Makes you appreciate the power of startups to drive innovation - without FundersClub launching half a year ago it's unlikely Angellist would have seen this as anything but a crazy idea full of legal thorns, with no pressure to innovate past their success.

Either way, fantastic to see innovators benefit all around from more access to more capital.

Naval and the angel list team were some of the people leading the fight to get the JOBS act passed in washington.

Great news! There's an amazing range of funding routes now available to startups. I'm currently considering using http://www.seedrs.com/

There doesn't seem to be much information for non-accredited people wanting to invest. Is this only open to existing investors?

Edit: found more info here http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/19/angellist-now-gives-smaller...

It's open only to accredited investors, because it is legally risky to accept investments from non-accredited strangers. It's commonly accepted practice to raise friends-and-family money from your existing network, but if one of those investors can claim their contact with you came from a solicitation to invest and not from some preexisting relationship, they can present legal risks down the line.

It's my vague understanding that the real issue here is "weird" non-accredited investors make the legal part of raising a VC round much harder.

Here's the AngelList take on why you want to avoid general solicitation and non-accredited investors https://angel.co/help/regulations#gs

It's only open to accredited investors. This is for legal reasons, I think.

You can read more here: https://angel.co/help/invest

The best part of FundersClub is a clean cap table because all the small investors are grouped together. Will this be the same? If I understand their partnership with SecondMarket, my guess would be no.

Any more data on this?

The small investors are grouped together into a fund. So the startup only sees one new entry on the cap table. The overhead is the same as adding a single large investor to the round.

More details here http://angel.co/help/invest.

Let me know if you have any more questions.

Thanks! This sounds great.

This is awesome. I expect they will open to non-accredited investors once the regulations from the JOBS act are clarified and enacted. All in all, it's great to see choices for getting funded. Though I doubt the old-line VC firms welcome potential disruption. [AH, First Round, etc. are in the new vanguard, and are definitely not old-line]

Seems like a desperate, almost pathetic, attempt to copy fundersclub down to the exact numbers.

And since when is competition a bad thing ?

Competition is a good thing, obvious copying is lame.

No, it's not. It's a source of real revenue which most startups(including mine and yours) can only dream of.

Um, speak for yourself. And how exactly is this "revenue"? It's more like taking the obligations of a lot of naive investors' money, the kind of money you should normally ask of your friends and family (read mom and dad).

There are legal exceptions for unaccredited family members. Soliciting their money does not complicate subsequent fundraising at all.