Actually I agree with you on the shareholder argument. One of the real reasons I am second-guessing whether to look for VC money is that I am afraid of what ha

Actually I agree with you on the shareholder argument. One of the real reasons I am second-guessing whether to look for VC money is that I am afraid of what happens when we have shareholders, and even more worried about what happens when there is public ownership of stock. The problem here is that maximizing shareholder value means to some extent working on elevating stock prices. So you can't do anything that might threaten stock prices once you go public. WL Gore, IIRC, went public, then put 15% of their profits into a buyback program on behalf of employees and eventually bought all their stock back, and then delisted themselves from the stock exchanges. I really admire that they did this. Now they still have stockholders: employees.....