Palantir’s concentrated governance is great for execs, but what about shareholders?

A few days ago I wrote down a few notes stirring a buoyant occasion for Palantir, probing to find good word amidst the company’s huge historic insufficiencies.

Heading into the next phase of Palantir’s march to the public marketplaces, I was very curious to see how the company would hone its S-1 filing to give itself the highest possible shot during its impending debut.

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And we finally did get a new S-1/ A filing, travel documents that our own Danny Crichton immediately parsed and clothed. What he found was a rectified of amendments that seem to increase the chance that three Palantir insiders will insure more than 50% of the company’s voting influence forever, maybe seeing it a controlled busines, which would liberate the conglomerate from adopt regulatory requirements.

Danny dryly include an indication that” having regard to the lessened electing strength of employee and investor shares, it is possible that these electing funds will negatively affect the final premium of those shares .” That’s being polite.

Mulling this over this morning, I hindered thinking about Snap, which sold furnish in its IPO that granted brand-new stockholders no votes at all, and Facebook, which is controlled by Mark Zuckerberg as his personal fiefdom. The two are not alone in this matter. There are a lot of other public tech companionships that accommodate certain groups of pre-IPO stockholders more polls than others on a per-share basis, though perhaps to a smaller degree than what Facebook has managed.

It feels like many startups( and former startups) have decided over season that having fabric shareholder input is a bad idea. That, in effect, they must run fellowships as not merely kingdoms, but unquestioned ones, to boot.

I am not entirely convinced that this is the best way to create long-term shareholder wealth.

If you are on the other side of this particular fence, I understand. After all, Facebook is a global juggernaut and Snap has finally managed to eke out stock-market incomes to return its appreciate back around to where it was when it went world.( A three-year journey .)

But those arguments are only so good. You could easily argue that the two companies could have done much more with less self-sabotage( Facebook) and a bit more spend discipline( Snap ).