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Thesis: large tech companies are private property Antithesis: any entity with billions of users and not much competition becomes quasi-public, needs antitrust Synthesis: adversarial process repels future founders. Instead, could a state pay market price to acquire the company?
Problem: The value of a startup owned by the state would be about 5% of the value of the same startup still run by the founders.
Agree. But that often happens with normal M&A too 
I’m not a fan of antitrust, but if someone is *going* to do it then state M&A may be an alternative.
Gets more interesting if other states come in as bidders.
What if the state were simply the largest equity holder? It would be quite similar to the public markets and an IPO.
Sovereign wealth funds do this. I think we’ll see more. The general trend of tech companies becoming as large as states is accompanied by states starting to act like tech companies (Estonian digital residents, Chile startup visa, UK fintech sandbox).https://teleport.org/blog/2015/07/the-network-state/ …
They don't have to buy it to regulate it. They just need to cut it up or shut it down.
Gov & public would be better off with gov as early investor, IMHO
not to be pedantic, but what does “value” even mean here? no one cares about market cap of IRS or DEA. doesn’t value of a public org really mean utility to customers/users, net of externalities (+ or -)? if so, 95% might not be the right discount factor.
to be clear, I think there’s still a strong argument that a nationalized tech company turned utility wouldn’t provide nearly as much utility, but thinking in terms of equity value is the wrong heuristic.
Another problem: Startup owned by state will erase most, if not all of their international footprint for obvious reasons!
The bureaucrats running the former business (who possibly would be the original founders) could be rewarded according to arbitrary measures of success that are deemed good for society.
The arbitrary measures could still include profitability, but say at only 50% importance where customer satisfaction would be the other 50%.
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