"IT SEEMS like a way of living in hell without dying." That was the way James Freeman, founder of Blue Bottle Coffee, described the process of taking a company public in the modern era - and the way he explained why he sold his company instead to Nestle last week.
It is no secret that the US public stock markets - despite the heights they've reached (and the credit that President Donald Trump has taken for them) - are fundamentally broken. No chief executive wants to live in the glare of the public spotlight and deal with pesky investors who hold stocks in time frames of days and months, not years and decades.
The number of companies listed on public stock exchanges is half what it was two decades...
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