We ranked America's top 30 startup-crowdfunding ecosystems. Los Angeles came out #1 — ahead of San Francisco and New York.

Each metro is scored 1–10 across five factors: momentum, capital, expertise, network, and scale. The headline isn't just the order — it's that no single city wins on everything. LA leads on capital, San Diego on scale, Cleveland (yes, Cleveland) on the experience of its founders.

And the map is wide: the top 30 span 20 states, holding 73% of all funded activity.

Where does your city rank?

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#Startups #EconomicDevelopment #Entrepreneurship #RegCF #Innovation

The cost of crowdfunded debt doubled — and it tracked the Fed almost perfectly.

We mapped the actual terms behind every funded Reg CF deal. The median interest rate on crowdfunded debt and convertibles rose from 5.5% in 2016 to 11.5% in 2024 — moving in lockstep with the rate-hike cycle.

At the same time, Reg CF quietly became a small-business debt market: loans went from under 8% of deals to more than 1 in 5.

Crowdfunding isn't just equity anymore. It's a financing menu — and it has a price.

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Only about half of the companies that crowdfund ever file an annual report. We tracked every Reg CF company with a reporting obligation since 2016. Of those whose first report has come due, just 50% have ever filed one — and most who do file only once, then go quiet.

For the half we can still see, the story is good: aggregate revenue grew 1.8x since the raise, and those companies disclose more than 28,000 direct employees — roughly 224,000 jobs supported once you count the indirect jobs each one sustains (Paychex 8x).

But the reporting gap is real — and it's a question every policymaker studying small-business capital should be asking.

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John Oliver’s main story a few weeks back focused on prediction markets, the fast-growing platforms that allow people to wager on the outcomes of future events.

The segment was funny because John Oliver is funny. The underlying story wasn’t.

Here’s the entire segment about prediction markets from his show. (As a note of caution to those unfamiliar with John Oliver, his humor is R-rated.)

Prediction markets increasingly allow people to bet on almost anything: elections, sports, political speeches, celebrity trials, weather, economic indicators and even war. Oliver’s central concern wasn’t simply that people are gambling. It was that these platforms are training people to see the world—politics, tragedy, public policy, human suffering—as a stream of monetizable events. You can profit from someone else’s tragedy—or lose money betting on it.

Furthermore, styling these gambling platforms as markets gives them the appearance of being investment opportunities. To anyone arguing that they a...more

The New York Times recently published a piece titled “Want to Invest in SpaceX? Here’s What to Know Ahead of Its I.P.O.”  In a section asking how much investors could make from the IPO, the article pointed to Tesla’s 2010 IPO and noted that a $1,000 investment in Tesla back then would be worth roughly $400,000 today.

That is not neutral context. That is jackpot framing.

Maybe the sentence is technically accurate. Maybe it is even relevant in the narrowest possible sense: Elon Musk led Tesla, Tesla went public, Tesla’s stock soared, and now another Musk company may go public. But journalism is not supposed to be a machine for laundering emotionally loaded anecdotes into investor excitement.

The message to readers is obvious: you missed Tesla, do not miss SpaceX.

That is FOMO with punctuation.

The deeper problem is the logical sleight of hand. Tesla’s past stock performance does not tell investors whether SpaceX is attractively priced. It does not tell them whether the IPO valuation...more

WASHINGTON, D.C. – May 27, 2026

The Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA) announced that its public comment letter to the U.S. Department of Labor is now available on Regulations.gov, responding to the Department’s proposed rule, “Fiduciary Duties in Selecting Designated Investment Alternatives” (RIN 1210-AC38).

The proposed rule would clarify how ERISA’s duty of prudence applies when plan fiduciaries select designated investment alternatives for participant-directed retirement plans, including asset allocation funds that may include alternative assets.

CfPA commended the Department for advancing a process-based, asset-neutral framework that preserves fiduciary discretion while recognizing the evolving role of private-market investment opportunities. At the same time, CfPA urged the Department to make the proposed safe harbor more practical by adding objective criteria and documentation thresholds that fiduciaries can apply consistently.

“Expanding access to private markets shou...more