Popular Equity

What are the key pieces that make the equity market?

To go from an initial idea to a venture backed by trading equity, most companies go through venture funding stages, and if successful, to an IPO and open trading. The dynamics of venture capital funding rounds are different than the dynamics in open trading. These early rounds provide capital to the venture, and make sure that investors providing capital have reasonable ownership. Valuations and dilution choices in these stages are negotiated with each deal, and are not set by an open market. It takes a lot of effort from everyone, to align all parties, with any specific deal.

Popular Equity does something similar in that it provides an end-to-end path to raise seed capital, and eventually move to open trading. The main difference is that all the terms of the seed capital investment are already defined. There's no need to renegotiate valuations and dilutions at each VC round. In fact there's no need to schedule multiple VC rounds: the door to investment is simply open. That door even stays open after open market trading starts, so there's always a path to inject more capital into a venture, even when investors aren't selling. And again the terms of those subsequent investments are already decided. Do you want to invest? If so, add more money here, and this is what you'll get.

The simplification means that many ventures, who might not want to spend time negotiating VC funding don't have to. List your venture on Popular Equity, and advertise the opportunity to invest to potential investors. Most ventures who are considering listing their own equity are already attracting donations or investor interest. For investors it means that there's no pressure, and no requirement to be connected to a specific VC firm. If people want to invest, they can, whenever they want, and everyone gets a fair share when they do.