Are You A Poor Unaccredited Investor?
Do you earn less than $200,000/year or have a net worth of less than $1,000,000? Congratulations! You are an unaccredited investor in the United States—how are you going to change that?
The Securities and Exchange Commission expand the definition of an Accredited Investor in 2021. Before this change, you had to be rich to get rich. It was insane! Now, you need to sit an exam or be rich. It is still nuts.
Watch this video if you want a primer:
So: Are you an unaccredited investor? Let’s look at their definitions on the Investor.gov website:
What does it mean to be an accredited investor?
Under the federal securities laws, only persons who are accredited investors may participate in certain securities offerings. One reason these offerings are limited to accredited investors is to ensure that all participating investors are financially sophisticated and able to fend for themselves or sustain the risk of loss, thus rendering unnecessary the protections that come from a registered offering.
An accredited investor, in the context of a natural person, includes anyone who:
earned income that exceeded $200,000 (or $300,000 together with a spouse or spousal equivalent) in each of the prior two years, and reasonably expects the same for the current year, OR
has a net worth over $1 million, either alone or together with a spouse or spousal equivalent (excluding the value of the person’s primary residence), OR
Calculating net worth involves adding up all your assets and subtracting all your liabilities. The resulting sum is your net worth.
The value of your primary residence is not included in your net worth calculation.
🇺🇸 America Was Built On Risk 🤠
The American Dream was built by people building businesses and backing them to the hilt
The thing that enrages me about these laws is that America is a place where you can lose everything very quickly. Let’s look at some classic examples:
🩺 You can get raked over the coals without health insurance.
👨🏼🎓 You can take out student loans which have insane interest rates.
🎰 You can go to a casino and put everything you do not have on the table.
💳 You can take out dozens of credit cards and get completely shafted for years.
💸 You can take out payday loans which make credit card companies look reasonable.
Do they make you sit an exam to do any of this? Do they check your net worth or income? NO. Funny that. It is almost as if they want to find as many ways as possible to take your money but stop you from making it.
🏛 I Broke The Law For Years 📜
In order to build my American Dream, I had to ignore this country’s laws to make it happen
Everyone in Silicon Valley breaks these laws to get rich. Here is the dirty little secret about these laws:
😣 When you are poor, no one cares if you are unaccredited.
🤑 When you are rich, you are accredited!
It is such an insane state of affairs. I feel like I am hallucinating when I tell people they are too poor to get rich. Nothing makes me more angry. I am happy to publicly admit that I used money from credit cards to invest in startups, complicated employee options agreements, and a boatload of crypto projects to win.
What is the worst that could happen to me? Bankruptcy.
🤕 What is the worst that can happen? 🏴☠️
Going bankrupt is a painful lesson that teaches you one thing: you are shit at capitalism
The best thing about America is that there is no shame in going bankrupt. You can do it multiple times in a single lifetime. It is part of the culture. It is almost expected. Everyone here goes on tilt at some point and over-commits to their dreams. It is part of the fabric of society.
What makes it really wonderful? When you win, people love it!
When you screw up, Americans always say: shit happens, get back in the ring.
The accredited investor laws were introduced in 1933 to protect grandmas from the evil stock salesman. I get it. But they should have been reformed or removed years ago!
We have the internet now. The sub-Reddit r/WallStreetBets does better analysis than any Wall Street snakes. If you want to do due diligence just get on Google, Twitter, Reddit and Telegram.
If you lose all your money, you deserve it. You are shit at capitalism and you need to learn your lesson.
👮♂️ I Tried To Comply 🚨
Crowdfunding is shit funding because it costs way too much money to do it
In 2017 I did the fastest crowdfunding campaign in American history. We raised $1.07 million in less than 3 weeks from ~2,000 investors. The vast majority of them were unaccredited. You can see the campaign here:
I am fighting tooth and nail to deliver a return to the people who trusted me with their capital. We have been partnered for almost half a decade. I am so grateful to almost all of my crowdfunders. The only ones I hate are the absolute chumps who threatened to sue me. I am looking into whether I can just cancel their investment and return them some filthy dollars.
Wefunder removed my video. Here is the transcript of my pitch:
Hi there, my name is Richard Burton and I'm one of the founders of Balance. Our goal is to make it easy for everyone to benefit from blockchains. Today Balance is a simple tool for checking your money. It was featured by Apple at launch and it brought together our founding team, which is Christian, Ben and myself. Our team have experience creating incredible products for companies like Apple and Stripe, and for protocols like Ethereum and Filecoin. We think that this experience makes Balance the best company to build incredible products for protocols. Three years ago, I spent a month working for the Ethereum foundation. As the value of Ether started to rise, we realized there's a big opportunity for Balance to help people see all of their money in one place, whether it's stored on a blockchain or in a bank. As the number of blockchains increases and the number of people and businesses that are making use of those blockchains also increases, we think that the value of the blockchain industry as a whole is going to grow enormously. As a team, we really care about making the best user interfaces possible and we want to make blockchains incredibly easy to use. We believe that if blockchain technology is going to fulfill its promise, the number of people using it every day has to increase from the millions to the billions. And we think that part of that is creating an incredible user experience. That's what Balance is working on and that's why we'd like you to back us.
Reading this pitch makes me emotional. I was right. I still am. I am not stopping. I will get everyone who backs me and supports me a return:
😘 1/3 of the funding was my family & friends
🐤 1/3 of it was people I know from Twitter
😵💫 1/3 of the people I have no idea about
I have tried to comply with America’s laws but it has cost me dearly:
🧾 Accountants’ bills for the crowdfunding we insane
🏛 $1m is not a lot of money in the wallet business
👎 Crowdfunding put Silicon Valley VCs off us
I will never forget the feeling of pitching Balance to a bunch of big-dogs in the Bay Area and seeing them all say no. They are all on my hit-list for life:
🤮 Paradigm
🤢 Sequoia
🥲 a16z
There is no limit to my loathing for these funds. Despite loving some of the people there, the ones I spoke to did not listen to a single word I said.
So I went and made my own money. Now I do not need the venture capitalists.
I am not lying: I am done complying. The best way to build influence in America is to change the law:
🚕 Uber smashed the tax medallions
🏘 Airbnb ignored local governments
🏦 Stripe refused to comply with FinCEN
🦄 Uniswap is fighting the Securities & Exchange Commission
💠 Tokens & Automated Market Makers 📈
Ethereum bends the knee to no man, no government, and no regulator. It just is.
We are about to test the meaning of the term unstoppable code. Regulators all over the world are struggling to comprehend the idea that someone can publish software that cannot be stopped. They keep trying to shut my friends’ projects down and my friends keep laughing all the way to the bank. It is hilarious.
We built our own system that does everything the regulators do:
🧮 Ethereum has asset creation, accounting & auditing baked into each block.
🏛 Bancor gave us the Automated Market Maker which allows us to list any token. Uniswap, Curve & Sushiswap copied the idea and made it even bigger. Now we have permission-less asset listing and global liquidity from day one.
💬 We replaced due diligence with Discord diligence. If you poke around any project’s Discord you can quickly figure out if the community is full of missionary sincerity or just another bunch of mercenary melts.
We did not talk to any regulators about these ideas. We just built them. We all got rich. Now we can fight the law with lawyers. It is amazing!
🗡 Want to join the fight? ⚔️
We are ignoring the laws all over the world—sound like fun?
Everyone in Ethereum has broken biblical amounts of laws. If they avoided leverage, they got rich. We are on a warpath with a huge treasure chest. We are going to win.
If you want to help us, join the Safari Wallet community:
Safari Wallet Discord ∞ Invite Link: https://discord.gg/safari-wallet
