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US Startups Don't Want To Go Public Anymore (qz.com)
According to a new working paper from the National Bureau of Economics, the number of American firms listed publicly in the U.S. has dropped more than half. In 1997, more than 7,500 American firms were listed publicly in the U.S. Nearly two decades later, in 2016, the number had dropped to 3,618 firms. Quartz reports: The crux of the issue is that U.S. startups are increasingly shunning stock market boards. That could have worrying implications for America's long-term economic prospects. One big reason young companies are shying away from IPOs is that public listings don't offer much benefit to promising startups, say the paper's authors, economists Craig Doidge, Kathleen Kahle, Andrew Karolyi, and Rene Stulz. In fact, going public can hurt them. The upside of public listing is that it lets companies raise huge sums of capital, issue more shares, issue debt with relative ease, and use equity to fund acquisitions. But because of the ways the American economy has evolved, those advantages are less important than they once were.
When industry powered U.S. growth, companies grew by spending on capital investments like factories and machinery. Back in 1975, firms once spent six times more on capital investments than they did on research and development. But as the U.S. shifted toward a services and knowledge-based economy, intangible investments became increasingly important. In 2002, R&D expenditures for the average firm surpassed capital expenditures for the first time. It's stayed that way since; nowadays, average R&D spending is roughly twice that of capital expenditures. The problem is, two features of public listings -- disclosure and accounting standards -- make things tough on companies with more intangible assets. U.S. securities law requires companies to disclose their activities in detail. But startups are wary of sharing information that might benefit their competitors.
When industry powered U.S. growth, companies grew by spending on capital investments like factories and machinery. Back in 1975, firms once spent six times more on capital investments than they did on research and development. But as the U.S. shifted toward a services and knowledge-based economy, intangible investments became increasingly important. In 2002, R&D expenditures for the average firm surpassed capital expenditures for the first time. It's stayed that way since; nowadays, average R&D spending is roughly twice that of capital expenditures. The problem is, two features of public listings -- disclosure and accounting standards -- make things tough on companies with more intangible assets. U.S. securities law requires companies to disclose their activities in detail. But startups are wary of sharing information that might benefit their competitors.
Once upon a time, people buying stock looked at a company and tried to decide the long time worth for that company. Essentially, did you, the investor, belive in the company and its products/services. For investing in it you got dividends if it was profitable.
Now, when you can trade immediately and it is more profitable, not to wait for dividends but rather selling the stock to someone else, many investors are not interested in the company itself, but the changes in the perceived value of the company. You don't care if the company goes belly up after you sell your shares, as long as you did a profit in selling them. There is very little incentive for long term investment for the good of the company.
So, now tell me, why a starting company would like those kinds of investors?
Why go pubic? you need a viable business plan and other annoyances like profits and disclosure to do that.
It's much more comfy to be bank rolled by VCs and stay in dreamland.
This is just another result of the concentration of wealth (and, in particularly, fiat wealth) in society. The difference now is that private equity companies and investment banks can raise billions of dollars if required to fund companies from a small number of ultra wealthy investors. Twenty or so years ago, the only way to obtain those sorts of sums was to attract the savings of the middle class. If you have a good investment, the cost of funding it is basically insignificant, so why would you want to let the unwashed retail investors get their hands on it? The only useful purpose for retail investors is to offload the company once maximum value growth has been obtained.
This is the yet another failing of modern capitalism. The savings of the middle class, which are supposed to be the prudently forgone consumption that allows space in the economic pie for new businesses to develop, have been rendered valueless. Normal people cannot get access to any of the investments that generate decent returns, and central bank supported asset prices bubbles essentially work as localized inflation, destroying the value of savings year on year. The smart money (ultra-rich and their bankers) have been busy using QE money to leverage themselves into all the real assets. The middle class cannot compete with this, and when the tide goes out (global fiat bubbles pop) the middle class will be left with paper, and the ownership of hard assets (real estate, productive companies etc) will make the return of feudalism complete.
Here's the operative sentence from TFS: "That could have worrying implications for America's long-term economic prospects." which is completely wrong! "Public" companies are vampires for "shareholders", which is great if you're one of them. Otherwise, you're at the shitty end of Piketty's r>g equation.
The disclosure is pretty much a killer for 1 or 2 product tech startups. Your competitors get to see how big your market is, how the market share is growing, how much cash you have left, and disclosure on r and d spend etc etc. Very easy to make judgements on if they are worth buying, or just competing directly with or otherwise the competition playing with you some how.
I've been following a product that was developed in a startup listed company, then sold to a non-listed venture capital based company 3 years ago. I have really zero information about what is happening to that product now. But for the 3 years before it was sold, I know the sales volume, gross profit margin, growth rate and final sale figure which is what I'm using to validate and extrapolate from there. In the private company all that information has stopped.
If your company makes consistent profits, as Valve does with Steam, what is the motivation to go public? You lose control of the company and can often end up focused on short term profits instead of long term success.
If your company is crap, like Twiiter, then obviously there's a strong motivation to dump it on to other people while it is perceived to be worth something.
This is why a lot of companies listed on the market are junk.
Once upon a time, people buying stock looked at a company and tried to decide the long time worth for that company. Essentially, did you, the investor, belive in the company and its products/services. For investing in it you got dividends if it was profitable.
That's a nice little fairy tale you are telling yourself. The reality is that people were day trading way back in the 1920s. The notion that investors back in the day were any different from investors today is demonstrably nonsense. Human greed hasn't evolved or changed in the last 100 years. The technology to facilitated it has advanced but the basic behavior of people in a stock market is no different today. It just moves faster is all.
So, now tell me, why a starting company would like those kinds of investors?
There have ALWAYS been short term investors who don't give a shit about the long term prospects of a company. This is nothing new. See the corporate raiders of the 1980s. I lived through that and I assure you that absolutely nothing has changed in the last 40 years except the speed on the transactions.
The cost of compliance with information disclosure regulations is also part of the issue, here. Sarbanes-Oxley is estimated to cost more than $500K/year. That is no small sum for companies with a few million in profit, so the bar for going public is concomitantly raised. A good rule of thumb is that you need to be at $100M+ of revenue to even consider this. Lots of very good, profitable companies do not make that threshold.
If humans are mostly water, and beer is mostly water, then humans must be mostly beer.
Let them first establish a profitable business using privately raised money. (We wouldn't have had the Dot Com Bubble if people had acted in this responsible manner.)
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Couple of important points you're missing here. Firstly: in tech especially these days you might not even have to convince a group of VC investors, if you've got promising technology one of the larger tech players might well be willing to invest in you. Alphabet/Google and the rest are funding quite a lot of small companies these days. Secondly: if your plan is to develop a sustainable business that will end up making you a lot of money, then going public might not be the best approach to begin with. The more stock you/the original founders keep on yourself, the more you're going to get out of the company when it starts turning a profit, regardless of whether you go public eventually or not.
When you add to this the points mentioned in the summary: namely that the amount of capital required by new companies is going down (software especially is nowhere near as capital heavy as it used to be) and hat going public makes you subject to stricter transparency rules which might not be ideal competition-wise, it's clear that unless you absolutely have to go public due to not being able to get funding elsewhere (or for some reason requiring large amounts of it), it often makes no sense for a startup to go public as a means of getting funding.
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
Creimertard. Mod down.
Please. From what I understand (and I am not that interested, so I haven't looked all that closely) VCs take even more than they used to. In return, they run companies into the ground by pushing them to grow too fast, where most fail. All for a 0.5-1% better return than responsible stewardship.
Anyone who actually wants to work like crazy for years in return for a 1% chance of success is either delusional concerning their own skills and destiny, bad at math, or just ignorant.
It is exactly the LACK of business finance savvy in startups that VCs take advantage of now. "If you're the next Google, this 0.005% stock will be worth millions!" They've dropped the percentages they give to owners to ridiculously low levels, and the dumb ones keep coming. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but this is what I seem to be hearing. It also makes complete sense, from a point of view that leads to the vulture capitalist label.
I've built my company slowly, mostly as it made sense. If I didn't have a ridiculously over-cautious wife, I'd probably be further along... but we're still doing rather well. (BTW, that's as much luck as skill/hard work) One of my major clients is WAY bigger than me, with like 4 subsidiaries and 20 locations around the US employing hundreds of people. With my 100% ownership of my company vs. the president of that company's current share of his, I'm actually worth more. It's almost embarrassing. He'll bitch about wasting his important time dealing with me, when I'm worth significantly more than him. Big man, indeed.
Sure, I guess taking a shot at greatness in your youth would be the time to do it.... it's just not a very good return on investment. Kind of like using the state lottery as your retirement plan.
I work for a Fortune 500 company as a result of working for a successful startup that got bought out. The startup that eventually hired me started in the late 1990s I think. Employees who were there in those early years told me that the company thought seriously about selling stock, but for whatever reason decided not to. That decision probably saved the company. The internet bubble burst and they avoided being caught up in that. I was told that after the bubble burst they did have some layoffs, but they weren't too bad. The company just chugged along and grew and eventually was bought out by the company I now work for.
There actually are ways without going public to eventually enrich company executives. Someone else mentioned a plus of going public was giving stock bonuses because they don't tap company revenue. The start up I worked for gave some kind of restricted private stock in the company to execs and the rank and file employees got some kind of shares but those rank and file shares weren't as numerous or worth as much. I came on too late to get those so I don't know much about them. All I do know is that when the Fortune 500 company bought us, the rank and file employees did get paid for their private stock shares and the exces made a fortune. Pretty much every one of those execs became a millionaire. Some of them told us they were simply going to retire after the sale because they made so much money they didn't need to work again.
What we are seeing is the fact that a company stakeholder and a stockholder are completely different people now. Now, especially with HFT, if your company has any bad news, investors bail in droves. You can't just focus on the next quarter, but the next few days, to keep the shareholders happy. You do a charge-off (a company investment in retooling or some major renovations to change from being a better buggy whip maker to a car accessory maker), you will be served with a class action shareholder lawsuit first thing the next day.
Because companies are under the constant lash of this quarter uber Alles, the only real way to expand into a new market is to buy an already existing company, unless one is Apple and investors know they will have their cake and eat it too when Apple forges into a new area.
Keeping a company private is a wise thing. The board that runs Dell isn't stupid, and after they removed themselves from the public market, product quality has improved. Plus, why subject one to the whims of market manipulators and pump/dump artists, when capital can flow from other sources?
Poverty is it's own punishment, and wealth it's own reward. No need to add to either with government intervention.
Oh, and while debtors prison is a bad idea we do need some kind of enforcement on running up a debt or no one will pay what they owe.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
The ratio of how much the funding is used for capital versus other expenditures doesn't change the fact that fundraising through going public can be appealing.
One thing the ratio did in the past, however, was to mitigate the looting the shareholders could do to the company. Capital assets are not trivially liquidated and as such contribute to a company having a hard time financially evolving themselves if they have a lot of money tied up in assets. A lot of companies getting rolling love and pay a premium to have flexibility and so they have perhaps more money being spent, but they can change their minds easily.
However, that flexibility also includes the ability to throw liquidity at the shareholders, and investment firms can get very pushy if they see liquidity and demand stock buybacks and large dividends for short term benefits even if the company's well being is better server through longer term investments. Being a public company attracts investment firms that don't give a damn about your business, and statistically speaking they are better off sucking the blood out of the company than letting it ride, so they will limit a companies ability to make long range bets.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I had to run out the door... I meant to add my attempt at useful suggestions/alternatives.
First, I want to back up on what I said a little bit concerning VC capital in certain situations. If you're success as a company REQUIRES lots of capital, then sure... having a little bit of something is better than a whole lot of nothing. There's nothing ignorant or stupid about that, if you've taken a clearheaded look at the situation and that's your call. However, I think many times there are simply better ways to do it.
The point of the article was that startups are avoiding investment money in order to grow themselves. I would imagine, if someone makes that decision, that it's almost certainly a better decision for them. If you CAN do it without selling too much of yourself to investors in the process, wow is that a whole lot better.
Sure, there are cases where you have to go big immediately or you can't even really play. However, they're far fewer than most seem to think. Google was FAR from the first search engine. If someone came up with a fully natural language super-AI search tomorrow, Google would be toast in a couple years if not months.
Anyway, that's a tangent for my point here I guess.
You don't have to have the next big idea to be successful, to make a lot of money, to build a good company... whatever your goals are. There's WAY more smaller niche spots to build a company in that pay better than an executive position at a major corporation. You can grow at a sustainable pace, with WAY less stress and freaking out.
Heck, what I think a huge number of people seem to miss is that you don't even have to be NEW. Sure, there are a million AC repair shops, electricians, gas stations. You just have to be BETTER than MOST. My favorite gas station is absolutely killing it, with 4x the traffic of the spot across the street. The spot across the street is CHEAPER. This place is just cleaner, friendlier, and they work hard to stock good stuff you actually want. That's it. Limited growth potential? Err, not really. Maxxed out your first location? Open another. (CAREFULLY, that's a major killer right there.. the second location)
A lot of small companies still make millions of dollars. Many small companies are run by idiots... that's your competition. A smart person who doesn't make a habit of fooling themselves can do really well, if they can manage to get started. That is, really, the hardest part.
One of the things that I hate about SV/VC culture is that they deride the companies that you're talking about as "lifestyle" companies. You're either a disruptive unicorn or you're nothing. It's a horrible make-or-break culture that doesn't do people any good.
We didn't have much trouble getting money from banks at LIBOR +2%, IIRC. If you can get money that cheap without sharing equity in the growth phase, why would you?
Of course, if all you have is an idea and you are relying on contract manufacturers in China to build it for you you might need a little extra...
I think the real reason IPOs are out of favor is summed up in TFS: the "intangible assets" aren't really worth what they claim. No positive cash flow, no dice.
When you sell out, good business decisions take a back seat to the constant pressure to increase profits - and thus the stock price - at all costs. How many companies have eaten themselves alive to feed investors, and then feed the MBAs/consultants that come in to "fix" things but ultimately just gut the company and run?
Are not treated fairly or consistently under US accounting rules when going public or in the event of an acquisition. So a startup might be better off avoiding that mess and then go public or be bought overseas.
Have gnu, will travel.
The article was about IPO and not VCs. Going public changes how a company can be run.
Private companies are not required to publicly disclose financial information, while public companies are required by the Securities and Exchange Commission to file an annual report documenting their performance in detail. Because private companies don’t have to disclose financial information, they can focus on long-term growth instead of making sure shareholders are getting their quarterly dividends. Private companies don’t need shareholder approval for operational and growth strategy decisions made by the company, as long as that is stated in their corporate documents.
Public companies must inform shareholders about and get approval for the company’s operations, financial performance, management actions, and other decisions.
Going public is expensive, and there is unlimited liability for a company’s owners.
Public companies may have an easier time raising large amounts of capital by selling securities. Investors are more likely to invest in a public company because there is less risk and more potential to reap large rewards.
Public companies can return to the stock market and raise more capital via a secondary stock offering or by issuing a bond.
Public companies must comply with the rules established by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which was enacted to protect investors. The act contains a myriad of regulations concerning board responsibilities and requires the Securities and Exchange Commission to administer rules that comply with the law.
Going public is expensive, and there is unlimited liability for a company’s owners.
Yes it is expensive but no there is decidedly not unlimited liability for company owners. The ENTIRE point of incorporation is to limit liability to a company's owners. If you own shares in a company you are an owner of the company and I assure you that you do not have unlimited liability. There are some limited circumstances where the corporate veil can be breached but these are the exception and difficult to litigate (though not for lack of trying).
Public companies may have an easier time raising large amounts of capital by selling securities.
Sometimes but it depends on the company and its circumstances. It's not unusual for companies to be able to raise large amounts of capital without needing to go public. The stock markets are not the only and often not the best source of capital. Equity capital is generally very expensive compared to alternatives. Cost of capital for loans (bonds) is generally less. Eventually if companies get big enough they are often forced to go public by law but no company wants to go public unless they have to. It brings a lot of administrative burden and distraction to management, not to mention cost.
Investors are more likely to invest in a public company because there is less risk and more potential to reap large rewards.
"Less risk"? In what parallel universe is that true? There is zero difference in the amount of risk to an investor. Nor does being publicly traded grant any special ability to garner large profits. That can be done with or without being publicly traded. Small investors are more likely to invest in a public company because they don't have the option to invest in private ones as a general proposition. But large investors aren't restricted to the public markets.
Public companies can return to the stock market and raise more capital via a secondary stock offering or by issuing a bond.
Private companies do the exact same thing. They just don't do it in a public market. You do not need a stock market to sell shares in the company nor do you need one to take out a loan (a bond).
Why go pubic? you need a viable business plan and other annoyances like profits and disclosure to do that.
You demonstrably do NOT need a viable business plan. Just the ability to convince others that your plan is viable. There are plenty of companies that go public without profits too.
It's much more comfy to be bank rolled by VCs and stay in dreamland.
"Comfy"? I'm guessing you have never dealt with VCs. Working with them is anything but comfy. And it typically is a VC that pushes the company to go public (or to be bought out) because that is where a VC makes their profit. VCs are rarely long term investors. They generally demand a return on their investment within a period of a few years and the return they demand is not a small one.
Don't go public if you don't have to. Then you can control your own company and make your own decisions instead of begin beholden to quarterly earnings reports.
From someone who has had thier not that small startup get absolutely trashed by VC I agree with most of what you wrote, my main disagreement is it's a worse landscape than you paint. You are leaving out a complete disregard for all laws or actions that they probably won't be held accountable to. Here is how I was scammed
It was a university startup and while I had the largest ownership by a good margin, we started with around 12 owners including some facility and licensed the technology through the university (you don't own what you invent at universities just like at companies). This made politics an issue from day one as emails from senior university officials from the business development office had comments like "who cares, fuck the students" and the law services butchered the articles of incorporation when a simple boiler plate would have been better. I was working two and a half full time jobs managing the technology and as this was my first company I had quite a bit to learn. We eventually took on money to produce product, but this basically "required" taking on a CEO with experience who due to various NDAs keeping information from us turned out to be a typical finnancial criminal. After the first CEO colluded with this new hire CEO, he was able to vote shares not yet vested through the milestones outlined in his agreement through a stupid and ignorant loophole in our articles and the agreement language. By combining them with the shares we lost in the opening round we lost control of the company. The CEO then made a predatory purchase agreement with the contract manufacturer who also happened to be the largest VC. This 10 million dollar purchase was hidden from finnancial disclosure during a subsequent investment round. When the company had a shortfall and couldn't pay an emergency shareholder meeting was called 1 week from an announcement on Christmas Eve night where it was announced the 10 million dollars invested in the company was now worthless because the company was insolvent and we now were so lucky to have our entire company bailed out ( with a 14-1 dilution) by undisclosed people who only paid 400k and the whole deal was kept secret to a few select large VC who fucked all the others (and me) over using inside knowledge of the company. They wouldn't provide any of the legal documentation required by law before the meeting and when a class action lawsuit started up the independent council investigating took verbal confirmation that they had in fact had a secret document that had disclosed the 10m off the books deal. I should have known when I tried to hire a law firm and the first 12 had conflicts that I was really fucked.
tl:dr VC will just take your company and kick your withered corpse to the curb but only after milking all of your contacts and resources dry then burning the bridges on your behalf. The only reason you should take on money is if you are damn sure you can get the upper hand and fuck them over financially, because that's the only reason VC invest in startups.
Was that before or after they had an excellent adventure?
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The number of companies listed is easy to understand, but the real important piece of information here is that the publicly listed companies are net buyers of equity, not sellers. (This is not in the summary... why?)
From TFA, "public firms have been net purchasers of $3.6 trillion of equity (in 2015 dollars) rather than net issuers."
That's amazing, and it says all you need to know about why companies aren't going public (if liquidity is the only actual benefit, there are easier ways to get that). The public market, between 1997 and now, has not invested in companies. Rather the opposite, investment and financing is flowing out of public companies, not in. In tech, we're crazy about startup companies, but the reality is that startup investing is less than 1% of the US investment market. So, what is everyone investing in?
There is no real advantage to IPOs any more. All it means is you lose control of your company. Once you go public all your decisions revolve around making wall street happy. Not your vision. You can be closely held and private like Dell (which rebounded after going private) or find larger investors. You can even sell shares and bonds to employees, vendors, customers the general public etc. off of your web site if you present the standard disclaimers. I've even bought a few shares like this.
As long as it is not publicly traded the rules are much more flexible.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
That could have worrying implications for America's long-term economic prospects.
This is a result of changes to America's economy, not a cause of it. A startup like Apple or Microsoft needed to get that IPO money to help fund continued growth. Factories are EXPENSIVE. This continued into the 90's, because people are EXPENSIVE. But today, you can create a billion dollar company without high capital or personnel expenses, because the point where you can get to scale-out is much earlier. The first case where I really noticed this was YouTube, which was bought for $1.65B, with something like 70 employees, and I wouldn't be surprised to hear that half of those employees were only hired because they had to do _something_ with their revenue. These days, you don't even need your own servers in datacenters, so you could probably get there with a dozen employees.
So, basically, if you can fund scale-out without going to the markets, why in the world would you go to the markets? For many things, overfunding scale-out is a sure route to failure, not increased success!
A current counter-example to the above is Uber. I really have no idea why anyone backing them is willing to pony up billions of dollars to pay for drivers to ferry customers around. That kind of thing made sense to me when your marginal costs of doing business were high per unit because of quantum issues (you can't write half a backend service or half of a UI), but Uber is miles past the point where they can realistically expect to grow past their expenses. So as best I can figure, they're going to go public into a market desperate for IPOs, and the results aren't going to be pleasant for IPO investors.
Having worked inside some big pre-ipo companies, I think that the leadership isn't too excited about having to answer to shareholders who might be whimsical, panicky, transitory, etc. corporate execs serve at the whim of the board of directors who are essentially the shareholders.Having a privately held company allows you to do whatever you want without having to answer for it. Want to lose money for a few years to grow the business? Not really a problem.
Also being publicly traded causes your stock price to fluctuate based on the irrational whims of the economy. Why deal with that if you don't need the cash infusion? The push to go to an IPO is only to get the VC's a quick payout. If the business is really a good one and it is growing, why not let your capital investment grow longer? Just so impatient VC's want to move on to the next company?
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I also note that those shops that stay small, stay single owner, actually are better innovators than the ones that have to answer to a board of stockholders. Financial people are usually technical novices at best
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I predicted a few years ago that the new business model would be privately owned. Publicly traded companies are driven only to maximize the next quarters profits, while privately held companies can make long-term plans, provided they have enough cash on hand to stay in business. Being highly motivated to keep the stock speculators happy makes for poor decision making.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
how is this supposed to work it's way out? If you make your own long term only stock market (with Black Jack & Hookers) I can't imagine they won't notice and want their cut. Don't forget, there's a powerful group of folks who make their money skimming off those long term guys' trades.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
or their bogus journey?
When rent seekers being to negatively impact the population's overall quality of life that's when it's 'too much'.
Nobody's arguing that somebody who generates 100x as much value doesn't get 100x as much money. That's the rising tide that lifts all boats.
What we're talking about are folks who either don't work (living off capital, typically capital given to them by their parents, grandparents, or even ancestors) or parasites like High Frequency Traders and Vulture Capitalists who find ways to drain money from the economy without providing value or worse, by using legal tricks and good 'ole boy's networks to strip mine value from productive companies.
Some of this can be tolerated. Never approved, but tolerated. But when it becomes the norm is when things go to hell. At that point you get an aristocracy who's only goal is to maintain their wealth, privilege and power. You end up in a dark age where absurd levels of conservatism are enforced to maintain that aristocracy. North Korea's got this going on. So does Saudi Arabia. China & India is only just barely staying ahead of it with insanely rapid growth that can't last. And the United States is gradually lapsing into it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
so is Libtard the new Godwin?
Of course, you're wrong about unlimited liability - that's the whole point of corporations in the first place.
But beyond that, it's the rise of egregiously intrusive regulation (SarbOx, SEC, FTC, etc.) and the near-impossibility of compliance that's the real driving factor behind no one in their right mind wanting to go public. The effect of such punitive regulation is to hang a Federal Govt sword of Damocles over every public company, which only the very largest can even begin to afford to protect themselves against (generally, those companies are so big, they should be broken up under our now-irrelevant anti-trust law, anyway...)
The death of the IPO is really just simply business owners rejecting Big Government overreach - it is, in fact, showing a place where the market still works...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
I'm sorry, did you just call a PhD engineering student who dropped out to form a multimillion dollar technology push company from just my masters thesis a conservative? Because I think I can add bad at stereotypes alongside judge of character. If you don't believe me have a look at my post history.
How's life in the hypocrite lane?
Perhaps there are half the number of publicly traded corporations in the US because the bigger half have bought out the smaller half; they have so much money they can think of nothing better to spend it on than M&A. Eventually there will just be a few conglomerates, almost certainly corresponding to broad tech companies that invest in AI and robotics. As much as I hate the "Apple, Google, Samsung and Amazon will take over the world!" clickbait articles, they're the most likely culprits.
You think UBI in the US is going to be a tough sell? Wait until all the money funnels to Korea and the US (and maybe Japan if Toyota, Honda, or Mitsubishi get their act together) and those countries have to finance UBI for the rest of the planet.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Weren't the same folks that are calling corporations now concerned that startups are not going public? I get so confused. I think it was Emerson who said that consistency was the hobgoblin of small minds. I guess I have to admit to being small minded.
Since slashdot won't display the first post, what's this in reference to?
Listed companies are no different than Pyramid schemes
Casteism
An old movie, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. Somebody referred to the HP founders as Bill and Ted upstream.
Cheap storage VM.