this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Yes. Becasue it is Joe Shmoe's money that funds the company while it builds the product. Without the money, there is no product.
Going public is a big issue, that is how Joe Shmoe gets his payback. He is the one pushing for the IPO so they can get paid.
Once that happens, the founders lose what little control they had, the control is always with the people that supply the money in the end.
Right I get it, money is needed for growth.
But maybe we just don’t need to grow so much. What if we let that excess need (due to lack of supply) spill over into competition with people who also don’t want the whole public traded, board room setup?
Idk taking the money out of business seems impossible no matter how you cut it. Maybe more self hosted and crowd hosted stuff is one solution? What are your thoughts in terms of solutions?
I have no idea how we move forward.
Currently private finding rounds hinge on convincing a few people who control millions to fund you. Part of that is showing them often highly confidential details of what you are trying to create.
Crowd finding would be much. much more difficult. Now you have to convince millions of people to give you funding, possibly exposing you to having your ideas stolen before you can develop them.
There are examples of people doing this. Cooperatives can be owned by the workers or by the customers. They're usually cheaper too.
They don't have the "move fast and break things" mentality however because by nature they don't have a billionaire sponsors, so it's harder to complete in a venture capitalist world. It's when big money dries up, like the great depression, when you'll see them popping up.
It's worked to a fair degree in gaming but yeah, not really a viable solution. Especially because the crowd itself is slowly getting robbed of its money.
the market itself is garbage. its a hot mess of under/over regulation by all the wrong actors.
tax stock trades. ever single one. tax stock ownership. tax the everliving fuck out of the stock market.
The solution I’m most interested in is eliminating the friction to seed/early stage funding coming directly from interested user communities and even better would be to also draw as much of the labor pool as possible from the same group.
I think this eliminates most of the misalignments in stakeholder interest.
We already have equity crowdfunding in the states. We need more innovation in crowdfunding platforms.