The increasing emphasis on the short term prospects of a publicly traded company is a problem. But is there anything here that's specific to software and web-focused companies? Others have been writing about this for years. John Bogle for example has argued that the increasing concentration of shares in a handful of pensions and mutual funds prevents the company's owners from acting like long-term owners.
Pension funds have longer time horizons than the VCs they are being swapped out with. The issue is that these long-term holders require a fraction of short-term holders to give them liquidity, i.e. the safety of knowing that one can exit the investment without a substantial haircut if one needs to.
The present problem is that the proportion of short-term to long-term holders in the market is too high. The former are there to support the latter.
Another point is that the latter, at some point, demand dividends. The antipathy to Apple that I saw on HN recently when it announced its dividend programme is also anathema to a healthy public capital market.
There is something slightly more specific, which is that we have some technology-related gris-gris[1]. The basic problem is that everyone feels more or less qualified to guide a company's technological progress. One very chilling story which exemplifies this comes from about 7-8 minutes into a Clojure talk:
But really what this is is, "I'm afraid. Because I don't want to choose
something that might put my job at risk, and so I will easily pick
something that is less effective but more industry-accepted, rather than
something riskier where I might risk really good success but also
failure." ... I was literally in a meeting at one point with a CTO and
he said, "We believe that the only way this project will ever be a
success is if we pick Delphi, but we're picking PowerBuilder." Knowing
that it's going to fail, but that's the safer choice politically because
if they pick Delphi, they might win, but they might lose and if they
lose and they picked something weird then they get fired.
So if you're a tech company and you go public, right, the salient fact is that your company is no longer self-valuing, but its value is being set by an (extremely meta) popularity contest: I think that this news will make others value you less, so I immediately sell a little cheaper than I think it's valued, thus driving the price down, and so forth. Normally you would say "who cares what someone says my value is?" but unfortunately the people who are playing this game ultimately own the company, so it matters by fiat. They can and perhaps will fire people who don't make that stock price go up.
The gris-gris enter in just about here. Some are owned by the market as a whole, and your owners will be anticipating them and responding to them. But the more dangerous gris-gris will belong to your owners themselves, I suspect -- "You used Lisp? What the hell is that? You're fired."
So that's where I would focus the discussion. Random people on the stock market probably have just enough technical knowledge to think that they know much more than they know. That puts them in a dangerous position when they own your company. If Zuckerberg is careful to keep more than 50% of his company while going public and in doing so releases an open document saying essentially "Facebook is about hackers," I would understand him as trying to violate some taboo on the open market (where "hacker" is a bad word) as well as trying to make sure that people can never muscle out the hacker approach that, in his view, probably makes Facebook exactly what it is. He doesn't want the Ownership to start pressuring the Developers with technological misunderstandings.
[1] A gris-gris (gree-gree) is a voodoo talisman. The key feature here is that it is unquestionably believed to work.
