Darian M. Ibrahim

Debt as Venture Capital

Venture debt, or loans to rapid-growth start-ups, is a puzzle. How are start-ups with no track records, positive cash flows, tangible collateral, or personal guarantees from entrepreneurs able to attract billions of dollars in loans each year? And why do start-ups take on debt rather than rely exclusively on equity investments from angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs), as well-known capital structure theories from corporate finance would seem to predict in this context? Using hand-collected interview data and theoretical contributions from finance, economics, and law, this Article solves the puzzle of venture debt by revealing that a start-up’s VC backing and intellectual property substitute for traditional loan repayment criteria and make venture debt attractive to a specialized set of lenders. On the firm side, venture debt helps entrepreneurs, angels, and VCs avoid dilution, improves VC internal rate of return, assists VCs in monitoring entrepreneurs, and follows from capital structure theories after the first round of VC funding.

Equity Crowdfunding: A Market for Lemons?

Angel investors and venture capitalists (VCs) have funded Google, Facebook, and virtually every technological success of the last thirty years. These investors operate in tight geographic networks which mitigates uncertainty, information asymmetry, and agency costs both pre- and post-investment. It follows, then, that a major concern with equity crowdfunding is that the very thing touted about it – the democratization of investing through the Internet – also eliminates the tight knit geographic communities that have made angels and VCs successful. Despite this foundational concern, entrepreneurial finance’s move to cyberspace is inevitable. This Article examines online investing both descriptively and normatively by tackling Titles II and III of the JOBS Act of 2012 in turn. Title II allows startups to generally solicit accredited investors for the first time; Title III will allow for full-blown equity crowdfunding to unaccredited investors when implemented. I first show that Title II is proving successful because it more closely resembles traditional angel investing than some new paradigm of entrepreneurial finance. Title II platforms are simply taking advantage of the Internet to reduce the transaction costs of traditional angel operations and add passive angels to their networks at a low cost.Title III, on the other hand, will represent a true equity crowdfunding situation and thus a paradigm shift in entrepreneurial finance. Despite initial concerns that only low-quality startups and investors will use Title III, I argue that there are good reasons why Title III could attract high-quality participants as well. The key question will be whether high-quality startups can signal themselves as such to avoid the classic “lemons” problem. I contend that harnessing the wisdom of crowds and redefining Title III”s “funding portals” to serve as reputational intermediaries are two ways to avoid the lemons problem.

Delaware Law as Lingua Franca: Theory and Evidence

Why does Delaware dominate the market for corporate charters? Analyzing the incorporation and reincorporation decisions of 1,850 VC-backed startups, we show that firms often choose Delaware corporate law because it is the only law “spoken” by both instate and out-of-state investors. Indeed, this “lingua-franca” effect is just as important as other factors that have been found to influence domicile decisions, such as corporate-law flexibility and the quality of a state’s judiciary. Our study provides further evidence that Delaware’s dominance is not necessarily due to the intrinsic quality of its corporate law. JEL Classifications: K22, G24, G34

Should Angel-Backed Start-Ups Reject Venture Capital?

The conventional wisdom is that entrepreneurs seek financing for their high-growth, high-risk start-up companies in a particular order. They begin with friends, family, and bootstrapping. Next they turn to angel investors, or accredited investors (and usually ex-entrepreneurs) who invest their own money in multiple, early-stage start-ups. Finally, after angel funds run dry, entrepreneurs seek funding from venture capitalists, whose big dollars and deep connections lead the start-up to an initial public offering or sale to a larger company in the same industry. That conventional wisdom may have been the model for start-up success in the past, but this Essay challenges it for the future. In particular, this Essay argues that some start-ups that attract angel funding should stop there, rejecting proffers of venture capital. It challenges the notion that venture capital is a necessary condition for start-up success, and argues the counterintuitive proposition that venture capital may actually be harmful to entrepreneurs and angel investors in some situations.