Ep 23: Bracket Busters
Nasir and Matt start things off by discussing PayPal's decision to stop freezing accounts for crowdfunding, as well as Starbucks licensing its mobile payment system, a company having to advance legal fees for a manager, and which NCAA tournament bracket contests are legal. They also answer questions about what to discuss at board meetings, corporate credit cards, and firing an employee for not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day. Update: No perfect brackets remained after the first week of the tournament. Full Podcast Transcript NASIR: Welcome to Legally Sound Smart Business! This is Nasir Pasha. MATT: And this is Matt Staub. NASIR: What do we have first up today? MATT: The first story we have today deals with another company we’ve discussed a couple of times and another issue we’ve discussed a couple of times. Basically, PayPal is coming on and saying they will no longer freeze accounts for crowdfunding. I’m assuming people know what crowdfunding is because we’ve talked about it on the podcast before. But someone does some crowdfunding idea, they get this example here, $700,000 all sent to their PayPal account and PayPal has been freezing these accounts because they’ve been worried about chargebacks. This is kind of a problem because, in this example, he’s saying, you know, “I need to pay my employees. I need this money and it’s all tied up.” I guess I understand PayPal’s concern in the past because just the nature of crowdfunding, people give money, they don’t get anything out of it per se – at least not at the beginning – and they might say, “Hey! Well, I don’t like this idea, I’m just going to request a refund,” essentially. This is good because it’s allowing people that are raising this money to actually use the money that they raised. NASIR: Yeah, absolutely. This reminds me of these credit limits that businesses – including ourselves, when we run credit cards or even ACH bank transfers and so forth – these guys always put limits on how much you can do per day and per week and per month, et cetera. Especially for a new business, it can be tough because, even if you have substantial growth, these companies are going to put limits on you and you’re going to be like, “Well, these guys want to pay me. It’s good for them. Why don’t they just let me exceed those limits?” The thing is PayPal gets a lot of slack and the reason is because they’re one of the biggest credit card processors in the world – second to Authorize.net and so forth. But, as far as what people use and have a good name to. They always put these limitations on because they’re worried about these chargebacks and these limitations. Crowdsourcing – I think we were going to cover it. Just last week, there was this guy that raised $300,000 or $400,000 on Kickstarter to write a book. Instead, he burned all the books or something weird. We were going to cover it, right? MATT: Yeah. Well, that was a really weird story. I didn’t understand it. He said the pressure got to him and he just couldn’t produce all the book. I guess it’s probably because people paid money to help him write this book or get it published or whatever it was and they were requesting the books and he just couldn’t. But it’s all money that they gave him for free. That’s what I don’t understand. It’s like there’s not really that much pressure because people are just giving you free. It’s essentially just donations. NASIR: Yeah, he couldn’t keep up with the shipping. You’re right. MATT: Have you ever done any of this? Have you ever contributed money? NASIR: Not online yet. I had one. I was going to do it online but then I just ended up giving on the side because I knew the person. We’ll still see what happens with that. I don’t know. I’m not surprised that this stuff happens, if not more, because these ventures are frankly always high-risk in the first place. But it is kind of strange for PayPal to get in the middle of that. But, if they are paid by credit card and so forth,