I’m not an investor.
I think that the “accredited investor” requirement is designed to protect an unsophisticated public from being taken advantage of by criminals. Without it, anyone who can tell a good story can fleece the public with good sounding lies, and take their money. Then the public can claim that they were tricked and that the government shouldn’t allow that to happen. But if you’re an accredited investor, the government can respond that you are a sophisticated investor and that you should have known better than to allow yourself to be taken advantage of, by relative amateurs. It’s like if a seasoned real estate broker allowed himself to be taken advantage of in a real estate transaction, by someone who didn’t graduate high-school and who had never owned real estate before. Shame on that broker. Robert Kiosaki has written about some extremely good investment deals that made him wealthy and that are only available to accredited investors. Esentially, there are deals out there that only the wealthy can invest in. It’s the saying that the ritch get richer in a game that you have to be ritch, just to play in the game. The poor and uneducated always lose in those games. So there are laws to protect them.
Publicly traded stocks are different. The numbers are all published and theoretically, anyone can learn how to evaluate each trade based on its merits.
After I had waited on my Librem 5 for a while and realized that it wasn’t going to be shipped any time soon, I realized that crowdsourcing is a method for companies to skirt the Securities and Exchange Commission laws that should keep companies from selling higher risk investments to unaccredited investors on a large basis. Perhaps the SEC is allowing it to occur because there are some merits to it. But it may actually be illegal in the US, just not ever prosecuted.
The way that Purism keeps everything a secret from its customer/investors, perhaps should be illegal for these reasons. I would never invest in a company that won’t show me a balance sheet and financial statement. As a customer who placed a pre-order, I was tricked by Purism. Every article that Purism publishes that doesn’t disclose the broken promises of the past and that is currently grossly late shipping is deceptive and exploitive to the public. You don’t realize that SEC rules to protect you are being ignored in the crowdsourcing process. You don’t know about information that Purism is hiding from you and that is being used to entice you to take a risk without having a reasonable amount of information about the risk. They just promote their product as though it has already been funded. It can take you a few years to realize that you were taken advantage of and that the known risk was higher than what you were led to believe it was. I suspect that Todd’s biggest challenge comes from how to spin the next story or excuse, to keep the level of risk involved hidden from everyone who might place a pre-order. This is all immoral.
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Total funds raised now $9,657,000 i.e. over $7m in the current series of notes.
Good going, Purism!
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Just a heads-up… the current campaign is presently on day 55 of 60; if you’ve been on the fence, it’s time to decide. Right now, it’s sitting at $9,753,000 vs. the $3,000,000 goal (or 325%).
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I beg pardon but is there any way to verify that the claimed amount has indeed been raised (as opposed to merely trust what is being said)?
Do you think that Purism’s management is willing to face jail time for lying to investors? The legal penalties for securities fraud are not a laughing matter, and it should be obvious to investors in a couple months whether Purism really raised the funds from the way that the company behaves.
If Purism has over $7M in new investment, I would expect to see activity such as:
- customers who ordered before March 2020 reporting that they are receiving their refunds,
- successful payment of its Kickfurther funds,
- more hires on the company’s Team page
- more commits in the source code,
- more L5’s being delivered to customers.
- announcement of new products such as a L15 v5, L11 tablet, L5 v2 or a 11th gen Core processor in the Mini or L14.
These are things that can be verified even if you don’t have access to the company’s financial information, and if none of these things happen, then it seems likely that investors will get suspicious and start demanding to know what is being done with their money.
I don’t see why Purism would lie about raising money. In all likelihood, Purism has just made it more likely that customers will file complaints with the authorities and go to small claims court to get their refunds, because they now know that the company has the funds on hand to repay them.
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Nah, not thinking anything about that. But I am curious what way of thinking I would need to adopt should I wish to invest. At the end of the day, those investors who trusted Elizabeth Holmes perhaps didn’t think she was willing to face jail time either?
" The case, U.S. v. Holmes, et al. began on August 31, 2021,[9] and is expected to last 13 weeks or longer. If convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in federal prison, plus potentially millions in restitution and fines."
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No. There isn’t any way to verify the claimed amount.
However if your concern is that the claimed amount is intentionally inaccurate then this investment is probably not for you because, in any investment, you are putting some amount of trust in the management of the company.
I don’t see why investors’ trust necessarily needs to be blind, and I don’t consider trust and verification mutually exclusive. They’re more alike to yin and yang actually. We trust that open source software does not have backdoors precisely because it can be verified. So, I find it rather unfortunate (than inevitable) that the amount cannot be verified.
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I guess my point was that you are placing much bigger trust in what management does with the funds, and you won’t be able to verify that in the simple way that you could verify the amount of funds raised, so verifying the amount of funds raised is not very important. Your access to verify what management does with the funds is basically limited to what is presented in the Annual Report, which in turn may be determined by the laws applicable to the issuing of securities and the running of a company.
I do see “trust” and “verify” as being mutually exclusive. You either have verified or you haven’t. If you have verified then there is no need to trust. If you have not verified then your choices are to trust, or not to trust (and hence to walk away, notionally).
I always took Reagan’s comment to be a subtle dig at the Russians i.e. “of course we trust you but actually we don’t trust you, so we are going to want to be able to verify”. Just sayin’ 
Were you to invest and receive an Annual Report then it is likely that this particular figure would be verifiable.
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Trust and verification are not mutually exclusive, because nobody ever has resources to verify every piece of software they are using. You typically verify only a small part and rely on the community (not only on developers if it’s FLOSS) to verify the rest.
I received the mail. And am thinking about investing. Don’t have much to invest, but I really want Purism to succeed.
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I want purism to succeed. I wish them well, but I don’t think they have been forthcoming with true forecasts of production. They have annoyed people with refund refusals even though I think the legal system would come down on them if anyone could be bothered pursuing their interests. Therefore I have some hesitation towards getting involved further than the very first “purchase” that I made years ago. I don’t think they are a bad company, but I won’t invest, and I won’t make another purchase until the first one comes through.
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In that case you probably aren’t eligible, technically speaking.
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I just meant I can’t buy a lot of shares. No shot of a hostile takeover by me I suppose.
If I had the money, I would invest in Purism, but not for economic reasons. I see problems with the company, but I also see Purism doing the work that I believe is necessary for a better future. I’ve spent 3 decades years watching the tech industry get worse and worse, and I fear for the future if there aren’t companies able to provide alternatives.
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I recently received an email from Purism regarding an investment opportunity. I have no problem with that.
But …
I am now also receiving “unsubscribe” replies. Multiple. Some of them quite narky and dickheadish.
The subscribers are either dumb or malicious - but I don’t think mailing lists should necessarily be set up like this, particularly not this particular mailing list. This particular mailing list should probably be set up so that only Purism can send to the mailing list and replies should either not go to the list or should be junked.
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I’m inclined toward lazy. Reply-all is the default reply for some mail clients and many mailing lists say to reply unsubscribe to unsubscribe (or click a link) not to send a request to a completely different email address. So assuming they can reply I see as lazy as opposes to stupid or malicious. And sure some might call lazy a form of stupid, but that in itself is lazy…
That said, I strongly agree that the primary onus should be on purism to not enable reply-all to have this result to begin with.
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