4 ms·
It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely ha
by omnimus 11mo ago
It's not Monotype but HGGC, private equity firm from Palo Alto that has bought Monotype and every other type foundry they can get their hands on. They likely have strategy to completely corner the market and then turn things up.
But as I wrote here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45973261#45977078
Besides open source fonts there still are stable high quality independent foundries that are safe to use as they would already be bought. (from comment above “Mostly swiss/european companies likes of Grilli type, Lineto, Dinamo, Klim type, Florian Karsten, Swiss typefaces… companies with often just few employees.”)
- eloisant 11mo agoOh my god, private equity firms are such life-sucking vampires. Buy a great company, suck as much cash as they can before discarding the empty carcass.
- eurekin 11mo agoI'd love to some deeper 60 minutes-like documentary about it. This perhaps might actually spark some legislation change
- expedition32 11mo agoDoubtful. The call is coming from inside the White House.
- red-iron-pine 11mo agoand congress. and scotus. owned lock and stock by billionaires
- fmajid 11mo agoYou may have heard of the 1987 Michael Douglas film "Wall Street"? Nothing has meaningfully changed since then.
- _DeadFred_ 11mo agoBack then (even in Reagan's 1980s) the Michael Douglas character types were despised by society. Now they are emulated and mainstreamed. We are set to have more private equity than McDonalds. American Capitalism is all about capital extraction now, not value creation. https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/there-are-now-more-pe-funds-than-mcdonalds-franchises-whats-behind-the-alts-explosion/ https://www.thedailyupside.com/advisor/investing-strategies/...
- matheusmoreira 11mo agoIs there a point to these private equity firms besides sociopathically ruining everything? Why are they allowed to exist?
- cyanydeez 11mo agoThe point is to make everything fungible, even you. How else will america reinvent slavery?
- jumpman_miya 11mo ago[dead]
- WorldMaker 11mo agoThe point is short-term profits. The private equity firms vampirically suck a lot of money out of these companies as they ruin them, and keep the money they steal. Arguably they shouldn't be allowed to exist: They use what seem to be loopholes in corporate law to run what are essentially embezzlement schemes. If a lone person runs an embezzlement scheme, that's possibly a felony charge. It shouldn't be a loophole that a company can do it just fine without repercussions when we know a lone individual doing it is a crime. The two problems in why they are allowed to exist are enforcement and probably legislation. Legislation is needed to close any actual loopholes in the law and/or just explicitly say things like "Leveraged Buy Outs are illegal". Enforcement is getting courts to see this as a crime and prosecute it as such. They may be waiting for legislation before they feel confident enforcing it. Fixing those problems is certainly easier said than done. (ETA: Also some of this is classic Anti-Trust violations. Trusts/Monopolies are still illegal. Enforcement has been somewhat negligent in the US this century and some of these deals cross too many country borders making enforcement in general harder. In this specific case, a US private equity firm buying a Japanese company, who enforces the anti-trust issue, especially if the Japanese company was already a de facto local monopoly before joining the international one?)
- rcxdude 11mo agoThey exist as a consequence of how company ownership works (i.e. that it can be bought and sold). You would need to figure out some quite specific wording to prevent this without also preventing all kinds of other kinds of transfer of company ownership. In principle, private equity firms could be a net positive: they could take over a business that's failing or just not living up to its potential, and turn around the management of it to improve it for all concerned. They often market themselves on this concept. In practice it rarely seems to work this way, where either they fail to make any return on their investment or they basically do this kind of monopolising, short-term extortion of customers. Often both. (Patrick Boyle has a video on them from the financial side if you want some details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfUOPDOLHvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfUOPDOLHvE TLDW: they often aren't a great deal for investors, either)
- motbus3 11mo agoThe thing is that tax on such businesses are too low. Same as it is happening on other areas, the negative effects to society have zero counter measurements. AI will take all work and the government will crash because lack of money? Who cares? Private Firm buys all houses in a region and force the market into a false sense of scarcity to inflate prices? What could possibly go wrong? Other companies being bought in bulks by big players to hold IPs while dismissing all employees with false pretense that they are losing money? Nothing to see here.. The fact that the cost of using gray area to hide and move money to not pay taxes has a predictable and slow movement is the best for those players.
- mattkevan 11mo agoSome really good options there. I did a deep dive a while back looking for small, independent, mostly European type foundries. There’s an incredible range of talent out there. Will never give Monotype and the like another penny.
- omnimus 11mo agoThe problem is soon you will not even know which fonts are owned by Monotype/HGGC. For example they bought Colophon and Sharp type two famous independent foundries. When buying their fonts it still seems like they are independent.
- mattkevan 11mo agoYeah the Sharp purchase was what got us.
- sdenton4 11mo agoThose independent companies can be eventually bought by PE and turned into more bombs, though, right?
- omnimus 11mo agoThey indeed can but licensing on fonts from most companies is perpetual. Especially from the independent traditional ones. So its possible they might be bought in future but the new owner can't change license retroactively. Also there is very high chance they already got offer from HGGC and simply refused it, because some similar notably independent type foundries got bought recently.
- _f9cu 11mo agoWhat is a foundry?
- omnimus 11mo agoSorry. Its name for a company that designs/distributes typefaces. It is a relic from past to call it this. In the past those companies were not only designing the typefaces but also manufacturing the physical matricies that were cast from metal. Its similar to how some people say leading to mean line height. Lead strips were used for space between lines of text.
- _f9cu 11mo agoCould it be true, the past companies, which held ownership on past products, still in a misconception about current world working, and overpricing products without considering the possible downfall?
- mattkevan 11mo agoNo, type designers want their art to be used. The type industry until recently has been a fairly friendly one as only designers really cared about it. I think it’s more likely that vulture capitalists have discovered a matket that they can ruthlessly exploit, extracting every last shred of value without giving the slightest of shits about its long term sustainability.
- cyanydeez 11mo agoThey should definitely look at moving to Public Utility and become owned by government.