The Great Debate UK

from Paul Smalera:

Facebook.coop

Facebook shouldn't pay its users. Its users should pay to own Facebook.

“Facebook was not originally created to be a company,” founder Mark Zuckerberg wrote in his letter to investors announcing the IPO of his already hugely successful and profitable company. “It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected.”

Facebook has succeeded wildly, despite internal admonitions that its “journey” is only 1 percent finished. Journalists have latched onto Zuckerberg’s statement that Facebook wants to “rewire” the way the world works. In a world of thousands of self-anointed “social media experts,” only Zuckerberg can claim to have basically invented what the world thinks of as social media. He has etched himself into the timeline of human innovation.

Pity then, that Zuckerberg hasn’t turned his talents or attention toward Facebook’s financial underpinnings. After all, an IPO? How ho-hum can he get? If Mark really wants to accomplish his social mission with Facebook, he should share the company’s ownership with the people who helped him create it. Not just his Harvard contemporaries. Not just the programmers. Not even just the venture capitalists.

I’m talking about us. All of us. The users. Facebook should be a user-owned, user-managed company, run for the benefit of users. For the Facebook, by the Facebook. The company should be a cooperative.

Before I explain further, let me lay out the case in four simple points:

from Reuters Investigates:

Sleepy in Seattle — the future of Microsoft

The world's biggest software maker once inspired fear in tech land. Today it's mostly yawns. Is Microsoft no longer a growth company? Should Google be nervous, too? And are Steve Ballmer's days at the helm numbered?

Seattle correspondent Bill Rigby's special report has some answers.

from The Great Debate:

The death and resurrection of the tech IPO

-- Eric Auchard is a Reuters columnist. The opinions expressed are his own --

The U.S. venture capital industry is desperate to repair the market for initial public stock offerings, but reviving the goose that once laid hundreds of golden eggs may not get very far.

The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) this week set out its comprehensive plan to revive the IPO market and the heady investment returns that once fueled the tightly knit venture capital industry's success.

From October through March, there were no venture-backed IPOs in the United States -- the first time on record of no venture IPO activity for two consecutive quarters.

The NVCA plan is entitled "The 4-Pillar Plan to Restore Liquidity to the U.S. Venture Capital Industry." Institutions at every step in the process that turns bright business ideas into publicly traded companies come in for criticism for the decline of the IPO market.

But start-up entrepreneurs and their venture capital backers largely have themselves to blame for why public markets have become gun-shy about buying into IPOs.

There is now a noticeable dearth of entrepreneurs building companies with differentiated strategies and sustainable business models. Hot start-ups are now far more often built to be sold to established firms. And when good ideas emerge, VCs flood the market with a slew of copycats, making it hard for true pioneers to succeed.