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Comment by edblarney | Hacker News Reader

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edblarney·

"As a buyer, you have no right to dictate what gets sold. "

Not quite.

This is why there are tons of regulations (most of them good) around being a publicly traded company.

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I don't see what the upside is to preventing founders to sell non-voting shares to the public. There are always other ways to raise capital with negotiated terms. The great thing about publicly traded companies is that it allows anyone to invest in a low cost standardized and liquid fashion. Onerous restrictions on the IPO market will just discourage IPOs in favor of other methods of raising capital where the gains are not available to smaller investors

Because a shares without a vote cannot protect themselves from being diluted or wildly uneven dividends and buybacks.

It has happened in the past.

Of course there is a risk in that, and that's why non-voting shares usually trade to a discount to voting shares. If the voting members fleece the non-voting members, this will make it increasingly difficult to raise money in the future without diluting ownership (GOOG vs GOOGL is about 3% discount)

Then don't buy those shares.

Can you explain why it will be different this time around to have an unregulated public market that lead to the great depression? I ask because your comment would apply to any regulation in the public markets. Can you at least explain why this specific situation would not be problematic?

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