David’s Research

Past Research and Overall Themes

My research focuses on the governance of entrepreneurial ventures and the financing transactions that fuel those new ventures in their earliest stages of life. My past research has largely focused on high-growth ventures seeking capital from angel investors, venture capitalists, and everyday Americans. Related past projects have expanded the scope of these financing transactions to nonprofits seeking donations and small business purchasers seeking various financing instruments to purchase an existing small business. Within each of these projects, entity structure and corporate governance processes are considered with the goal of helping entrepreneurs optimize their outcomes through legal best practices.

Current Research

Accessible Financial Data for Equity Crowdfunding Investors will soon be published in the University of Colorado Law Review (spring 2025.)  In this article, I build on my past works of Equity Crowdfunding and the Lead Investor and The Local Nature of Equity Crowdfunding to explore ways in which the SEC can better regulate equity crowdfunding to ensure that nonaccredited investors have access to reasonable investment opportunities and high-quality information on those investment opportunities.  This article builds on my previous work by contemplating which types of quantitative data are necessary to provide investors with insightful information, and further, how that technical quantitative information should be required to be presented to investors.  Additionally, this article proposes minimum standards for companies raising capital via equity crowdfunding, that must be enforced by the equity crowdfunding portals hosting these fundraising campaigns.

Also in the realm of securities law, Getting it Just Right: The Goldilocks Level of Securities Regulation is forthcoming in the Nevada Law Journal in spring 2026. This article advocates for a new approach to securities regulation in economically developed countries that seeks to tilt the balance between capital formation and investor protection in the direction that best represents the entrepreneurial goals and desires of the citizenry.  To date, the academic literature has focused on securities law reforms in the opposing directions of investor protection and capital formation for new ventures.  However, these scholarly arguments fall along partisan lines, ignoring the views of individuals and businesses being governed.  In this article, I re-focus the discussion on the citizenry’s opinions on how the regulation of entrepreneurial activity and fundraising should function.  This article advances the important new perspective that the opinions of the citizenry should be an important factor in determining the securities regulations ultimately adopted in a given jurisdiction.  This paper makes an important contribution to the academic literature because it provides a new way to balance the competing concerns of investor protection and capital formation in a way that is flexible, dynamic, and removes partisan considerations from the equation.

Additionally, Larry Trautman and I have an article titled The Growing Role of Venture Studios in Startup Finance, which is forthcoming in the Case Western Reserve Law Review in 2026. This article is the first in the law review literature to contemplate the investment transactions entered into by venture studios with startup companies.  In short, venture studios gather both capital and human resources in the pursuit of testing, validating, and launching multiple startup companies at one time.  To date, the academic literature in entrepreneurial management has explored venture studios extensively.  However, the law review literature has missed an opportunity to engage with this emerging type of investor.  In this article, we both introduce venture studios and compare their value proposition to startups to more traditional investors like angel investors, venture capitalists, and accelerator programs.  This article advances the important new perspective that venture studios present very unique investment terms to most new ventures they deal with, which makes them a great strategic partner for some startup founders, and a less ideal partner for others.

Importance of Research

The legal aspects of entrepreneurship are a relatively understudied area of the law.  My research seeks to fill many of the gaps related to core legal issues startup founders encounter with respect to corporate governance, financing transactions, and the company’s innovation efforts generally.  Since startup ventures have a major impact on economic growth in the United States, my research seeks to provide new and accessible insights to researchers, startup founders, and investors to help them optimize their behaviors for entrepreneurial success.