At 05:15 PM 5/14/97 -0700, Vladimir Z. Nuri wrote:
ultimately what cyberspace does in many ways is decrease the "granularity" of economic transactions. ... increasingly, I think you will see very small companies have stocks. you will also see a much better means by which an investor can judge the value of a company. the assets will ... what would be neat is if one could invest in very small companies or ideas.
Really interesting post! I think the net will simplify the ownership issues and the publicity issues long before it makes good information about the value of small companies easy to get. That's far more dependent on the personalities of the players in a company (hard to judge, except in person), the ideas the company's trying to develop into products/services (may need non-disclosure arrangements, may need privacy to develop in, may not want to waste their time publicizing each step in their decision processes, contract negotiations are usually very private, etc.) On the other hand, the net can often help those parts of a business. The Cygnus Support folks have done well in a very open environment. I recently talked with a headhunter who'd seen my discussion with someone on Usenet and wanted an opinion about the guy; the headhunter was doing a lot of in-depth web searching to find people who might be interested or qualified for a position he was trying to fill. It's amazing what AltaVista knows about you, especially with DejaNews around... Venture capital firms provide some value to their investors by managing the granularity of the transactions, but they also add value by providing personal understanding of the companies they're evaluating whether to invest in. Information wants to be free, or is at least cheap to copy, but providing the personal attention needed to understand and analyze information and make good decisions on it is still expensive. The nets can improve the information they have available on both the company and the market, and can provide better information to investors about what venture capital analysts are good at evaluating what kinds of businesses. Will the nets split these businesses up into individual venture-advice-consultants competing for investors? Or will the lead to broader coordination between venture capital businesses? Or both? # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)