As much as I agree with the author's point, it's misleading to refer to "the market" when you're really talking about a very small subgroup of people. Much of the distortion and irreality in startup world stems from the fact that companies are not selling to a broad market, but trying to tell persuasive stories to a small group of wealthy investors. Using "the market" to refer to that small group creates confusion that I worry is intentional.
IMO that is still a market (if you have 1 buyer and 1 seller, you have a market), albeit a small and illiquid one.
I think what you are getting at is that because the market for private companies is illiquid, rife with information asymmetry, and is opaque, it is difficult to gauge true market price.
Yes, but I mean something else as well. We're taught that free enterprise is the socially optimal way to allocate resources. Part of that is the assumption that 'the market' that is doing the allocating represents a wide cross-section of society. In this case it's a very small clique, and it takes advantage of our cultural esteem for free enterprise and capitalism to mask the fact that there's not a lot of contact with "the market" as we normally understand it.
There are so many assumptions to unpack in this comment.
1) Some people think that free enterprise is the socially optimal way to allocate resources. Many people don't. I think free enterprise allocates resources in a financially optimal way - sometimes that lines up with socially optimal and sometimes it does not.
2) I think it's a bad assumption to think that anything smaller than the consumer goods market or the public stock market is "not a real market". There are hundreds of VC firms and thousands of startups. It's a much bigger market than most B2B products, it's probably as (in?)efficient as the job market.
3) Given the way public companies are plowing their profits into share buybacks rather than investment, I generally hold private companies in higher esteem than the average public company at the moment.
