Investor Marc Andreessen tweeted an eight-step plan on how to destroy the public stock market.
According to Andreessen, increased regulation discourages companies from going public. He points out that the number of publicly traded companies already naturally decreases because of takeovers, mergers, and bankruptcies.
We've included the Tweets below:
1/How to kill the public stock market, Step 1: # of public companies naturally shrinks each year due to mergers, takeovers, bankruptcies.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20142/Step 2: Use regulatory "reforms" to radically reduce rate of new IPOs, shrinking # of public companies from 8,800 to 3,600 since 1997.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20143/Step 3: Steadily increase # of regulators, lawyers, activists, pressure groups, "governance experts" against shrinking # of public co's.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20144/Step 4: "Pounds per square inch" of pressure on each public co increases, further disincenting new IPOs and incenting private takeovers.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20145/Step 5: Private growth companies go public much later or not at all, shifting growth and capital gains from public to private market.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20146/Step 6: Without growth, gets harder & harder to realize gains in public market required by investors, particularly for retirement plans.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20147/Step 7: Layer on top a healthy dose of market manipulation, mutual fund front-running, and HFT profit extraction. http://t.co/IghRocPadg
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 20148/Step 8: Repeat as necessary until blood completely squeezed from stone, then wonder what happened to the good old days.
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 31, 2014SEE ALSO – BEN HOROWITZ: I Asked My Employees To Work 7 Days A Week For 6 Months And They Loved It