself from the likes of Kickstarter in a number of ways.  To begin with, not every startup makes it to the homepage: while anyone may submit their ideas to Kickstarter, FundersClub filters candidates and picks out the best ones.

This arrangement raised concerns that there may be a potential here for abuse and misinformation. There is even a chance that the SEC may declare FundersClub’s operation illegal, but Furrier says that the startup would be able to stand up for itself in a court of law should that be the case.

FundersClub is disrupting the way fund raising works, and as with any bleeding edge advancement, there is a lot of risk involved.

In the rest of the interview Furrier discusses the recent acquisition of Ancestry.com. The family history database site was recently sold to European private equity firm  Permira Fund for $1.6 billion, a price tag that he believes to be fully justified. Ancestry.com has over two million subscribers to date, and could be integrated with other assets to create an even more lucrative product for an international audience.

See Furrier’s entire segment below:


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