Friday!

We realize SVC is arriving comically late today. (We almost hate to send it and draw attention to this fact.) It’s been one of those days.:)

Hope you a great weekend, everyone. See you back here Monday.

Top News in the P.M.

Alphabet”s Waymo unit is seeking a preliminary injunction against Uber over self-driving car technology. TechCrunch has more here.

The SEC has denied a bid to list a bitcoin-tied exchange-traded fund, citing the risk of fraud and a lack of regulation among the world’s bitcoin markets. As CoinDesk reports, the decision caps a years-long quest by bitcoin investors Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who first sought to list the ETF in mid-2013. The value of bitcoin has fallen 18 percent on the news, says Bloomberg.

The Case for Tenured Voting

It’s hard to get too worked up about unequal voting rights, which are seen by public market investors as giving founders too much control, while viewed by founders as necessary to protect their companies from short-term shareholders. The reality is that only a minority of companies can command these terms, most famously Google, Facebook, Zynga, Groupon and now Snap. The majority of other startups have far less leverage.

Still, the controversial structure seems to be growing more common. According to Dealogic, 27 of 174 U.S. IPOs in 2015 featured a dual-class structure. In 2014, 36 IPOs used the structure out of a total of 292 U.S. IPOs.

Why it matters: Research published last year by Institutional Shareholder Services suggests that companies with unequal voting rights underperform non-controlled companies over a one-year, five-year and 10-year period. Now Snap has taken the structure to an unprecedented extreme, even writing in its IPO paperwork that, “to our knowledge, no other company has completed an initial public offering of non-voting stock on a U.S. stock exchange.”

It’s too soon to know how Snap will fare. While its shares soared 44 percent on the day of its IPO last Thursday, they’ve since fallen about 16 percent, helped along by a growing chorus of skeptical analysts. The trend has some worried, though, including SEC Commissioner Kara Stein, who publicly raised questions yesterday about the rights of investors, and who suggested the SEC “focus on how some innovations may prove detrimental to investors.”

One alternative the SEC might discuss is tenured voting, a structure that was lightly used decades ago, halted by regulators in the 1980s, and of growing interest again to a small number of Silicon Valley denizens who argue it’s a lot better than what tech companies have come up with.

It works much like you’d guess based on the word “tenure.” The longer an investor hangs on to his or her shares, the more voting control he or she amasses. The idea is to protect founders from activist investors, while also giving public market shareholders some say.

It’s immediately easy to see the appeal. Carl Bass long served as Autodesk’s CEO and had to wrestle with activist investors last year. Somewhat unsurprisingly, he told us recently that he’d “like to see tenured voting, where there’s a premium based on how long you own the shares.” It makes sense to Bass that “one person who has owned a million shares for one year has less voting power than another person who has owned a million shares for two years.”

Managing partner Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz is also a fan of the idea, saying that as “part of broader capital markets reform to better align the long-term interests of shareholders and management teams, tenure-based voting would be far more amenable as a solution than the more blunt-force application of dual stock.”

The challenge, says Steven Davidoff Solomon, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Law, is that “it takes time and you need a first mover.”

More here.

New Fundings

Datebox, a 1.5-year-old, Oklahoma City, Ok.-based e-commerce company that organizes dating ideas and products for couples, has raised $2.6 million in seed funding from Oklahoma Seed Capital Fund, SeedStep Angels and other angel investors. More here.