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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

And porkbun, a seemingly privately owned company, isn't private equity?

Private Equity vs Private Ownership

The first is a vampire looking to take what was publicly or even privately owned, extract every last dollar and leave the shell with the debt of buying the next victim.

Private Ownership is Valve or Porkbun - The people running the business want to make a profit but not to their own or their customers determent.

> The first is a vampire

I mean not always, but that does happen and that's what you hear about.

Is there a good example of a private equity buyout which wasn't based on that strategy?

My understanding is that there are private equity firms who have legitimate strategy and competency with turning around struggling companies.

Good examples have come up in fast food industry like Arby's and Buffalo Wild Wings.

Last paragraph on this article:

https://www.fershman.com/articles/private-equity%E2%80%99s-s...

This "vampire the company into a debt spiral" strategy is definitely not what happened in these cases, though we can argue about whether the end product is better or worse off for it. I'm certainly not lining up at Arby's, Dunkin, or Buffalo Wild Wings. Still, I think that question is essentially irrelevant to the topic at hand: this is a private equity firm that's legitimately trying to make the company healthier on business fundamentals.

Very few, but Canada Goose’s acquisition by Bain Capital was arguably a scaling play, and worked pretty well.

Not in the sense that anyone means when they say private equity?

You mean how it's always used post hoc (ie. "ah ha! the company was owned by private equity! you should've known!") or as a generic kneejerk reaction, neither of which has any rigorous criteria for what the "bad" sort of private equity is?

Yes.

> the "bad" sort of private equity

People mean "acquired by a Private Equity firm". You can learn what one of those is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity_firm

Yeah people generally mean PE investment firms that are in the business of moving around and sucking up companies for short terms and stripping them to squeeze all the money out and then moving on to the next one. Not simply that a company’s equity is privately held, not publicly traded.

Maybe it is.

I rejected porkbun in favour of hostinger just because porkbun is from the USA and hostinger is from Europe.

Which Private Equity company do you think owns them?

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