The 5 Biggest Business Moments of 2021

Covid-19 hasn't stopped disrupting business in 2021, but for many small business owners, this was the year the company made a big recovery from the pandemic. For the first time since March 2020, large volumes of business activity came online again, which led to extensive sales growth and increased merger and acquisition activities.

Here are five key business moments that stood out in 2021.

Change in crowdfunding regulation.

"Before," we will tell future small business owners, "a founder could only raise $ 1.07 million in crowdfunding in a single year." A long-awaited change to the SEC's regulatory crowdfunding rules almost quintupled to $ 5 million in March. Solid seed stage rounds can now be raised without any VC funds and large angel investors. We can already see some companies moving above the old cap on crowdfunding sites like Republic, where Sugarfina raised more than $ 2.5 million from more than 1,400 investors in its current campaign.

SPACs have it all.

A potentially simpler, but often more expensive way of offering shares to the public through a kind of reverse merger has been around for a very long time for companies that have been taking this route to investor exit. Its biggest names included genetic testing company 23andMe, which went public in June via a SPAC sponsored by billionaire Richard Branson's Virgin Group. Other big names that have taken the SPAC route in the past few months include WeWork and Buzzfeed.

NFTs are increasing in value.

NFTs were more theory than virtual reality until 2021, but an explosion in the market value of many crypto assets resulted in non-fungible tokens being blown up. Much of the value created so far is tied to receipts claiming ownership of digital images, and critics have dubbed it the newest tulip mania as the so-called "right-click brigade" keep pointing out that they are easy to download and "own" "the digital image in all but blockchain detection. That skepticism didn't stop artist Beeple from seeing his work raise $ 69 million at auction at Christie's.

The Reddit crowd is fighting back in the public markets.

It started with Gamestop, then came AMC, Nokia and a lot more. Reddit group WallStreetBets targeted short sellers and sparked an industry discussion about "meme stocks" to transform markets. Many market watchers were surprised that a group of retail investors of such size and uniformity could come together to change the way companies performed across billions of dollars in market capitalization. Industry insiders now have something else to worry about if they choose to hold a significant position that is throwing the Reddit crowd in the wrong direction. And their moves have proven surprisingly sustainable: GameStop stock is well below its high, but is still trading at more than ten times its price a year ago.

Facebook / Meta goes under the microscope.

Amid book-length investigations into its practices, hundreds of pages of leaked internal documents, and testimony from former employees before Congress, Meta (nee Facebook) shows that even for the world's seventh largest company by market cap, practices since inception can put the company at risk. Meta has thwarted ethical overseers by ditching facial recognition technology, but the pressure is only growing.

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