Sand Hill Exchange, a Silicon Valley startup, was recently closed for running afoul of securities regulations. You can read the company’s version of what happened here.
We love entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial spirit, but when you’re moving at the speed of light it’s easy to forget that the regulators, while moving much, much, much more slowly, also have a job to do, and eventually they will catch up to you. The regulators remind us of the existential horror thing in the recent movie, It Follows. No matter how fast or how far you run, it just keeps walking slowly toward you, and it never stops.
Regulators may seem like they are there just to say no, but that’s really not the case. They have a job they have signed on to do, and that job gets them pushed and pulled in many different political directions. Still, there is an enormous chasm between what the regulators do, and what entrepreneurs want to do, and that’s just the devil’s bargain we must live with, and work towards improving every day.
So if you want to be a serial creator of the next Dynamic Tesselation-Gesture-Tech Nixie, with a Sensoration Zigmee that sends Quantum Pulse waves out to control the Internet of Things, and you need funding, please keep reading our Terror Tales, and check with your lawyers first.