News Pick – Now anyone can invest in start-ups, if they have the stomach for it – WSJ

April 9, 2017 – “When Oculus VR sold to Facebook for $US2 billion in 2014, some asked: what if the people who backed the virtual-reality start-up two years earlier on the crowd-funding site Kickstarter had received shares instead of T-shirts or VR headsets?They might have seen $US100 turn into $US14,000, says ­Richard Swart, chief strategy officer of NextGen Crowdfunding. Until the past year or two, the Oculus approach to crowd-funding was the only one available to everyday investors who aren’t wealthy. Federal law prohibited Kickstarter and similar platforms from offering shares to backers, so start-ups doled out merchandise or other perks instead.” Read more at The Wall Street Journal