SEC Announces Speakers for June 18 Small Business Forum: "Access to Capital: More Critical Now than Ever"

Washington, D.C.--(Newsfile Corp. - June 16, 2020) - The Securities and Exchange Commission today released the program with agenda and speakers for the June 18, 2020, virtual Small Business Forum.  The event will begin at 12 p.m. ET and, as always, will be free and open to the public.  The full program, with the complete agenda and bios of speakers, is available on the Forum webpage.

“Access to capital is more critical now than ever for small businesses across the country, from startups to small cap public companies,” said Martha Miller, the SEC’s Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation.  “The Forum is an opportunity to highlight success stories from businesses and their investors, as well as to address challenges faced in the current environment.”

The event will begin with spotlight sessions featuring thought leaders from across the capital formation marketplace:

• Empowering Women Entrepreneurs – Insights from investors who support women-founded companies
• Rural and Thriving – Overcoming the unique challenges of building companies in rural communities
• Stories from Founders of Color – Building minority-owned companies and raising capital
• Building Tomorrow’s Public Companies – Exploring the pathway to IPO and the future of public offerings
• Small Cap Today – How smaller public companies handle challenges in today’s market climate

These 20 minute spotlight discussions will be interspersed with keynote addresses from SBA Administrator Jovita Carranza, Pete Flint (Managing Partner, NFX and founder of Trulia and lastminute.com), Arlan Hamilton (Founder and Managing Partner, Backstage Capital), and Susan Tynan (Founder and CEO, Framebridge).  The spotlight discussions and keynote addresses will be webcast live at SEC.gov.

Following the spotlights and keynotes, participants will engage in collaborative policy sessions to craft suggestions to improve securities policy impacting how companies raise capital from investors.  The first collaborative session will discuss policy recommendations to improve the framework by which companies raise capital from investors in the exempt, or private, markets.  The second session will focus on policy recommendations to address challenges faced by companies seeking to go public or that are smaller public companies.  The collaborative policy discussions will be open to the public and accessible by video conference to anyone who pre-registers online by June 17, 2020.

Visit the Small Business Forum webpage for more information about the event, including a highlight video that showcases how the public input received at the Forum positively impacts the rules that the Commission is responsible for creating and updating.