With all due respect, I think that's a dangerously optimistic assumption. If anything, the tech bubble of the '90s showed us that most people clearly do not understand the risks involved. (And that was with publicly disclosed companies!). Even some ostensibly very sophisticated people, like Wall Street traders and bankers, were unable to parse the tech landscape back then -- to say nothing of the legions of retail investors who jumped into the fray.
I think there needs to be a give and take here. If we're going to allow retail investment in private companies, then private companies who open their shares to secondary retail markets should have to have some sort of public disclosure of financials, performance, and trading volume[1]. You really can't have one without the other, or else you're inviting speculative bubbles and other such clusterfucks. I can almost guarantee you that 9 out of every 10 retail investors in America would blindly -- blindly -- leap into startup speculating. The results wouldn't be pretty.
[1]Thereby blurring the line between public and private, but that's a whole different can of worms.
Edit: It seems I missed your "can of worms" comment. I guess I just really don't like the fact that the US govt has and is continuing to treat its citizens like they're mentally incapacitated. Now a lot of us do behave that way, but I don't think it's the government's place to try to change that behavior. The market will do that when they lose their money. If they don't learn their lesson, that's their own problem.
True, but I'm actually less worried about the danger to individual retail investors, and more worried about the externalities to the system imposed by a mass influx of speculative crowdfunding -- externalities that can easily wipe out the retail investors, even if their losses aren't concentrated too heavily in any one company.
"The current law basically says that anyone without $1 million and $200k in the bank is too stupid to invest in a startup but someone with that money is smart enough to."
There are two ways to look at the meaning of the current law. The first is that yes, the law views net worth as a proxy for sophistication, and therefore those without high net worth are deemed "too stupid" to invest in private companies. The second interpretation is that those with net worth in excess of $1 million (or whichever benchmark we choose) are capable of absorbing speculative losses, while others are not.
I agree with you that crowd-pooling gets around this issue, and it's interesting in that respect. But I still think it opens the door to too many unintended consequences.
2011- 1,100 seeded startups. 2004- Year Facebook formed. 2012-Facebook's valuation: est. $100 billion.
If you say that 1,100 companies are seeded a year (which is not true, only 885 in 2009, 850 in 2008) and multiply that by 8 years (2004-2012), you get 8,800 startups to invest in. So EVEN IF 8,799 of those companies failed, if you invested in every single one you'ld have a 250% return in 8 years during a down market. That's amazing.
But those 8,799 didn't fail. If 1% succeeded you'ld have 88 companies still left in your portfolio IN ADDITION to your Facebook stock.
This is why we need crowdfunding so badly. Without it, wealth is pumped to people who have so much wealth that they can't spend it all. With crowdfunding, capitalism works to spread that money around to people who can spend all of it. We're talking an explosion of wealth in this country and it wasn't from some stupid government debt plan.