Framtida studier

Analysen och diskussionen i denna rapport är gjorda med underlag av det studerade fallet. Fler empiriska såväl som analytiska studier bör genomföras för att bekräfta eller utveckla de slutsatser som denna rapport når rörande delägarbaserad crowdfunding.

Det är även intressant att vidare studera vilka som i slutändan investerar i delägarba- serad crowdfunding. Detta skulle kunna leda till en ny strategi som företag kan bruka vid genomförande av delägarbaserad crowdfunding för en effektivare marknadsföring. Vidare av intresse kring finansiärer är vilken roll finansiärer som investerar får gentemot andra finansiärer såväl som mot företaget. Denna analys har ej varit möjlig i denna studie, då det empiriska materialet begränsas till förberedelserna av en kampanj och ej dess efterskede. Vidare är det av intresse att identifiera kommunikationsmönster för hur information om en crowdfunding-kampanj sprids. Här skulle exempelvis aktörer som agerar informa- tionskällor identifieras för en effektiv kommunikation men också vilka av dessa som agerar opinionsbildare och förstärker informationen. Ett start up-företag är ofta resursbegränsat och en tydlig bild över vilka källor som sprider information och var den informationen tar vägen kan därför vara av intresse. Exempel på källor som skulle kan undersökas är crowdfunding-plattformen, företagets sociala mediakanaler, företagets nära kontaktnät, utomstående informationskällor som för vidare information om en kampanj eller de finan- siärer som investerar i en kampanj.

Denna studie har även identifierat ytterligare delar av delägarbaserad crowdfunding som denna studie inte har närmat sig. En av de områden som bör studeras närmare är huruvida svensk aktiebolagslag bör anpassas för att underlätta delägarbaserad crowd- funding. Studien har identifierat rättsliga hinder som har begränsat marknadsföringen av kampanjen samt antalet ägare ett onoterat företag kan ha. Detta har i sin tur gett kompli- kationer kring möjligheten att nå ut med en kampanj till större massor samt möjligheten att ta in kapital från fler än bara personer med god ekonomisk ställning. En vidare studie i hur svensk lag skulle kunna anpassas för att minska dessa hinder skulle därför bidra mycket till utvecklingen av delägarbaserad crowdfunding som finansieringsmetod.

Vidare har studien identifierat potentiella problem som kan uppstå vid en lyckad kam- panj, men då den empiriska studien aldrig granskade efterarbetet med en lyckad kampanj har dessa frågor mer eller mindre lämnats obesvarade. Ett problem som identifierades är det efterarbete som uppstår i och med att ett företag går från ett litet antal ägare till ett betydligt större antal. Detta kan ge konsekvenser kring ägarstrukturen i ett företag och kan därmed medföra en oväntad arbetsbörda för ett tidigare icke befintligt problem. Vidare kan det diskuteras att en sådan här omstrukturering av ett företag kan ge nya förutsättningar, vilket dels kan påverka ett företags möjligheter att nå ut i nya kanaler, men också inskränka och förändra rådande företagskultur. Detta skulle i så fall motivera

en djupare förståelse kring hur ett företag bör bemöta en omställning från ett fåtal ägare till ett större antal ägare.

En annan aspekt som har yttrat sig i studien är de möjligheter och risker som kan uppstå då en kampanj används i marknadsföringssyfte. En sådan strategi kan som ti- digare nämnts bidra med möjligheter att på ett nytt sätt nå ut till potentiella kunder och finansiärer genom att ge en intresseväckande bild av företaget, och samtidigt visa på ett företags marknadspotential och hur mottagligt det är mot allmänheten. Dock kan även risker uppstå om kampanjen misslyckas eller om ett företag inte kan leva upp till de förväntningar som skapats mot företaget i kampanjen. Detta område har inte kunnat studeras i och med att kampanjen inte lanserades, och bör således studeras närmare i framtida studier.

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Appendix

Nedan presenteras intervjuer utförda under studien. Text i kursiv stil talar för Företaget. • Intervjuperson A är doktorand vid handelshögskolan i Stockholm och har kunskaper inom teori kring delägarbaserad crowdfunding. Intervjun ägde rum 27 januari 2015 via telefon.

• Intervjuperson B är VD vid ett företag som genomfört en lyckad delägarbaserad crowdfunding-kampanj och har kunskap om praktiska moment i denna finansie- ringsmetod sett från företagets perspektiv. Intervjun ägde rum 28 januari 2015 via telefon. Närvarande under intervjun var också Företagets VD.

• Intervjuperson C är medarbetare vid crowdfunding-plattformen Fundedbyme och har praktiska kunskaper om hur företaget bör agera sett från plattformens perspek- tiv. Intervjun ägde rum 5 april 2015 via telefon.

A Intervju med doktorand vid handelshögskolan i

Stockholm

What makes equity based crowdfunding unique compared to other kind of investments, such as venture capital, business angels, etc?

So the obvoius thing for that is whether you mean for investors or for entreprenuers. And I’ll speak first for entreprenuers.

If you think particularly about Sweden, but to a large extent in the rest of the world, equity investments, so talking about private equity, but also venture capital is very orga- nized and very network based. So entreprenours often can only approach organised private equity, lets call them organisations or organised venture capital organisations.

And those individuals typicly have some sort of professional background but also comply with various global regulations around being individuals of a certain net worth and also have some previous experience, either with a startup or with investment more generally.

Which means that the pool in traditional equity investing, the pool of people that you can draw on is quite small, quite organised and quite tightly linked to one another. And the suggestion, and I think there is some truth in it, has been that there are a lot of people who have money but arn’t part of these tight networks and don’t nesseserily have the professional experience or professional background to qualify as a quialified investor in the eyes of certain laws but nether the less do still have money that they would likt to

invest in an equity, either in equity in a singel company or more typicly in a portfolio of companies where they invest equity in whole lot.

So what it does for the entreprenour is it means that they have a larger number of individuals or a larger number of possible options from which they can obtain equity finansing or sell equity and that means that they have more options both in terms of possibly getting money at all, because often, selling equity is quite difficult. So just if you have more numbers the odds of recieving go up. But also if you think about equity, equity investment is often being a partnership or callobaration of some sort, they, often very competitiv startups that can really can pick and choose who they take finansing from. They can then find an investor that is more closely aligned with their objectives and maybe bring slightly different things to the table unlike more traditional investors where there is a small pool and they typically do very similar kinds of things.

So that’s from an entreprenour perspective. One additional thing, and this is perhaps something that entreprenours have to guard against, is that traditional investing, either through venture capital or private equity, it’s usually a small number of individuals who contribute a large amount each or it’s a single VC fund where the startup just has to deal with that VC or private equity fund. They don’t have to organise a whole lot of individuals, whereas with equity crowdfunding, in theory what can happen is that you can have a larger number of individuals each contributing a smaller amount. But the responsibilities of the startup to those finansiers are the same. And it’s often quite earnerous to communicate with that very large number of actual finansiers or equity share earners, and so they need to find ways to deal with that and there’s a couple of ways that that’s been dealt with but we can talk about that a bit later.

From the perspective of the investor or potential inverstor, equity finansing often has kind of been a bit of a game, if you wanna call it that, where investors don’t nessesserily know which other investors are going to invest, so there’s a kind of information assymmetry where the entrepreneur often knows a little bit more about what’s really going on, and the investor perhaps knows a little bit less. And this removes a lot of the information assymmetry because you can see, the investor can actually see who has comitted funds or an equity purchase in a startup. So that then typicly dissapears, so it can bee really good for the investor.

And the last thing, which I think is a benefit both for entreprenours, startups and investors, is that crowdfunding isn’t just a kind of finansing phenomenom, it’s also also a marketing phenomenom, which is to say that through the crowdfunding platform, and the social media background to crowdfunding, people who arn’t neccesserilly involved in the project in financial terms can get involved in other ways like tweeting about the company or like saying “Oh, I know something about this, maybe I could come and speak to you”,

that kind of thing.

So you have things like social capital coming in, but also potentially you have some sort of market validation because a startup that takes it’s project to crowdfunding can often dram up a lot of interest and you can see whereas there is a potential market for the product or service that you’re providing, and there’s some limitations to this, with equity crowdfunding, because things are not always pablicly available and you have to opt in in order to see equity crowdfunding campaigns which you don’t have to with donation- or reward-based crowdfunding. But I think that market validation are still there to some extent with equity crowdfunding.

You mentioned the potential problems with this large amount of investors. How can we tackle that problem?

There is a couple of ways of doing it, and they really will require legal devices. So the one is just for the startup to bite to the bullet and to commit time and resources to communicating to a large of investors, and I’m not sure if that nesseserily is a bad thing, because they do have some responsebility to the investors.

Another possebility, and this can be done either through the crowdfunding platform or seperately, is a seperate holding company can be set up where there is some sort of board that is appointed on the holding company who the startup then report to and that board is some kind of manegement board so they act as the shareholders and they have the kind of menegerial interest of shareholders in mind and the actual physical shareholders then own some share of that holding company which makes desicions and the shareholders themselves don’t actuallt make those decisions. They don’t actually get involved in management or organisation decisions, they just have the finansial benefit.

So those are the two possibilities, and what has happened in practice is that those kind of management companies, crowdfunding platforms have taken on that role themselves. So not here in Sweden, but in the Netherlands I can think of one platform, I have to go and check what the name of it was. But basicaly the crowdfunding platform sells shares in a fund and so that’s crowdfunding, and they manage the fund which is a portfolio of different private companies and the crowdfunding investor purchases a share in that fund. So in that way you overcome this problem of communication but then also you have some sort of diversification in doing that.

So those are really the options and then you also have your more traditional, kind of legal, what’s called tag and drag, where you sit in formed authicles, around how decisions get made. If a majority make a desicion then minority shareholders are abliged to go along with that and that just decreases the amound of effort involved in coming to a consensus in a decision in a firm or an organisation when you have a lot of shareholders.

out that big part of your company, it you know what I mean. Like, it would be preferreble not to sell out a big chunk of your company, instead you should aim for like just a few percent?

I think that that question is not really related to crowdfunding. I think that that’s a question for the company more generally about finding a balance between how much control they want to have over the company and how much they really need the money that selling equity in the company would bring to them. And perhaps, maybe maintai- ning management control is more important in crowdfunding, I haven’t really thought about that in equity crowdfunding. It might be the case because it helps organise better, certainly.

But, in practice, I’m not sure that startups really can afford to be quite that picky. I think that legal instruments might be a better bit in terms of that kind of stuff, because in practice of course startups need money and so they have to find a balance between money and control generally. And the same is true of equity crowdfunding.

What makes equity based crowdfunding unique compared to other kind of crowdfunding? Did you understand the question? It’s like: why should one go for equity instead of like reward based or donation based? I mean except the obvius parts of it.

Look, I think there is a lot of, I think the actual fact that you buy an equity share makes it very different. But also something that applies to equity crowdfunding which doesn’t apply quite as much to, for instance donation and reward based crowdfunding, is the very tight controls on publicity when it comes to unlisted shares and that really makes equity crowdfunding something quite different to donation and reward based crowdfun- ding, because if you think of donation or reward based crowdfunding, like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo or even FundedByMe’s own donation or reward based, that’s really compleatly open, whereas equity based crowdfunding has much more limitations then that in terms of publicity and consequently in terms of marketing benefits. It’s quite different.

So I think that’s something that really kind of sets it apart. But in any ways it