alessandroIn 2018 a group of Valve staff tried to figure out just how efficient they were being—and found they were making more money per head than Apple, Facebook, and nearly every tech giant out there
resetbypeerAnd that for being a non-public company.
Non public should be more efficient from the labor cost savings of not having to file all the sec documents quarterly and legal costs of following public company regulations.
Not to mention that an obsession with increasing share price introduces massive inefficiencies.
Public companies focus on short term profit to keep share holders happy. Private companies can actually focus on long term profit, especially if it’s at the expense of some short term profit.
mercOr they can choose not to focus on profit at all. Probably most people with an ownership stake in Valve are fabulously rich now. Maybe they just want to focus on interesting R&D now.
Theoretically there’s a benefit to a publicly traded company that since a lot of your financials are visible to everyone and people get to “vote” by buying and selling shares, there’s a sense in which you can get feedback on how well you’re running the company that you don’t get when it’s private. But, as Reddit’s “wall street bets” and “superstonk” subreddits show, a lot of investors are morons.
This isn’t totally true. Private companies can still have shareholders that demand info. Their aren’t the same level of regulations, but it’s not nothing.