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points by anotherengineer 3 days ago | 0 comments

Really wonder how their public benefit mission will align with the expectations to maximize shareholder returns

I want to be optimistic, but I just can’t imagine the public benefit mission winning out in the market

They’re not the first PBC to go public. Coursera, Warby Parker, and United Therapeutics (not affiliated with UHC) have all followed the same path. Not sure if we’ve had enough time to see this tension play out, public benefit corps are only a decade and a half old and most of these companies IPOd in 2020-2021, but there’s probably some evidence one way or the other

[–] triceratops 3 days ago

> the expectations to maximize shareholder returns

There is no legal requirement to do so. So they can simply set the expectation upfront that they won't do it.

[–] mike_hearn 3 days ago

And they are doing so. The S1 says they may never pay dividends (read: they are completely against it), shareholders get no say in how the company is run whatsoever and the company essentially answers to its own friends.

The only way to get return from ANT is to sell to someone else at a higher price, but they aren't promising that of course.

[–] hollerith 3 days ago

A no-dividends policy is nothing new.

Amazon, Tesla, Netflix, and Palo Alto Networks have never paid a dividend at any point in their histories as publicly traded companies.

Advanced Micro Devices hasn't paid one since 1995, Adobe since 2005.

[–] mike_hearn 3 days ago

True, although Amazon and Netflix at least have done large stock buybacks, which are theoretically equivalent except for tax incidence. So they have returned capital to investors. I didn't check for the others, maybe they did too.

[–] hollerith 2 days ago

Sure, but Anthropic never announced that it will never return capital to investors; did it?

[–] mike_hearn 4 hours ago

I think this S-1 is about as close as you can get to announcing such a policy. It doesn't literally commit them to never returning capital, but it appears to block off or rule out pretty much any chance of them doing so via various means.

[–] kerbs 3 days ago

They can co-exist, maybe only if times are good I suppose. It's not too different from Apple here:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/03/tim-cook...

[–] Teknomadix 3 days ago

The PBC mission is directly aligned. The "public" that they benefit are defined as their shareholders.