Technology investments timeline: where dates come from, filing lags, and an announcement-dated Kutcher example

An investment in a private company generates almost no public dates. A few filings appear, most of them late, and the events that matter to the people involved leave no trace at all. Building a timeline in this category is an exercise in knowing which dates exist and refusing to invent the rest.

This page lists the dated events that a technology venture actually produces, in the order they normally occur, with the lag attached to each and the record that holds the date, then applies the method to one celebrity investor's public record, Ashton Kutcher's.

What to take away

The events, and whether they leave a date

Two of those rows are worth expanding, because they are the only ones that reliably date something real rather than something said. The exempt-offering row has a named form and a fixed lag of its own: a Form D notice is filed by companies that sold securities without registration under Rule 504 or 506 of Regulation D, and a company must file it within 15 days after the first sale of securities in the offering. The trademark register in the table is the United States Patent and Trademark Office's, and the patent record is the same office's.

Where to search for each date

The state register is the spine

Incorporation is the first genuinely public date in a venture's life, and it is precise. Later filings, particularly charter amendments authorizing new classes of shares (the technology investments valuation page covers how classes affect value), are the closest a private company comes to announcing that it raised money, and they are searchable in the same place.

The specifics of each filing belong to the state's own office. The group map from public filings page shows how far such records go.

What the register will not tell you is who bought the shares, at what price, or on what terms. It shows that a company gave itself the power to issue a class of stock. Everything about who took it up is private.

Patent publication is the long clock

A patent application is confidential when filed. It is published after a period fixed by statute, and the provision on the confidential status of applications, 35 U.S.C. § 122, is where that rule sits along with its exceptions: each application is published promptly after the expiration of a period of 18 months from the earliest filing date for which a benefit is sought, earlier at the applicant's request, and not at all if the applicant certifies at filing that the invention will not be the subject of a foreign application that requires publication.

This produces the most useful date in the whole sector and the most commonly misread one. When an application is published, what becomes visible is work done well before the filing date, by a team that may since have been dispersed or acquired. The publication date is evidence of nothing about the present.

The USPTO's patent record labels each document type. That matters because an application and a granted patent are not the same claim about anything.

The order things actually happen in

Read against that sequence, an announcement dated in step six tells you nothing about steps one to five. The restaurant ventures timeline page shows the same divergence between the public and the actual sequence in another category.

A dated index: Ashton Kutcher's technology investing

Ashton Kutcher, the actor and investor, has one of the more visible celebrity records in technology investment. Built only from dated public statements and press reports, his index looks like this. These entries rest on secondary reporting and the investor's own announcements. No primary filing has been checked for any of them, so each is an "announced or reported on" date and not a closing date:

Read against the sequence above, every entry is a step-six date: an announcement, a report or a founding statement. None of them is the closing date of a round, the date shares were issued, or the date a stake was sold. The Airbnb line has no date at all, and it stays undated rather than being given a guessed year. To move any entry from "announced" to "filed", the next sources are the portfolio companies' Form D notices on EDGAR and the state registers of the states where the funds' own entities were formed. For the 2015 launch, the fund manager's Form ADV on the SEC's adviser search, if one exists, would give a registration date.

Building one that holds up

That discipline is the same one the portfolio case studies page sets out for evidence generally, and it applies with extra force here because so little of this sector is on any record at all. What is on record about the vehicles doing the investing is covered on the technology investments portfolio page, and the reader's checklist before wiring money puts these dates to practical use.

Common questions

Can I date a funding round precisely from public records?

Rarely. A charter amendment or an offering notice gives you an outer bound. The closing date itself is usually private.

Does a published patent application mean a company owns the technology?

No. It means an application was filed and reached publication. Grant is a separate step with a separate date, and ownership can have been assigned in between.

Why do so many entities appear to be formed after the product existed?

Because work commonly starts before anyone incorporates. A formation date is the date of a legal step, not the start of the venture.

What is the single most common timeline error?

Treating the date of coverage as the date of the event. Coverage is published when somebody decided it should be.