4 ms·
As soon as finance capital gets involved, the core objective of business shifts to primarily providing higher returns for the investors. Small to medium busines
by tap-snap-or-nap 3y ago
As soon as finance capital gets involved, the core objective of business shifts to primarily providing higher returns for the investors. Small to medium businesses can have diversity but once they "go public" they all are almost alike.
- ticviking 3y agoThen don’t go public. Accept that you cannot grow at the same speed and focus on deep roots and fanatical customers
- Joker_vD 3y agoDoes that ever work? After all, an enterprise that cannot grow at the same speed is effectively shrinking, isn't it?
- adambyrtek 3y ago37signals (and others) proved that a different approach is possible.
- lawn 3y agoWhy does it have to grow? It can also be stagnant, which is totally acceptable as well.
- waboremo 3y agoYou can't really be stagnant due to competition. Not unless you're deep into some niche that's difficult to get started in or stick around.
- eulers_secret 3y agoYeah, it can work. Valve is private and basically owns the pc game distribution market. Even competing agains industry titans like MS. I’m not sure I know another example, so maybe it’s very rare.
- xctr94 3y agoA few companies in tech have plenty of goodwill, even if not all are privately owned: RedHat (currently burning theirs), Mozilla, 37signals, Khan Academy, Mapbox, Komoot, DuckDuckGo, Brave, etc. Not all these have a viable business model, but they’re not obsessed with growth and brokering user data.
- izacus 3y agoYeah, as soon as MBAs and financial investors get involved (which, for "inefficient" small companies, is just a matter of time) the companies change to be exploitative cancer on society like the rest. There's whole industry looking for companies that are too nice to their employees and customers to buy, exploit, grab profits and leave a husk behind.
- nine_k 3y agoI suppose that's it's impossible to do a hostile takeover of a private company. All it takes is to stay financially healthy and reject offers to sell! Much easier said than done. Sometimes the owners just get tired or bored, and want out. They sell the company to the highest bidder, within reason; often there's no crowd clamoring to buy a small, non-growing company. Then it's usually over.