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Ignoring the midterm hysteria, we continue our obsession with SoftBank today by looking at the group’s IPO of its telecom unit. But first, some thoughts about Form Ds.
Recently, I was looking up the investment history of Patreon (Note: I was an investor in the company through my previous venture firm CRV). I did what I normally do: I went straight to the SEC’s EDGAR system and started searching for the company and its filings. And came up with nothing. Full-text search, office address searches and founder name searches — nothing was returned.
And yet, the company has publicly raised more than $100 million in venture capital according to Crunchbase, and to my knowledge, is not incorporated outside of the United States.
There should be a whole spate of filings, and yet none exist. What’s up with that?
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After some investigation, my working hypothesis is that startups are (increasingly?) not filing disclosures with the SEC as a specific strategy to avoid scrutiny.
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