work with FINRA to get regulatory approval, to engage a new clearing firm, and to raise a $1 million investment. But the deal got delayed and we ran out of cash in November 2012. We had to lay off the brokers and FINRA said we had until February 2013 to come up with the money.
We met with another investor and signed an agreement to get $1 million, but the investor’s funds were frozen due to a real estate dispute. In July 2013, some of our early backers invested a small amount of capital to keep the lights on at SprinkleBit. In October 2013, a Canadian angel investor put SprinkleBit back on its feet.
Meanwhile, there were more complications, including problems with the new clearing firm, which required a lot more software development from our side. It took us six months to receive the documentation we needed for their system and another year before they opened their connection to us. The whole experience was Kafkaesque, as taken from the The Trial.[[itals]] But finally, exactly two years after signing our letter of intent, we got a green light to begin trading.
Investors began trading on the SprinkleBit website in November, and we are planning to launch globally in March.
X: So how’s your visa status now?
AW: Good question! I’m actually flying back to Sweden in two weeks to renew it, but this time it’s just a formality.
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Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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