I think it depends on how it's done. If there's a whole bunch of individual deals for small amounts, I don't expect a VC to want to clean up the mess. If there's one or two deals for small amounts of money and equity, I expect them to get bought out of it - what's $20 thousand on a $5 million round? But I also expect there to be organized consolidation of crowdsourced money into a single package with a single set of terms, which would make it less hairy for a VC (and the terms could be set up to help limit dilution) - in particular, I expect this is where the "Raise your crowdfunding here!" startups will go.
The buyout might be $20k, but from experience I'd bet that the legal fees to resolve that buyout even if nothing janky happens during the closing is going to be low-mid 6 figures --- just for that one issue, not counting the rest of the closing costs.
And if jankiness occurs, I'd assume that's curtains for the round.
You'd want to watch and see whether VCs and VC-friendly lawyers like WSGR and Orrick come up with standard documents for crowdfunding, but I'm with 'damoncali in thinking that selling equity on something equivalent to Kickstarter is going to be the kiss of investor death for the next several years.
To make things worse, it's a mess to try to find former employees/contractors with .5% to try to buy them out. Can you imagine trying to find the 20 guys who each put in $250 and aren't answering their email? The jank required (and +1 for appropriate use of the word "janky") to derail a professional round may be nothing more than "can't find everyone".
I would assume someone will try to come up with some standard language to wrap this type of investor together into something manageable. If they succeed, it will be a non-issue. But that is a big if. It only takes one difficult shareholder to torpedo a deal. This is all very new, so who knows what will happen. What I'm comfortable saying, though, is that nobody is going to want to deal with crowd funded startups until this is all figured out. It's just not worth it when there are clean deals out there.
No they don't. Any kind of complexity at all in M&A and major investment closings gets insane expensive no matter who's involved.
Have you ever closed a VC round? I did (with 2 cofounders) during the bubble. There was nothing remotely interesting about our paperwork. It was insanely expensive.
I said they'd find an efficient (for them) way to deal with it.
The point was made that this could derail later rounds, and my response is that methods and approaches will be developed so that is not the case, because solving problems is what these people do.
