The chief legal officer of freelancing website Upwork Global Inc. has been appointed to a new Securities and Exchange Commission committee focused on policy and regulations for small public companies.

Brian Levey will be one of 15 inaugural SEC small business capital formation advisory committee members, Upwork announced Tuesday, the only one from a California company. The committee holds its first meeting May 6. He said in an interview that he'll bring his experiences with freelancers and small businesses at Upwork and previously eBay Inc. to the discussion on what regulations and policies are blocking small businesses from raising capital.

“I believe this Committee can further efforts to enhance marketplace efficiencies, serve as a resource for growing businesses and unlock economic opportunities for entrepreneurs across all regions of the United States,” Levey said in an emailed statement Tuesday.

He'll also provide insight as the chief business affairs and legal officer of Upwork, a public company with approximately 430 employees as of December, according to its 10-k filing. Levey joined Upwork in April 2014 as senior vice president and general counsel and helped the company through its initial public offering last year.

His experience of bringing the Mountain View, California-based company public will “add a perspective” of what it's like to bring a small company public, Levey said. He declined to comment on specific policy or regulatory challenges he's seen small public companies face.

But it's not just his experiences with smaller businesses that drew Levey to the committee. It's his prior experience with the SEC. Levey took a quarter off of college for an externship with the agency that gave him a ”real life introduction to the financial markets,” which he said he's had a longstanding interest in. When Levey was contacted about joining committee earlier this month, he said the opportunity felt “a little bit full circle.”

The SEC announced its appointments to the small business capital formation advisory committee last week. Sapna Mehta, the general counsel and chief compliance officer of Rise of the Rest Seed Fund and associate general counsel of Revolution, is also an inaugural committee member.

The new committee replaces the advisory committee on small and emerging companies. Levey said he'll have a better idea of the group's specific goals after the initial hearing next week. In a press release last week, chairman Jay Clayton and Commissioners Robert Jackson, Hester Peirce, and Elad Roisman said the committee is part of the SEC's “focus on facilitating capital-raising opportunities for small- and medium-sized businesses and expanding investment opportunities for retail investors.”