Yesterday, California Governor Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 10 (AB 10) which raises the state’s minimum wage to $9.00/hour on July 1, 2014 and then to $10.00/hour on January 1, 2016. Unless some other state raises its minimum wage in the interim, the Governor’s signing of AB 10…
Entrepreneurs often ask me questions about startup funding — how and where they go about finding all the money they need to launch their ventures. These questions always lead to a conversation about friends-and-family, angel investors, seed funding firms (or “incubators”), venture capital firms, commercial banks, the SBA,…
Today I came across this excellent blog post by Slava Akhmechet, founder of RethinkDB, that lists 57 startup lessons he’s learned over the years. If you’re an entrepreneur, or if you’re considering starting your own business, you should read his post. Here’s a few lessons learned, just to…
On August 6, 2013, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld $173,250 in penalties against an employer for failing to maintain correctly completed I-9 forms for newly hired employees. The employer, a drywall company, was notified by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (“ICE”) officials that it was conducting…
The Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) yesterday adopted new rules lifting the ban on general solicitation and/or advertising for funds for certain private offerings of securities. The SEC took this action in order to implement the federal JOBS Act, which was passed by Congress in April 2012. The…
On July 1, 2013, California Attorney General Kamala Harris issued her first-ever “Data Breach Report” detailing the 131 data breaches that were reported to her office by 103 different entities in 2012. According to the report, 2.5 million Californians had their personal information compromised by data breaches in…
In today’s New York Times, there was an interesting article entitled, “Affordable Care Act Could be Good for Entrepreneurship.” In the article, the author cited a new study from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Urban Institute, and Georgetown University’s Health Policy Institute that showed how the Affordable…
As you know from previous posts in this blog, the choice of entity is a big question for most startups. Whether to form an C Corp, S Corp, LLC, partnership, or something else is one of the earliest — and most important — decisions an entrepreneur confronts. There…
On March 11, 2013, San Jose’s Minimum Wage Ordinance went into effect. That law, which was passed by voters in the November 2012 election, requires employers to pay their employees a minimum wage of $10.00 per hour for work performed within the city limits and requires the minimum…
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently issued a new federal I-9 form. This is the form that all employers must use in order to verify a new employee’s eligibility to work in the United States. Employers can continue to use the old I-9 form only until May…