Purism is seeking investment from individuals
puri.sm
puri.sm
So, no, I think I'll pass.
The final revision only started shipping in December 2020 (the first early batches in Nov 2019), but not all orders have been fulfilled yet because of supply chain issues. Shipping is supposed to resume soon though: https://puri.sm/posts/the-ball-and-supply-chain/
The other responders here are wondering if someone can get into that ballgame without all the safeguards you went through.
[1] Angellist did actually check for this, though it only required screenshots of account balances.
There's a million things with both better upside and safety.
The only benefit for this early investment is the 8% discount. It doesn't feel like a fair trade for the added risk of investing earlier.
All that said, it's nice to be able to have the outside possibility of future return for a donation that supports their mission.
My guess, though, is that they might be trying to fall under Rule 504 ... where the disclosure and verification rules are more lax. However you can't fall under Rule 504 if the offer is public ... and I think that having the offer on a publicly accessible website is a violation.
Some of the previous requirements around accreditor investor status have changed though
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/09/18/sec-expands-defin...
You would think that would be the way that it is, but is most assuredly is not.
I doubt the SEC sees it that way. The core purpose of accredited investor requirements is to protect Joe Sixpack from opening themselves up to a bunch of liability.
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
Furthermore, a lot of business models require convincing other people to support you, either through investment, or through getting a larger share of your company's budget. This filters out many incompetent businesses, but since open source is free, the filter is poorer It's like asking why the average book in a bookstore is better than the average book on Amazon Kindle--if you don't need to convince a publisher to spend their limited resources on your book, there's one less filter for bad books.
The least unreasonable for-profit open-source companies (e.g., Red Hat) use the labor of skilled developers as the unique value, i.e., anyone can run Red Hat just fine but if you want the world's most qualified people to work on your specific problems you have to pay them. But even this produces a vague incentive not to write public documentation and not to write understandable and easy-to-maintain products.
The other way to do things (e.g., Google, Facebook) is to have some business entirely unrelated to the value of your open source and open-source infrastructure things (e.g., Go and React) that make your business better if they're open-source but don't meaningfully make it easier to compete with you.
Then there are the companies that realized they didn't actually want to contribute their core product to a commons (e.g., Elastic) or companies that couldn't meaningfully monetize their open-source core product (e.g., Sun, Netscape).
[0] https://puri.sm/posts/purism-and-linux-5-13/
[2] https://puri.sm/projects/coreboot/
[3] https://www.fsf.org/news/fsf-adds-pureos-to-list-of-endorsed...
I wish I were an "accredited investor according to Rule 501 under the Securities Act of 1933", because from your links it looks like a kind of good I'd be willing to invest in.
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Zlatan-T...
Unlike System76 they aren’t even maintaining a swanky Linux distro like PopOS.
I don’t need that to buy any other stock, why would I need it here?
Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
If I check the "yeah I'm cool" box even though the SEC wouldn't think I'm cool, am I just forfeiting some sort of recourse if Purism flops and I lose my money? Or am I opening myself up to getting in serious trouble?
(Likewise, I want to invest in Aptera but I don't know anything about this. I feel like the main thing it'll accomplish is making my taxes more complicated, which at my level is a huge step in complexity and cost for a minuscule step in returns.)
Those have much stricter legal and regulatory oversights which would be financially infeasible for a smaller entity to deal with. The law is to prevent people from losing all their limited life savings in scams.
>Hell, how does it even apply to people not living in the US in the first place.
Because it's a US company governed by US laws around hosting an investment vehicle. Feel free to invest in a company in a different country if you wish to be governed by different laws.
Yeah, I understand that. It was mostly a thought experiment. Say I invest in this company, sitting in my house in Japan. What are they going to do? Extradite me to the US because I gave some US company money in an unapproved way?
These people, on the other hand, are just a bunch of people with a web page. You can solicit investments on a web page, but only from sophisticated buyers, who the law assumes should know better than to invest.
Unless you are selling cryptocurrency or a variety of non-materialized products (crowdfunding).
It seems eminently more reasonable to me to be able to invest in an existing company with an actual product.
If your point is that cryptocurrency speculation should be heavily regulated and even restricted to accredited investors, you won't get any disagreement from me!
this is the legal term for the good kind of lying
but if you want the badge that says "I'm actually an accredited investor!" there are knowledge tests you can take again instead of purely wealth or income tests
The rest I don't know. Seems like a very bad investment to make, perhaps people understand it as a form of donation/support (Purism does not look financially healthy).
But as the other commenter noted, these numbers aren't verified in any way.