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Comment by ericd | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with EquityZen and Forge? If you're accredited, they can make it feasible to invest in a number of private companies. Companies can make that difficult by exercising their ROFR consistently, but many don't.

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It's an option to note, I haven't used them as I'm not sure I'd have a good chance of being able to get what I want (since obviously there has to be a seller for me to buy), and the fees also seem pretty notable (5%, and/or up to 2% annual), maybe with some other potential issues of distribution/ownership (it seems it's not equivalent to owning the shares, but owning part of another entity that does own the shares). But, it may be a lot nicer than nothing for some, so thanks for reminding me of it.

The fees are actually a bit higher, 5% from the buyer and 5% from the seller. I haven’t seen a management fee with either of those, though, at least with the single issue purchases - their multi-company funds might be different.

And you do own shares in an SPV instead of owning the shares outright, but that’s a lot of what makes the lower minimums possible.

What ownership/distribution issues have you seen?

Wait can I really invest in stripe and buy shares before they go public using EquityZen? Is this correct?

AFAICT Stripe is one of those that aggressively ROFRs. I’ve been trying to invest in them for a while, but no luck.

Have you used either? What did you buy and did any of them go public - what happened then?

Yes, I’ve used both over the past few years to invest in SpaceX, NextDoor, and Cerebras. None of those have gone public, but I believe that once they do, the shares are transferred out of the SPV into a brokerage account.

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