As humans we have come up with many systems of aligning interests and working towards common goals. A company brings together people who want to work on a problem together. And investors in a company are able to align their capital and future goals to the outcomes that these individuals want to achieve.
There are many barriers in starting a company, like figuring out what the product is, what the market is, what the strategy is and so on. There are also questions on how to structure it, formalize the processes, be compliant with regulations and taxes etc. And the largest barrier of course is capitalization – finding the capital needed to make things happen.
We have seen a lot of innovation in this space that today has made it easier for the companies to be able to find the capital they need through channels like seed funding, venture debt, venture capital, private equity, ipo etc. However, there has always been a barrier on who can provide this capital and at what stage. Once a company is further along and goes public, anyone can invest in them and provide them capital. But when a company is at an early stage, investments are only available to accredited investors who have the network to find investment opportunities and the resources to do the diligence on them to evaluate the risk / return profile.
Republic is a huge innovation in this space that opens up early stage investments to anyone and helps these early companies more easily find these investors. I started using it as soon as it went live and recently was also able to invest in my friend’s startup using this channel. I am very excited to see how this evolves over time and I am impressed by the democratization it brings to this space.
