David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Malfeasance to exist in the private markets or international pseudo domestic markets, wherever crypto exists. Because crypto impacts the US even for companies that aren't domiciled here. We've done a lot of things to push companies, either away from going public or away from doing business in the country. It still totally affects Americans and Canadian teachers. FTX being a prime example there. This isn't a direct answer to your question. But one thing that I thought about through this whole process, about Sarbanes-Oxley and the consequence of stay private longer and whatnot, no doubt, Sarbanes-Oxley raised the cost and complexity of being a public company. No doubt. I think, though, probably not as much as the stay private longer proponents were saying, and this might be related to what you're saying. I suspect, again, to the incentives and behaviors, a lot of the companies that stayed private longer weren't doing so for the stated reason that it was too hard and too unrest to be a public company. But they were doing it because there was too much benefit and money to be made by staying private, whether that was secondary sales, whether that was being able to prop up your company better than your business was performing, just the general opacity that the private markets afforded. Even thinking about companies like Uber, the king, the granddaddy of all of the stay private longer. I think that's fair. I also think, what else was congress going to do? It's not like they can go create Bahamian laws. They can make it harder to invest in offshore entities, but not sure that that's necessarily good. That might be a baby bathwater situation. You also can make it harder to be a private company, but we don't want that either. We want to encourage new business creation. We want to encourage a period before companies go public, where they can have looser relationships with their private shareholders and communicate information in a less standard way, because they're tiny companies. I think that makes a lot of sense. There's always a signal noise thing, where you want to make sure that your legislation is directed at quashing only the signal that you want without having the blast radius.…

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