Reinventing the company（From the economist）

Entrepreneurs are redesigning the basic building block of capitalism

NOW that Uber is muscling in on（开拓）their trade, London’s cabbies have become even surlier（无礼的）than usual. Meanwhile, the world’s hoteliers aregrappling with（扭打） Airbnb（一个民居预定网站）, andhardware-makers with cloud computing. Across industries, disrupters（破坏者） are reinventing how the business works. Less obvious,and just as important, they are also reinventing what it is to be a company.

To many managers, corporate life continues to involvedealing with largely anonymous（匿名的） owners, mostof them represented by fund managers who buy and sell shares listed on a stockexchange（证券交易所）. In insurgent（起义的）companies, by contrast, the coupling between ownershipand responsibility is tight. Founders, staff and backers exert（发挥）control directly. It is still early days but, if thisinnovation spreads, it could transform the way companies work.  

Listing badly

The appeal ofthe insurgents’ model is partly a result of the growing dissatisfaction withthe public company. True, the best public companies are remarkableorganisations. They strike a balance between quarterly results (which keep themsharp) and long-term investments (which keep them growing). They produce astream of talented managers and innovative products. They can mobilise talentand capital.

But, after acentury of utter dominance, the public company is showing signs of wear. Onereason is that managers tend to put their own interests first. Theshareholder-value revolution of the 1980s was supposed to solve this by incentivising(激励) managers to think like owners, but itbackfired（失败）. Loaded up with stock options,managers acted like hired guns instead, massaging（揉）the share priceso as to boost their incomes.

The rise of bigfinancial institutions (that hold about 70% of the value of America’sstockmarkets) has further weakened the link between the people who nominally（名义上的） own companies and the companies themselves. Fundmanagers have to deal with an ever-growing（不断增长） group of intermediaries（中间人）, fromregulators（管理者） to their own employees, andeach layer has its own interests to serve and rents to extract（.每一环节都需要满足其利益并从中榨取酬金）No wonder（不足为奇） fund managers usually fail to monitor individualcompanies.

Lastly, a public listing（公开上市）has becomeonerous（繁重的）. Regulations have multiplied since the Enron scandal（丑闻） of 2001-02 and the financial crisis of 2007-08. Althoughmarkets sometimes look to the long term, many managers feel that their jobsdepend upon producing good short-term results, quarter after quarter（一季度一季度的来）.

Conflictinginterests, short-termism and regulation all impose costs. That is a problem ata time（每次） when public companies are struggling to squeeze profitsout of their operations. In the past 30 years profits in the S&P 500 indexof big American companies have grown by 8% a year. Now, for the second quarterin a row, they are expected to fall, by about 5%. The number of companieslisted on America’s stock exchanges has fallen by half since 1996, partlybecause of consolidation（合并）, but alsobecause talented managers would sooner stay private.（优秀管理者更愿意让企业保持私有化）

It is noaccident（没有意外）that othercorporateorganisations（企业组织） are on the rise. Family companies have a new lease oflife. Business people are experimenting with “hybrids”（杂交） that tap into public markets while remaining closelyheld. Astute（机敏的） investors like Jorge Paulo Lemann, of3G Capital, specialise in buying public companies and running them like privateones,（专门收购上市企业，然后像私企那样经营）with lean staffing and a focus on thelong term.（配置精干的团队，然后着眼于长期发展）

The newmenagerie（新野蛮群族）

But the mostinteresting alternative to public companies is a new breed of high-potentialstartups that go by exotic names such as unicorns and gazelles. In the samecities where Ford, Kraft and Heinz built empires a century ago, thousands ofyoung people are creating new firms in temporary office spaces, fuelled bycoffee and dreams. Their companies are pioneering a new organisational form.

对上市公司而言，最有趣的选择是注入具有潜力的初创公司作为新鲜血液，最好有个奇怪的名字像独角兽啊羚羊之类的。一个世纪前诞生的福特，卡夫和亨氏公司，在同样的城市里，成千上万的年轻人正在咖啡和梦想的刺激下，在短租办公室里创造新的公司。他们的公司在引领一个新的组织方式。

The centraldifference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies,startups go to great lengths（竭尽所能的） to define whoowns what. Early in a company’s life, the founders and first recruits own amajority stake—and they incentivise people with ownership stakes orperformance-related rewards. That has always been true for startups, but todaythe rights and responsibilities are meticulously defined in contracts drawn upby lawyers. This aligns interests and creates a culture of hard work and camaraderie.Because they are private rather than public, they measure how they are doingusing performance indicators (such as how many products they have produced)rather than elaborate accounting standards.

核心的差别在于所有权：没人知道上市公司的到底是归属于什么人，初创公司不遗余力的定义是谁拥有这家公司。在公司的初期，创立者和初始雇员拥有主要的股票，他们用股权或者绩效奖励来激励员工。这一点很符合过去的初创公司，但是，现在，权利和义务被律师们细致的定义在合同里。这让利益一致化并创造了一个辛勤工作和团结合作的文化。因为他们是私有的而不是公有的，他们用指标（例如生产了多少产品）来衡量自己做的如何，而不是费时费力的会计准则。

New companiesalso exploit new technology, which enables them to go global without being bigthemselves. Startups used to face difficult choices about when to invest inlarge and lumpy assets such as property and computer systems. Today they canexpand very fast by buying in services as and when they need them. They canincorporate online for a few hundred dollars, raise money from crowdsourcingsites such as Kickstarter, hire programmers from Upwork, rentcomputer-processing power from Amazon, find manufacturers on Alibaba, arrangepayments systems at Square, and immediately set about conquering the world.Vizio was the bestselling brand of television in America in 2010 with just 200employees. WhatsApp persuaded Facebook to buy it for $19 billion despite havingfewer than 60 employees and revenues of $20m.

新公司开发新的技术，这会让他们无需自己变大就能走向全球化。初创公司曾经在何时投资到像徒弟和电脑系统这种大型而笨重的资产上面临艰难的选择。现在他们可以通过在需要时买入服务实现快速扩张。他们可以注册一个几百美元的在线公司，然后通过众筹网站筹集资金，从upwork应聘程序员，从亚马逊租用计算处理器，才能够阿里巴巴上找到制造商。在square上安排好支付系统并快速的左手政府师姐。Vizo是2010年美国销量最好的电视机那时公司只有200名员工。Whatapps让facebook以19万美元的价格收购了它，虽然只有60名员工和2000万美元的收入。

Three objectionshang over the idea that this is a revolution in the making. The first is thatit is confined to a corner of Silicon Valley（仅限于硅谷）. Yet theinsurgent economy is going mainstream. Startups are in every business fromspectacles（眼镜商） (Warby Parker) to finance (Symphony).Airbnb put up nearly 17m guests over the summer and Uber drives millions ofpeople every day. WeWork, an American outfit（机构） that providesaccommodation for startups, has 8,000 companies with 30,000 workers in 56locations in 17 cities.

The second isthat the public company will have the last laugh（最后的赢家是上市公司）, because moststartups want eventually to list or sell themselves to a public company. Infact, a growing number choose to stay private—and are finding it ever easier toraise funds without resorting to public markets. Those technology companiesthat list in America now do so after 11 years compared with four in 1999. Evenwhen they do go public, tech entrepreneurs keep control through “A” classshares.

The thirdobjection is that ownership in these new companies is cut off from the rest ofthe economy. Public companies give ordinary people a stake in capitalism. Thestartup scene is dominated by a clique of venture capitalists with privilegedaccess. That is true, yet ordinary people can invest in startups directlythrough platforms such as SeedInvest or indirectly through mainstream mutualfunds such as T. Rowe Price, which buys into them during their infancy.

Today’s startupswill not have it all their own way. Public companies have their place, especiallyfor capital-intensive industries like oil and gas(资本密集型的行业，例如石油天然气). Many startups will inevitably fail, including some ofthe most famous. But their approach to building a business will survive themand serve as a striking addition to the capitalist toolbox. Airbnb and Uber andthe rest are better suited to virtual networks and fast-changing technologies.They are pioneering a new sort of company that can do a better job of turningdreams into businesses.