This morning, the SEC this morning approved as the U.S.’s 14th stock exchange Long Term Stock Exchange (LTSE), an outfit that was founded in 2012 by “Lean Startup” author Eric Ries, who has long wanted to reward shareholders who hold onto their shares, rather than who dump them the minute things go wrong.
Ries thinks such rewards are important because he believes in public markets. Among other things, by establishing a common currency, being publicly traded enables companies to more easily acquire other companies. It enables employees to more freely sell their shares. It also allows retail investors to participate in the growth of tech companies — growth from which they’ve largely been shut out in recent years as the average time a company remains private as stretched to roughly 12 years.
Indeed, Ries’s biggest issue with public market shareholders are their focus on short-term results, citing it as the biggest driver for startups to remain privately held. After all, it’s hard to innovate when you’re being sued over disappointing earnings.
Whether LTSE can usher in rules that encourage both companies and shareholders to focus on the longer term remains to be seen. LTSE has not received approval over any kind of listings standards. It hasn’t even submitted these yet.
While ideally, the exchange wants to welcome “values-based” companies that limit executive bonuses and grant more voting power to shareholders who hang on for the ride, Ries seems to recognize that he may have to settle for less owing to some pushback, including by the Council of Institutional Investors, a group of institutions that fear long-term voting could ultimately empower founders and company insiders at the expense of other shareholders.
During a call today, he told us that LTSE won’t necessarily give more voting power to shareholders who hang on for the long term. “These rewards could be voting or other things,” he said.
Certainly, Ries will see some rewards if LTSE takes off. While numerous reports today note that famed VC Marc Andreessen is one of LTSE’s financial backers, the biggest shareholder right now is Ries himself, who owns 30 percent of the for-profit company, according to government filings.
Other major shareholders include John Bautista, a cofounder of Long Term Stock Exchange who is also an attorney with the law firm Orrick; Founders Fund, which owns 14 percent of the company; Collaborative Fund, which owns 7.8 percent; and Obvious Ventures, which owns 6.7 percent. The company has raised roughly $19 million altogether to date.
Ries is hardly alone wanting companies to be able to go public sooner without worrying about activist investors. We’d written about the case for tenured voting in late 2017, noting then that concept has been around for decades. But while it resonates with founders, few others have embraced the idea. Back in the 1980s, for example, U.S. stock exchanges determined that tenured voting was unnecessarily complicated and too hard to track. Meanwhile, bankers don’t like the idea because anything that looks different to the market is harder to sell.
Interestingly, another Andreessen-backed startup to make headlines this week — Carta — seems like a bet that LTSE won’t realize its vision completely. The seven-year-old, San Francisco-based startup largely helps private company investors, founders, and employees manage their equity and ownership. But it raised $300 million in Series E funding at a $1.7 billion valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz. The reason, it says: its plans to become what Carta CEO Henry Ward describes as the world’s largest marketplace for private company shares.
Carta paints the evolution as a natural one, now that so many startups and institutional investors use its platform already. And investors seem to agree that Carta has more pieces in place than any platform before it. As VC Om Malik of True Ventures told us yesterday , citing the company’s “data density” and “clarity” into the goings on of the many participants on its platform: “That’s one company I wish I was a stockholder in, I like it that much.”
In fact, Ward talks about Carta democratizing access to the private market, but it seems more interested in becoming a hub for startups and institutional investors to get their private company trades done. (At least, Ward, with whom we spoke last week, did not answer simple questions about who will be able to use the platform in the future.)
Whether either company realizes its bold ambitions will take time to know. In the meantime, it will be interesting to understand whether together they can become a safer, smoother, less stressful way for startups to go public, or instead the two wind up competing for mindshare, with Carta hoping companies will stay private, while LTSE is pushing for them to get out in the world — and onto its exchange.
