US Securities and Exchange Commission Rules on Crowdfunding Effective

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) rules on crowdfunding became effective on May 16, 2016.  The rules are a hefty 685 pages long and are available, here.  The Investor Bulletin issued by the SEC Office of Investor Education and Advocacy provides an overview of the rules and the JOBS Act tailored to potential investors, here.  The Investor Bulletin explains that anyone can make a crowdfunding investment, but that there are limitations based on net worth and annual income on the amount that can be invested.  The Investor Bulletin explains: 

If either your annual income or your net worth is less than $100,000, then during any 12-month period, you can invest up to the greater of either $2,000 or 5% of the lesser of your annual income or net worth.
If both your annual income and your net worth are equal to or more than $100,000, then during any 12-month period, you can invest up to 10% of annual income or net worth, whichever is lesser, but not to exceed $100,000. 

Additionally, crowdfunding investments can only be made through a portal and not through other direct means.  "The broker-dealer or funding portal—a crowdfunding intermediary—must be registered with the SEC and be a member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA)."  The Rules provide numerous requirements for intermediaries to protect investors.  The Investor Bulletin also provides numerous warnings to potential investors concerning the risks associated with crowdfunding.  The Rules provide that, "An issuer is permitted to raise a maximum aggregate amount of $1 million through crowdfunding offerings in a 12-month period." 

Notably, the Rules also state that: 

Certain companies are not eligible to use the Regulation Crowdfunding exemption. Ineligible companies include non-U.S. companies, companies that already are Exchange Act reporting companies, certain investment companies, companies that are disqualified under Regulation Crowdfunding’s disqualification rules, companies that have failed to comply with the annual reporting requirements under Regulation Crowdfunding during the two years immediately preceding the filing of the offering statement, and companies that have no specific business plan or have indicated their business plan is to engage in a merger or acquisition with an unidentified company or companies.

Offering documents must disclose: 

Information about officers and directors as well as owners of 20 percent or more of the issuer; • A description of the issuer’s business and the use of proceeds from the offering; • The price to the public of the securities or the method for determining the price, the target offering amount, the deadline to reach the target offering amount, and whether the issuer will accept investments in excess of the target offering amount; • Certain related-party transactions; • A discussion of the issuer’s financial condition; and • Financial statements of the issuer that are, depending on the amount offered and sold during a 12-month period, accompanied by information from the issuer’s tax returns, reviewed by an independent public accountant, or audited by an independent auditor. An issuer relying on these rules for the first time would be permitted to provide reviewed rather than audited financial statements, unless financial statements of the issuer are available that have been audited by an independent auditor. 

Happy investing!

 

Money for (old rope) new patents

The Australian Financial Review has published an article today report on an initiative by IP firm Wrays and R&D tax advisor Swanson Reed which calls on the Australian government to provide assistance to companies of up to 50,000 Australian dollars for the preparation and filing of the patents. The authors of the proposal argue that Australian companies need support and that their proposal would be cheaper than the suggested patent box initiative.

The initiative is dismissed by Rui Rodrques who is an investment manager at a Sydney venture capitalist Tank Stream Ventures who argues that online tech industries do not need patents and that the support would only go to traditional industries.

The proposal is reminiscent of Germany's SIGNO SME patent initiative which supports small companies with their first application in both Germany and internationally. This has supported between 400 and 700 companies in the past fifteen years. The last evaluation report in 2009 reported that the learn process by which start-up companies began to understand the patent process was one of the key features of the programme. However, the "innovation market" project to encourage exploitation of IP did not fulfil its potential. The evaluators recommended that the financial support nonetheless be continued. Similar schemes exist in some other countries, such as in China. This author's experience of the scheme does suggest that the financial support helps to kick-start the patenting process as it reduces some of the financial burden on the company. It also helps start the discussion of the value of a company's intellectual assets to its business strategy and the appropriate protection with intellectual property rights (and not just patents).

The objections to the proposals mentioned in the AFR article are that such schemes do not necessarily help online companies and that the patenting process moves too slowly. It's also true that it can be hard for a small company to pursue patent infringements and that the financial penalties in Australia are low. This traditional view of patenting would seem to discourage start-up companies from filing. On the other hand, patents do provide assets which can be used to strengthen licensing programmes and also provide potential purchasers with additional leverage. A recent study carried out for the France Brevets investment fund suggested that - at least in France - patent savvy companies tended to be more successful than other start-up companies in which venture capital firms had invested.

When Successful Innovation and IP Go in a Different Direction from Increased Domestic Employment

Ever since the onset of the Great Recession, the primary concern of most governments has been to accelerate domestic growth in a way that will increase employment. For example, there is no more anticipated economic data point than the US unemployment rate, published on the first Friday of each month. For the general public, the success or failure of many governments is the extent to which they can generate jobs in a sustained and substantial way. The primacy of economic growth, and its by-product —increased employment — threaten to place public discussion about IP in an awkward position. The reason is that there may no clear connection between enhanced innovation and IP activity and improved employment data. Instead, the benefits of cutting-edge IP may well be redounding primarily to the benefit of the few who are able to capitalize on the commercial success of their innovations, with little or no benefit to the overall employment situation. To the extent that this is true, arguments in favour of public support of IP rest on uncertain policy grounds.

Take a country like Israel, which is seen as an example of the use of effective public moneys for innovative research and development. A primary vehicle for this funding is the so-called Office of the Chief Scientist (known as the OCS), which extends financial support for innovative activity by recipient companies, here. The problem is that OCS funding requires that the intangible “Knowledge” for which read IP, very broadly defined) that is generated from such funding may not be transferred out of the country until the grants have been repaid to the OCS from commercialization of the Knowledge, unless a waiver can be obtained. Underlying this prohibition is the view that OCS funding is, at the end of the day, first and foremost intended to enhance local employment, whereby the commercial success of the company, except to the extent that it contributes to local employment, is a secondary consideration. How strongly this underlying policy is viewed can be seen from the fact that, under the strict letter of the Encouragement of Industrial Research and Development Law, the transfer of Knowledge in an unauthorized fashion might theoretically attract criminal penalties (although this blogger is not aware of any instance in which the criminal sanction has actually been brought to bear).

Pushing against this clear nexus between the expenditure of public moneys, the creation of valuable IP/Knowledge, and increased domestic employment, as exemplified by OCS funding, is the exit ethos of the Israel start-up community. While it has become a bit hackneyed, the description of the country as “Start-Up Nation”, here, does capture the esteem in which is held a successful hi-tech exit (meaning that the company has been sold to a foreign purchaser or, less likely these days, has successfully floated its shares on a reputable stock exchange), replete with underlying IP and related innovative technology. However, from the point of view of government employment policy, a successful exit typically has, at best, only a modest effect on overall domestic employment. Even assuming that the company maintains an R&D facility in the country after the exit, the primary benefit of a successful exit are the millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars, that go to the investors and founders. Thus, even if the likes of a Google maintains a local R&D facility as a result of the exit, the employment benefits redound to a select few, with the overall national employment situation being largely unaffected.

Israel is brought as an example because its circumstances so vividly underscore the proposition that the development of IP tends to go to the benefit of capital (read investors and founders) rather than labour. But it is hardly alone. Singapore is engaged in an impressive and aggressive push, supported by public funding, to strengthen the position of that island nation as a Global IP hub in Asia, here. As this blogger understands the initiative, underlying it is a concern for the overall employment position in the country. The experience in Israel should be a cautionary tale for Singapore.

Don’t get this blogger wrong: he is all in favour of IP, innovation and successful commercial exits based on them. To the extent that government funds can assist these developments, it is to be encouraged. However, there is palpable and increasing risk here. In an age where public budgets are increasingly scrutinized, a budget line for the support of innovation and R&D, where the benefit fails to redound to the public in the form of increased employment, carries with it a double risk. First, the decoupling of successful innovation and R&D from improved domestic employment threatens to decrease the amount of continued public funding of such activities. Even more ominously, this decoupling may threaten public support for robust IP protection, thereby throwing out the IP baby with the public funding bathwater in a way that this blogger would prefer not to contemplate.

Berlin's Hi-Tech Future: High, Low, or Somewhere in Between?

This blogger had not really devoted much time to considering the start-up environment in Germany, beyond a general awareness that Berlin was a magnet for creative types from all over the globe. That all changed when his son recently informed him that he was taking his newly-minted double degree in computer science and psychology and joining a start-up in Berlin. It was good timing, then, that the October 5 issue of The Economist included an instructive article entitled “A Slow Climb: Business Creation in Germany”, here, with the sub-heading: “A vigorous start-up scene has yet to produce its first big breakthrough.” Both for this blogger and his son, the article discusses a number of key factors that distinguish the hi-tech start-up scene in Berlin from other creative hot-beds, an environment that is falling short, at least for the moment, from the carry-through from seeing a start-up being “founded every 20 hours” to the flotation and exit atmosphere that characterizes a start-up milieu such as Israel.

Let’s begin with a sobering fact: Germany does not appear to have spawned a world-beating hi-tech start-up since the founding of SAP in 1972 here. While German ingenuity, encapsulated by the industrial success of its family-owned Mittelstand, is well-recognized, here, this industrial model does not seem to have translated well into the digital world. This is so even as venture capital flows into Germany, in general, and Berlin, in particular (more such investments were reportedly made in Berlin than in London during the last quarter). The article discusses some of the possible reasons for this.

First, Germans appear to have a less enthusiastic view of entrepreneurs than do many of their neighbours. Fewer than 50% of those surveyed in Germany had a positive view about starting a business, compared with 65% in France, 68% in Poland and 79% in the Netherlands. This may be connected to another data point, namely, Germans have a higher level of fear of failure (42%), as compared with 32% in the US.

Secondly, the environment for financing start-ups in Germany has some serious deficiencies. Angel investors and venture capitalists, the life-blood of many start-ups at their formative stage, appear to be less robust than in the US. Thus, it is reported, while the average such investment in Germany is around $1 million dollars, the comparable figure is $6 million dollars (though this blogger is not quite sure what is the basis for these figures). Added to this is the fact that successful entrepreneurs in Germany are far less likely than their US counterparts to then become angel investors themselves.

Thirdly, it appears that German investors are more cautious. Instead of betting on a lot of companies, with the hope that a small number will succeed, German investors tend to invest in a smaller number of companies. In addition, German investors appear to have shorter time horizon for expecting the company to reach a break-even point. In part this can be explained perhaps by the nature of the typical start-up investor, which tends to be a large German company, such as Deutsche Telekom and the publisher, Axel Springer Verlag, here. While such a litany of corporate behemoths is impressive, it is hardly the kind of investment dynamic that one senses in the likes of Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California here, where a world-beating number of venture capital companies are seemingly found on every corner.

Pushing against this gloom are a number of factors that, it is argued, point to a much brighter future for German start-ups (and Berlin in particular). These include relatively low costs (from employee salaries to rents), the ever-increasing concentration of creative types, and the cutting-edge reputation of Berlin, especially for “20 (and 30)-somethings”. The German government is also committed to increasing financial support, although the relative pros and cons of government support in hi-tech endeavours continues to be debated.

The article ends with a luke-warm (as compared with the US) assessment of the likely future of the Berlin hi-tech environment, stating as follows:

“Digital Berlin is now nurturing the sorts of companies that could make pulse-quickening stockmarket debuts, if Germany had a shareholder culture vibrant enough to welcome them. As it is, many are likely to wind up in the hands of incumbents like Telekom and Springer. A few will soar on their own. Germany may not produce the next Google, but perhaps the land of Mercedes and the Mitttlestand does not need to.”

Perhaps this is too bleak an assessment. After all, how many imagined “swinging Berlin” at the outset of German reunification.
What Digital Berlin will look like a decade hence may also yield unimagined hi-tech surprises. At the least, this blogger will have an inside view of the dynamics taking place there.

A Vote for a Massive Open Online Course for Start-Ups

Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft and iversity are sponsoring a contest for the development of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).  The ten winners will receive 25,000 Euros and support in creating their course.  Basically, the purpose of the contest is to get the word out about and increase participation in MOOCs.  The time for submittal of proposals has passed and the public voting period has begun.  (after the public voting period to help assess demand, the jury chooses the winners).  The proposals include courses covering Harry Potter to Applied Biology to Network Security. 

Professor Karl Okamoto’s (Drexel University, Earle Mack School of Law) proposal is for a MOOC for advising startups.  Here is his description:

Participants in this course will obtain an understanding of the legal issues that should be addressed by a startup venture. The course is designed for two audiences – for aspiring legal practitioners and for the entrepreneurs who will consult them. It provides an overview of the applicable business, intellectual property and tax law doctrines (with an emphasis on US law), but emphasizes the various “private ordering” solutions that transcend a particular set of legal rules. The course will also consider various theories of entrepreneurial success and examine the role of lawyers and lawyering in the creation of value in light of these theories. Participants will gain familiarity with the praxis of entrepreneurial lawyering both as a means to developing concrete solutions to real world problems and as a lens on startup culture and practice. In addition to lectures by the instructor, participants in the course will undertake numerous hands-on exercises. Experts, both lawyers and entrepreneurs, will participate in the course, providing both feedback on student performances and expert discussion.

This looks like a very useful course, and I voted for it.  Any other supporters?  [If you see any other proposals that merit a vote, please note them in the comments.]

The U.S. National Science Foundation I-Corps Program: The Goal is Commercialization

The I-Corps Program is a collaboration between the U.S. National Science Foundation [NSF], Kaufmann Foundation and Deshpande Foundation designed to help bring government funded—NSF funded—inventions to market.  As fellow blogger, Neil Wilkof has discussed, the valley of death is a real problem and a search for effective solutions is ongoing.  The I-Corps Program is another attempt to solve the problem.  The I-Corps Program started out on July 28, 2011 with a plan to fund 100 projects per year at $50,000 for each project.  Basically, the program has several parts:

There are three distinct components of I-Corps: Teams, Nodes and Sites. I-Corps Teams are composed of the principal investigator(s) (PI), an entrepreneurial lead (EL), and a mentor. The I-Corps Nodes serve as hubs for education, infrastructure and research that engage academic scientists and engineers in innovation; they also deliver the I-Corps Curriculum to I-Corps Teams. The I-Corps Sites are academic institutions that catalyze the engagement of multiple, local teams in technology transition and strengthen local innovation.

Here is the I-Corps Teams’ role:  

Over a period of six months, each I-Corps team, composed of the principal investigator, a mentor, and an entrepreneurial lead, will systematically identify and address knowledge gaps to ascertain the technology disposition: What resources will be required? What are the competing technologies? What value will this innovation add? The I-Corps program will also pilot innovative merit review processes through which promising discoveries emerging from NSF-funded research projects will be identified quickly and efficiently for financial support as well as for mentorship through the national network.

A key component of the program appears to be the required curriculum for all I-Corps teams based on a Stanford “Lean Launchpad” course that is described as “The I-Corps curriculum provides real-world, hands-on, immersive learning about what it takes to successfully transfer knowledge into products and processes that benefit society.  . . . [T]he entire I-Corps Team will be engaged with industry; talking to customers, partners, and competitors; and encountering the chaos and uncertainty of creating successful innovations. Getting out of the laboratory/university is what the effort is about.”  The Lean Launchpad course was developed by Stanford faculty member Steve Blank and is available online here via Udacity. 

According to Xconomy and TechnologyTransfer Tactics, the program is being expanded to include more than the original I-Corps I-Core Sites and/or Nodes—Stanford University, Georgia Tech and the University of Michigan.  Now UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, University of Maryland, Virginia Tech, George Washington University, City University of New York, New York University and Columbia University will participate as I-Core Sites and/or Nodes.  Are there any similar programs in other countries?

 

Good News for Crowdfunding for Start-Ups? President Obama nominates Mary Jo White to head Securities and Exchange Commission.

Late last week, President Obama nominated Mary Jo White as the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  Her appointment awaits confirmation by the U.S. Senate. Hopefully, this is an indication that the new SEC rules implementing the JOBS Act will become effective soon and thus, the legal landscape concerning crowdfunding for startups in the United States will be clarified.  Apparently, part of the hold-up relating to approval of the rules has revolved around concerns with inadequate investor protection in the rules and questions concerning the identity of the new member of the SEC.   A description of the issues concerning crowdfunding is provided by startup guru Yoichiro“Yokum” Taku here.   

When Should a Start-Up Seek Patent Protection?

In carrying out due diligence, how many times have I heard this refrain from a start-up: "Oh yes, we have a couple of a patents or patent applications, but they don't really address our current activities." And so I ask--"so what about seeking patent protection for the current activities?" The answer tends to be: "We have not gotten around to it" or "it is not really within our current budget." Being told that the company can always try to sell the patent, especially if things don't go well, is beside the point. Suggesting that the patents can be licensed looks good on paper, but less so in the marketplace for technological transfer. The problem is that the patent no longer matches the start-up.

I thought about this disjunction between the patent position of a start-up and the nature of its current business activities while listening to a recent podcast about a survey conducted at Stanford University on the impact of the university and its graduates on the world of entrepreneurship here. One of the salient points made was that around 60% of start-up ventures alter their business model [Jeremy notes: Neil asked me to guess how high this figure was: in my own experience it has been very much higher, possibly because I only get to speak to start-ups after they have hit a problem] and around 80% change the definition of their target audience. Since these are aggregate figures, the correlation between the change of a business plan or a target audience and the ultimate success of the start-up will differ, depending upon the specific industry involved. However, generally speaking, these results mirror those that I have frequently heard in connection with entrepreneurial activity.

In considering these results, the question crossed my mind: what is the relationship between the likelihood that a start-up will alter its business plan and the capacity of the company to plan an effective patent strategy? A useful way to understand this interaction is in terms of David Teece's influential notion of "dynamic capabilities". Teece describes "dynamic capabilities" ("Dynamic Capabilities & Strategic Management", Oxford University Press), as follows:

"For analytical purposes, dynamic capabilities can be disaggregated into the capacity (1) to sense and shape opportunities and threats, (2) to seize opportunities, and (3) to maintain competitiveness through enhancing, combining, protecting, and when necessary, reconfiguring the business enterprises's intangible and tangible assets. Dynamic capabilities include difficult-to-replicate enterprise capabilities required to adopt to changing customer and technological opportunities. They also embrace the enterprise's capacity to shape the ecosystem it occupies, develop new products and processes, and design and implement viable business models" (p. 4).

In a more pithy form, as set out on page xi of the Preface to the paperback edition to the book, it is "the managerial capacity to engage in sensing, seizing and transforming ..."

As described by Teece, managing "dynamic capabilities" in general, and in particular, "reconfiguring the business enterprises's intangible ... assets", is a tall order for any company, no matter how established. A fortiori, given the likelihood of a substantial (and often early) pivoting of the business plan of a start-up, the challenge is dramatically increased. Here, the question is how to align any potential patent program with the likelihood that the overarching business model of the company may well shift. here seems something fundamentally at odds between the swirl of the entrepreneur's "sensing, seizing and transforming" and the (presumably) more measured process by which an invention is identified and a corresponding patent application is then drafted and filed.

Under such circumstances, should the start-up even consider engaging in any type of patent registration programme, at least until the company has a relatively firm notion of what its ultimate business is likely to be? Whatever the inventor's imagined clairvoyance about his or her ability to comprehensively embrace all the possible preferred embodiments in the patent, the likelihood of successfully doing so seem daunting. Or should the patent applications wait until it is more clear whether the start-up will need to change its business plan and, if so, in what direction? Guidance from readers who can point to empirical studies that have sought to analyze the connection between the especially dynamic nature of a start-up and the nature and timing for seeking patent protection would be most welcome.

So Which Is It for a Start-Up: A Patent or a Proto-Type?

The debate goes on: how important are patents for start-ups? At a conference in which I particpated last month in Singapore, the sense that I got from speakers ranging from Silicon Valley to Europe and Asia was that patents are less rather than more important for start-ups. Against that back-drop, I was intrigued by an article tht recently appeared in Bloomberg Business Week--"Startups' New Creed: Patent First, Prototype", by Ashlee Vance here. The thrust of the article is that, where once a start-up would give priority to first coming up with a prototype, today "they must first protect [there prototypes] with bulletproof intellectual property portfolios that can take years to build." According to the article, "this is the fallout" of the recent high-stakes patent disputes between such giants as Apple, Samsung and Google.

The article focuses on the operations of the Schox Patent Group, a patent boutique located in San Francisco. A look at the firm's website includes a brief video in which the founder, Jeffrey Schox, states that his office deals only with patent filings for start-ups ("no trademarks, no copyright, no licensing, no litigation"). From this starting point, the article recites the basic features of Schox's business model:

1. The firm charges a flat rate per patent application--$15,000, rather than charging on an hourly basis, "making him more like a partner to his client." According to the article, by contrast, the typical law firm charges for a patent are in the range of $40,000.  

2. His client base derives in material part from the contacts that he makes in teaching two classes at Stanford, attending angel investing clubs and devising ways "to identify promising companies." Indeed, he will sometimes take an equity interest in the companies that he represents.  

3. His office makes liberal recruiting use of students from the Institute of Design at Stanford because, as Schox observes, this provides a non-engineering perspective that is conducive to a more creative, "multidisplinary approach."  

4. Schox's approach to dealing with his start-up clients is to impress upon them that patents are a weapon. As such, the emphasis is on trying to conceptualize how competitors might design around a patent, leading to a consideration of coming up with "unusual extensions of the technology." (In the video promo, Schox states that a start-up to does not obtain a patent for enforcement purposes, but rather to make the company more attractive for investors.) In any event, in his view, "the going rate for a hot patent is about $1 million."

So which is it--are patents of secondary importance to start-ups, or are they now the primary currency for seeking to leverage one's hot new idea? Is the start-up paradigm more like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, tinkering in their Palo Alto garage to develop a prototype for the nascent Apple computer, or like Craig Ciesla and his company, Tactus, as featured in the article, where his techology regarding a feature of flat screens yielded 20 patent applications before any outside funding sought?

A couple of thoughts in this regard:

1. Schox's model might well be idiosyncratic to the innovation ecology of Silicon Valley. In particular, there is an unparalled aggregation of creative human capital and technological prowess, against the backdrop of the billable hourly rate system for law firms that allows for different pricing models for patent preparation and prosecution. Or maybe not?  

2. Schox's fields of focus lend themselves more to seeking to protect features via patentable inventions rather a workable prototype. Still, we wonder about the role that patents play in the valuation of a typical start-up. Anecdotally, I listen weekly to a podcast, emanating from Stanford, focusing on innovation. I have been struck, time after time, how seldom patents are brought up in the presentations and discussion (especially as compared with quality of staff).  

3. Many commentators are heard to lament that there is a relative dearth of substantial innovation at the moment. If so, perhaps there is a correlation between the focus in start-ups on patent protection rather than coming up with a prototype at the outset, and this produces the alleged lack of substantial innovation. If so, an emphais on patent protection uber alles might be either a coincident indicator,or even a cause of the decline, in innovation.

"Investor-ready" start-ups: an event today

There's a free event coming up this evening for which, IP Finance understands, there are still some spare tickets -- if you're a tech enterpreneur or service provider.  This may be of some interest to readers, either because they need the services which are show-cased here or because they already provide them and are curious to learn how others do so. Details are as follows:

Making your tech start-up "investor-ready"

Tuesday, 26 June 2012 from 18:30 to 21:00 (GMT)

London, United Kingdom

Event Details

Amoo Venture Capital Advisory presents “Amoo Booster Series”. As part of our commitment to nurturing the tech ecosystem we have set up Amoo Booster Series which is a monthly event with notable speakers from the industry, that are as passionate about startups as we are.

The aim is to deliver practical advice startups can implement right away. This is done in a friendly space with the opportunity to network with other entrepreneurs and investors; we have created a community for like-minded people to communicate, share ideas and explore ways to support each other. 

Hear from a venture capitalist, an angel, an entrepreneur, a patent attorney, a lawyer and an accountant. They will run through how you can make your start-up investment-ready.

Simon Halberstam - Lawyer and partner in the Technology team at law firm Kingsley Napley 

Mark Twum-Ampofo - Accountant and partner who specialises in the Technology sector at accountancy firm Kingston Smith

Patrick Bergel - Entrepreneur and founder of Animal Systems who has developed an amazing new technology for communicating between mobile devices using sound, and who has leveraged his intellectual property to secure funding from Imperial Innovations 

Gerard Chandrahasen - Patent Attorney and partner specialising in software patents at patent attorney firm SC Patents

Ellen van der Broek - Ellen is a director at her own company WH PH Ltd, advising private equity and corporate clients on investments, strategy and fundraising. She has worked both with venture funds as well as startups. Since October 2011 she has been working exclusively as an Advisor to DN Capital. Prior to this, she worked in the Private Equity Secondaries team of Partners Group and has also been an investment banker on private equity transactions, working in the Financial Sponsors team of ABN AMRO. She holds an MBA with distinction from INSEAD.

Sponsored by:

                       

To register, just follow this link.