Via Reddit, I saw this gem about a guy who essentially did a self-IPO and puts shares of himself up for bid to raise money. The result was that his investors had an outsized effect on his life, going so far as to make decisions about the gender of the people he should date and his political registration. It was a pretty interesting, if poorly-ended read.
What made it thought-provoking wasn’t the fact that it sounds like a good idea: it’s very obviously a terribly, terribly stupid idea. No, the interesting thing comes from a more meta consideration. Why is an IPO a good idea for a company like Google, but a bad idea for any one individual person working at a place like Google? If IPOs are bad when applied to individuals, how did it come to be that individuals would discover that they can be successfully applied to corporate entities? In other words, where did this idea come from?
The other nugget I pull out of this story is a reminder that market entities like IPOs are just tools. They are not an end in and of themselves, like all market tools. When a market tool fails, you should discard it, not hold onto it for purely dogmatic reasons. That’s something that’s lost on a lot of people as well.
Anyway, just a couple of thoughts for this Thursday night.