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Discussion
Jonathan Howard
@staringispolite · Growth engineer & founder
So is it essentially some legal magic where investors pay for a contract with the equity holder in exchange for money up front? (Investor gets rights to all profits in the event of a sale, but equity doesn't actually change hands until a change of control/liquidity event as usual?)
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Jack Smith
@_jacksmith · Serial Entrepreneur & Startup Adviser
@staringispolite : yes, pretty much.
I discussed it with my uncle, who works for the London stock exchange. He said how they would refer to it is that you're trading on a derivative of the stock; rather than magic ;)
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Jack Smith
@_jacksmith · Serial Entrepreneur & Startup Adviser
These guys are really awesome. Tackling a big problem (lack of options for generating liquidity in pre-IPO companies). There used to be things like SecondMarket, but that is now completely flopping (pivoting to do something in bitcoin I heard), as companies don't want random people on their cap table.
I think EquityZen has the potential to be huge in the fu… See more
Kristofer™
@kristofertm · Founder @ Lamplighter Labs
This sounds great. Guessing the company needs to OK this before employees do this, or is it not needed b/c you're not actually selling your shares?
Also, didn't hear SecondMarket was making a move to bitcoin stuff - I thought they were still doing a similar thing?
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Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
@KristoferTM - I won't pretend to know much about this but most companies have a right of first refusal (and probably other terms) to prevent employees from selling outside the company. I'm interested to learn more about this though.