What private companies are you happy doing business with?
I'm increasingly of the opinion that most publicly owned companies either have lower quality services and products or eventually will. It may not matter in the end for most people as long as they can get what they need but personally if I have a choice I'd rather do business with companies not being traded with the hope that they can still operate without feeling like they need to go public to survive. There must still be a lot of privately owned companies that do prioritize customers instead of shareholders but with the constant churn of selloffs and takeovers it can be hard to keep track of.
The only popular one I can think of right now that I do regular business with is Valve Software. What are some other private companies that you are happy to support?
Valve, hands down. I'm sure others will agree, they're probably the best private company that most people will ever do business with. Sometimes it feels like to me that they are the only large company left that actually cares about the end user's experience. Not just in the software, but also in support.
They also happen to be the most profitable company in the world per employee
Which I think really speaks to their business model and the fact that there is value in producing a quality product and caring about the consumer.
—-
Note: there is a darker side - the skin gambling and loot box issues that imo valve has not done enough to curb
The excellent YouTube channel People Make Games did a two-part documentary on Valve. Part 1 focuses on exactly what you mentioned, the gambling and loot box issues. And Part 2 focuses on the employees and what it's like to work there. Highly recommend them both. I'm still a huge fan of Valve's products and their customer-service. But those videos definitely shed a different light on them for me personally.
slight edit: got the parts mixed up
Yeah it really is a shame Vale has allowed and even implicitly promoted such a degenerate problem on their platform. I understand that money printer go brrr, but it really seems like Valve could afford to not allow this and still make all the money in the world.
I mostly agree with you, however I do have a minor gripe that is kind of selfish.
So the company I currently work for used to do a lot of business for Valve, a lot of the packaging and marketing materials for everything from the original steam deck to internal valve initiatives.
However in recent years they moved all production to China.
I get the cost of going to China because I've worked in sourcing, licensing, and manufacturing, so truly I get it.
But for being a privately owned company and how incredibly valued Valve is and how much money they make, I wish they'd support their local and American owned businesses, especially ones like us that have supported them over the years.
Especially because we're also super passionate about Valve and their products. We genuinely looked forward to working with them and always pulled all the stops for them.
FYI it took me a moment to realise you mean publicly traded companies, not ones that were nationalised and owned by the people.
I think it’s worth saying that being a private company is not a panacea. I used to work for The Wonderful Company. Despite the name, they were not wonderful. They were far from the worst company I have worked with, but definitely not wonderful. It was privately owned by Stuart and Linda Resnick.
Here is a good example. It’s an employee owned cooperative, not private, but it is a similar idea. It’s called Oliver’s Market, and it’s the best damn grocery store I have ever been to. Some locals complain that it’s too expensive, but I don’t think it actually is. If you buy quality food from other grocery stores, Oliver’s actually ends up being cheaper. It’s just that Oliver’s doesn’t stock the bottom of the barrel crap that you probably shouldn’t be buying anyway. All around a fantastic company.
Yeah I've no doubt there are tons of private companies that are happy to make a quick buck screwing people over and I didn't mean to suggest they are always better. It just seems to me even the best managed public companies tend to put customer needs behind shareholders.
I think things turn out best when the incentives for shareholders can be aligned with the incentives for consumers. You can see this pretty clearly with certain companies like Apple, which was mentioned in the now deleted comment.
For their hardware, especially lower end hardware, Apple’s incentives align well with customers. iPhones come out every year with decent improvements and are a fantastic value, especially when you consider the support length. The lower priced Macintoshes are some of the best computers you can buy.
But for things like services, in particular the App Store 30% fee, Apple’s incentives are the opposite of what is good for the consumer. That is how we get all the anticompetitive decisions that Apple makes, and their malicious compliance to the EU DMA.
Ultimately the incentives for a private and public company are identical, it’s just that public company incentives are stronger.
Are they really? I'm not saying they're bad, clearly they're good, but after experiencing how franky completely okay many low-end Android phones have been in the recent years at least, around here (Europe, so apple stuff may be more expensive) sold for less than 1/3 of the price of the cheapest iPhone model, fantastic value is not something I'd use.
Again, they're good, but aren't Macbooks quite overpriced for their hardware and designed to be very difficult to repair? Or has that changed recently, or are we talking about desktops?
I hate to "well akchually" on this in particular because I despise walled gardens (it's one of the main reasons why I don't own any Apple products, no idea what I'll do if Google succeeds in moving in that direction as well), but Appstore's big advantage for the consumer is tighter control and more curation. It has way less bullshit adware or straight up malicious nonsense than Goole Play store.
I switched to apple after using and loving Android for years. I switched in 2020. The App Store might have slightly less adware and malicious products, but not by much. There are numerous apps that try to trick kids into purchasing a $10/week subscription to a shitty mobile game with their parents credit card. It takes so little searching to find an app that explicitly breaks apples listed rules on the App Store. Apples incentive to remove them is nearly zero, since they make 30% of those ridiculous subscription fees. This misaligned incentives also shows in other products like them destroying the usability of the apple TV apps to sell their subscription service.
With regard to iPhones being good products, I stand by this. Are they the best deal you can find? Nope. But are they a good value? Yes. Don’t forget that Apple devices get software support for far longer than any Android devices on the market. Google keeps promising longer support, but doesn’t actually support they devices they already have sold. When I switched to the iPhone, I switched from the Galaxy s10e to the iPhone 6s+. The iPhone was far older, but had consistently better day to day performance than the 1 year old Samsung. When I had bought the s10e, the contemporary iPhone was the 11, which is still supported. The s10e is definitely not.
As for Macs being a good value, I stand by that too. Before Apple silicon happened, I comparison shopped Mac laptops to the equivalent pc laptops. If you actually got similar specs, the pc laptops were within $100 difference of the macs (with some of the PCs being more expensive). People view macs as a poor value because they don’t serve the low cost market with new devices. But if you actually compare them correctly, they are quite reasonably priced. And everything changed when the Apple silicon attacked. If you haven’t used one, it’s hard to convey just how good Apple silicon is. They are super powerful, and still manage to sip battery life. The only thing close is the snapdragon windows laptops, but Apple silicon still runs laps around those chips. The base model Mac mini is pretty much the best value computer money can buy right now.
I can't really argue against that, because I keep buying the damn things, and the package as a whole is better than anything else I know of on the market - but I also can't in good conscience think of them as reasonably priced when they deliberately underspec the base models for price anchoring, and then gouge to a ridiculous degree on the storage and RAM upgrades you need to make it a worthwhile purchase.
Alright, lessons learned! The thing with Appstore curation definitely used to be true, but obviously isn't anymore, too bad.
With regards to Android phone performance, I've only ever used one flagship phone and since then I've been happy with "low end of the midrange", phones that cost half of what iPhones cost. They're fast enough to not annoy me in any way and the only difference I mind is that flagship phones always get much better tuned camera software, which dictates photo quality no matter which one has better hardware. With regards to long term support, perhaps this is the most ignorant or naive thing I'll say here, but I've never had a security problem with any phone ever. I'm using a phone released in 2021 with no issues, previous one was a similar situation.
I disagree with Macs being good value before the switch to ARM, but yeah, I agree that their switch to ARM has been really cool and I hope we get some competitors in time. The downside is that software needs more work to fully utilize the different platform, but that is improving all the time. IIRC the really bad serviceability is still an issue in the laptops though.
Unfortunately at least half of the software I use does not run on a Mac, plus I tend to use old specialized software (and also old games) and Mac OS's backwards compatibility is by far the worst of all desktop platforms, which makes it unusable for me.
The repairability issue is one point that I won’t ever try to defend Apple on. It’s just bad. And the worst part is that other manufacturers just seem to follow Apple in this. If I didn’t like macOS as much as I do, the only laptop I would ever buy is a framework.
I will say that Apple has made some interesting advancements in iPhone repairability. This is right after they made them extremely unrepairable, but they are nonetheless advancements. For example, I believe the iPhone 13 was the first glass sandwich style device that could be opened from both sides. Previous iterations could only be opened from the front or back, making replacement of one slab of glass incredibly difficult. All phones, including androids, had to choose to make a screen replacement easy or a back glass replacement easy. iPhone has both be easy. I don’t know if this advancement has been copied by Android manufacturers yet.
This might be the first time I've ever seen anyone say that Apple is pro-consumer... they have done irreparable damage to the right to repair and have contributed more to the e-waste problem with planned obsolescence than any other company in the world. The biggest issue I have with them is that when Apple takes a "brave" stance, it empowers all the other companies to follow in their footsteps and overall leads to a decline in the general market.
King Arthur Baking Company
They are 100% employee owned through employee stock ownership plan, where eligible employees earn/accrue company stock over time. It is very rare to see this type of model today in the United States, but it aligns with how I wish more companies were structured.
They also make excellent flour.
They do more than make excellent flour, they publish a huge range of great quality recipes on their site that they develop, and host a baker's hotline that you can call and get live support from real people on whatever you need help with when baking.
My first step for making any baked good is usually to check King Arthur's recipe as a baseline!
I was going to say this. It's one of the few websites from brands that I bother going to. Their recipes aren't revenue generators so none of the rambling backstory and ads, just classic recipes that work well. I go there first for anything baking related.
They also have an incredibly extensive list of ingredient volume to weight conversions if you run into recipes that haven't already had the ingredient weights listed. It's saved my butt more than once.
I’d love to see more well known successful companies with this sort of structure. It just seems like the right incentive structure for a sustainable company with a good product
Ocean spray, the cranberry company, is also a cooperative owned by its member farmers. Don't know of any others on store shelves, but we always go out of our way to buy from those two companies.
Wow I never would’ve guessed. Good to know!
Bob's Red Mill has a similar ownership structure. And great products as well.
In the end, the main thing that being a public company actually entails is that you need a robust accounting and reporting system such that you can meet the government-mandated reporting requirements that a public company must satisfy. It's fundamentally about about able to meet transparency goals.
What that lets you do is sell your stock on public stock markets. It doesn't mean you have to let "shareholders" control the company any more than you want to, nor that you are somehow obligated to maximize profit (this is usually confused with fiduciary duty).
There is a matter of correlation there - the usual reason people want to go public is that your stocks being able to be traded by anyone will allow you to raise much more money for capital than a private company would. The fact that it is publicly traded not only means that the pool of investing money is much larger, but also that your equity is very liquid, which makes potential investors less scared about putting money in.
If you don't care, and just want to run your company as a boutique, then going public is a lot of accounting work for not a lot of gain.
So the population of public companies has more companies where the founders have the goal of growing very large, which is what you are likely observing when you say that they have "lower quality services".
That hasn't been true since 1919 when the Dodge v. Ford ruling showed that a corporation must be managed primarily for the profit of its stockholders, not the personal whims or social goals of its founders.
Shareholder primacy is never enforced after that case. There are numerous examples in modern times.
What happened when Zuck decided to spend the GDP of a small country on the metaverse? Nothing. He’s still doing it, buoyed by Meta’s other revenue generating businesses.
Nor is it unique to public companies. Private companies have shareholders as well.
Zucc has a 61% controlling vote share, which is a rare exception to most publicly traded companies.
Sure, but if shareholder primacy were enforced legally, the remaining 39% (as well as all non-voting shareholders) would have grounds to sue. All Zuckerberg’s control gives him is job safety from the board; he is the board.
Public and private companies with CEOs that do not have a controlling vote share suffer from the same pressure; the CEO must appease the shareholder-appointed board to keep their job. The easiest way to make all shareholders happy is to maximize profits; if you believe this is a problem (I do), it’s really a coordination problem akin to the tragedy of the commons.
Worth noting that the duty is to manage in the shareholders interests - that leaves a surprisingly large open door to debate what that actually means: short term profit, long term profit, regulatory risks and fines, reinvestment, asset growth, etc. etc. And then within each of those categories there's even more scope to debate what a reasonable person would expect to achieve those goals: product quality, cost cutting, brand perception, and a million other things.
But yeah, like I said below, the real pressure that most public companies feel is "make share price go up". In practice the incentive structure tends to come out the way you're interpreting it, but I do think the legal nuance is still an interesting one - more than anything because it's a route to realigning those interests a bit if we could get sufficiently large shareholders (pension funds, for example, which are theoretically operating in the interests of millions of normal people) to start making clear that they're willing to sacrifice a certain amount of share price growth for externalities they value more, such as prioritising the environment where doing so is only marginally more expensive than not.
You could maybe argue that this is also just a function of extreme growth, but going public does tend to re-center compensation for the decision makers in terms of share price, which meaningfully changes the incentive structure compared to an equally large privately held company - there can be a lot more incentive to "metagame" the expected market perception of a move, and particularly to consider that on relatively short timescales, where a privately held company leader will often have more ability to wait for the actual business impacts of a decision to be shown before it's judged.
You're also a lot more likely to be dealing with significant investments from shareholders whose sole interest is increasing share price - a lot of them will be through large funds where the ownership of the company is heavily abstracted away from the investors. The pressures put on the company from that kind of investment can be quite different to those from a smaller number of more targeted shareholders investing in a privately held company, even at similar scale (not to say necessarily better, there are plenty of examples of private equity asset stripping out there, but a privately held company can at least attempt to be selective about taking money only from people whose interests align with those of the founders, in a way that one with significant publicly traded shares can't).
The way I see it once you start taking money by selling shares it becomes way easier to keep doing that instead of increasing sales by making your product or service better.
I think it starts out with good intentions, you need more investments to make the changes to improve your services but then there is always a need for more investment and very quickly the shareholders become the only real customers.
That's not really how it works. You, as in the company, don't really "make money" by selling shares. Because of dilution, the change in net value for the shareholders - which is, in essence, the company, for public and private companies - is 0.
Surely value is created in the process or why would anyone do it?
@stu2b50 is quite right about why issuing shares (or taking on debt, for that matter) can be in the interests of the company - and often that's exactly why it's done. But the other important answer to "why" is that sometimes it's in the interests of the people making the decision, even if that goes against the interests of the company as a whole.
Maybe the money is being raised to invest in the company's long term success. Or maybe it's being raised to boost some short term numbers by spending unsustainably, thus hitting targets and justifying a very large round of executive bonuses. Either can be true, and how easy it is to get away with the latter depends on a whole lot of internal and external factors.
The value is in liquidity - the time value of money. It's the same reason why it can be logical to take on debt, even though in a pure +- calculation, you have less money than when you started when you take a loan (the principle minus interest paid).
It's not pointless, but if you just sell equity the only way for that to be "profitable" is for it to be a ponzi scheme, and overall the company is not gaining value in a ponzi scheme.
The backbone of the company's value is always its actual revenue and potential future revenue.
Robert McNeel & Associates are a private, employee-owned software company behind Rhino 3D, one of the most powerful CAD software out there. Its scripting add-on, Grasshopper, is used by all the avant garde architecture to create those alien spaceship-looking building designs you see out there.
They're a quiet, unsexy firm and have been developing and refining Rhino 3D for over 30 years. Their software license is expensive ($1000 a seat) but once you buy it it's yours, and their customer support is great (US-based and speak English).
Quality is out there, but you've got to pay for it.
My wife is a ride or die rhino user, and thanks to educators in her landscape architect faculty who are passionate about quality reliable software. Glad to see it mentioned here.
Dynalist Inc., the developer of Obsidian
Is it just the software you enjoy or has the developer been doing other good things?
The software and their company's business model.
Saying that Obsidian saved my life is only a slight overstatement. I have ADHD that requires fairy diligent and complex daily management if I am to retain my health and functionality. I'm in the middle of a seriously challenging career transformation, spanning multiple years, that even a neuronormal person would struggle to manage. On top of this, last year I got a new neighbour who is doing their best to drive me off the premises because it would be convenient for them. One way they tried was rogue legal action (which worked on my other neighbour who moved out). Obsidian has been a key factor in all three things going as well as they possibly could go.
Briefly about that last thing:
They were betting on it being enough to threaten me with a lawsuit, because in order to remain confident I didn't do anything wrong, I would have to have an insane amount of pre-recorded data on my daily activities, which normal people do not need nor have. But I have Obsidian and keeping logs is so insanely frictionless that I just started spontaneously doing so a year prior. Mentioning this to their lawyer resulted in him never contacting me again.The reason I've felt confident enough to put my entire life on Obsidian is the way the company is managed. They are against all sorts of enshittification and as part of this, staunchly support user-owned data. There are no proprietary file formats (save for special plugins that need one to function), no mandatory accounts to set up, nothing in the cloud (unless you want to sync something and even then you can use third party options in addition to the native sync). You don't even have to pay anything to start and continue using the fully featured local system. No ads or data-collecting. When you go to the settings, there's an option to turn off AI features and it's turned off by default. That sort of thing.
They have zero corporate bloat - I think they're only 8 employees and a dog - and they have no plans to sell out. In fact, last year a predatory tech firm (Bending Spoons) offered to buy them and they just asked if they may publish the proposition email to gauge user sentiment (obviously sentiment was overwhelmingly negative). The CEO made it clear that everyone who works for them is allowed to throw such emails straight to the bin without even discussing it with others.
They're just a really lovely, special company.
Awesome! That's definitely the kind of company I was hoping to hear more about.
Aside from a very few specific small businesses, I can't say there are necessarily any large businesses I am "happy" to support, just products or services I still find to be reasonable or useful or of a particular quality and if the business hasn't made itself out to be awful in a number of ways, I may recommend their products or services to others.
I find it extremely difficult to determine any I would be enthusiastic about supporting vocally unless they met a high bar of workers' rights, inclusivity, and other standards.
There are crappy companies that still get my business because of an abundance of convenience or affordability or some other reason that I begrudgingly use them
While I understand and even think private vs. public can have a definite impact on how a company operates, I don't think much can be determined from that factor alone (aside from I would be hard-pressed to support any public company enough that I'd consider them worth mentioning to anyone). But plenty of private companies and even small businesses can easily have bad company cultures, be crappy to their workers, make bad products, overcharge for those products, etc
My favorite grocery store of all time, Wegmans. It's been in the top of Fortune's "Best 100 Companies to Work For" list a few times. The employees are always super helpful and their quality and range of products are great. They also have superb gluten-free options (and clear labeling!), which is great because my wife is gluten intolerant.
It's honestly the only place we shop. If we're getting good meat for a special occasion, we'll run to whole foods because their butcher is better. I'd be lying if I said that we didn't take proximity to Wegmans into consideration when we were buying our house... We're 7 minutes away from the closest one.
If grocery stores count, then WinCo all the way! They are not a co-op but they are employee owned, and they have huge stores with major variety. The workers seem to be happier than any grocery chain I’ve ever seen.
That being said the place I shop at the most is a local green grocer, and they are the tops in my book.
Canadian Tire Corporation. They are not perfect by any means, but they are a staple in Canada. Still Canadian owned, various useful businesses and financial products under their umbrella. I venture that most Canadians probably deal with them in some way pretty often. They usually have good customer service, at least for their financial products. They employ a ton of Canadians.
I don't just throw my money at them and they still have plenty of problems, but I have no problem shopping at their umbrella of stores, etc.
It's nice to see Canadian retail thriving as since NAFTA, it's been less and less in many sectors.
I'll raise you a Calgary Co-op, a grocery chain owned by its members with a successful liquor store, gas bar and loyalty program. While it's been a few years since they switched distributors, their produce used to come almost entirely from Alberta farms. Apparently this just wasn't tenable anymore.
Apple is publicly traded, this topic is looking for privately owned companies.
Off topic but mine too and me too! :)