- Neighborly sought to bring crowdsourcing to bond underwriting
- Company told employees this month that it couldn’t pay them
In early 2017, a San Francisco startup backed by billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs and actor Ashton Kutcher scored the first victory in its campaign to shake up a $400 billion-a-year business dominated by Wall Street’s biggest banks.
The firm, Neighborly Corp., underwrote a $2 million debt sale for Cambridge, Massachusetts — the home of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — by selling the securities in $1,000 lots to residents who wanted to invest in their own community. The company didn’t earn a penny in fees. But the successful experiment in the prestigious Boston suburb lent valuable publicity to Neighborly’s quixotic quest to make a technological end-run around big mutual funds, insurers and banks by peddling municipal bonds directly to the people.
So employees went to Maui to celebrate.
Bloomberg Technology
By Amanda Albright
October 16, 2019, 6:57 AM PDT