Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the SEC’s forty-fifth Annual Small Business Forum. Warm greetings as well to those of you who are joining us by livestream. And of course, my sincere thanks to the Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation for organizing today’s program and for its steadfast advocacy on behalf of America’s entrepreneurs. Let me also add the customary disclaimer that the views I express here are my own as Chairman and not necessarily those of the SEC as an institution or of the other Commissioners.
For four and a half decades, this gathering has grown to become one of our most anticipated events, perhaps because it is rooted in the premise that those who write the rules have an obligation to hear from those who operate under them. So, to all of the entrepreneurs here today, thank you for deepening our understanding with your experiences, and for enhancing our rulemaking with your recommendations.
Although today marks my first forum as Chairman, I attended several of them as a Commissioner in the Aughts, when we convened across the country. There is something bracing about meeting small businesses in their own communities. And as we look ahead, I would welcome the opportunity to bring this program back on the road. After all, as capital formation rarely originates in Washington, so we should look beyond city limits on how best to facilitate it.
For now, though, we have a terrific program ahead of us, organized around three panels that I think reflect real friction points in our current framework. Let me say a brief word about each.
Our first panel will focus on how we can better support early-stage entrepreneurs in accessing capital. For context, the Commission last reviewed the exempt offering framework in 2020, when it adopted rule changes intended to open those pathways to small businesses. That framework continues to function well for relatively larger offerings. Yet 84 percent of early-stage businesses struggled to secure capital last year. Access to affordable capital clearly remains a challenge for entrepreneurs. And I have instructed the Commission staff to explore solutions to these barriers that these businesses face so that our rules work as much for the established as for the aspiring.
Our second panel will then turn to the role that smaller funds play in supporting growth-stage companies. Two pieces of proposed legislation in Congress — the House’s INVEST Act and the Senate’s Empowering Main Street in America Act—include several policies that are relevant to this space. I especially look forward to hearing our panelists’ views on provisions that affect small fund managers and growth-stage companies.
This panel will also examine trends of increased concentration in the venture capital industry. For example, in the first seven months of 2025, roughly forty percent of all venture capital dollars flowed to just ten companies, while the share of deals below $5 million fell to a decade low of forty-nine percent. On the fundraising side, thirty firms accounted for approximately seventy-five percent of the total venture dollars raised in 2024.
Early‑stage investors are often the first to identify breakthrough innovation and to broaden the pipeline of emerging companies. So smaller, nimble investment firms must continue to have the opportunity to thrive across both industries and regions.
Finally, our third panel will reflect on how to Make IPOs Great Again, especially for small cap companies. One of my highest priorities with respect to the SEC’s disclosure rules is to scale the requirements with the company’s size and maturity. Balancing disclosure obligations with a company’s ability to bear the burdens of compliance is particularly important where Congress has directed the SEC to promulgate a disclosure rule whose costs may have a disproportionate impact on some companies.
For newly public companies, the SEC should consider building upon the “IPO on-ramp” that Congress established in the JOBS Act. For example, allowing companies to remain on the “on-ramp” for a minimum number of years, rather than forcing them off as soon as the first year after the initial offering, could provide companies with greater certainty and incentivize more IPOs, especially among smaller companies.
Raising capital through an IPO should not be a privilege reserved for those few “unicorns.” More and more, public investments are concentrated in a handful of companies that are generally in the same one or two industries. Our regulatory framework should provide companies in all stages of their growth and from all industries with the opportunity for an IPO, particularly one that represents a capital raising mechanism for the company, instead of a liquidity event for insiders.
As we pursue each of these priorities, let me close by once again thanking the organizers of today’s program—and each of you for participating in it. I would also be remiss not to note that today marks the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations—a fitting occasion to convene a forum dedicated to the proposition that free individuals, unencumbered by unnecessary regulation, can build and innovate in ways that no sovereign hand could prescribe.
For forty-five years, this forum has facilitated the kind of honest discussion on which positive policy outcomes depend. For forty-five years, it has reminded us that durable rules are forged not through imposition but through dialogue—and that they must be not only well-intentioned, but well-informed. So I look forward to a constructive conversation and to the work ahead of us. Thank you.