So if I was looking for someone who would build a company with me, someone who would take on an entrepreneurial role, provide expertise, labour or personal connections, I wouldn't be allowed to do that. I wouldn't be allowed to give shares to employees in exchange for labour either. Nor would there be any family businesses.

>Nobody's Labour ever makes a difference. The success of any project is all about capital, political leverage and media exposure. Let's be honest here.

Capital is a factor that leverages and buys labour. Without labour the result of this equation is always zero. Without a product or service you have no customers, regardless of how much free media coverage you may be getting (for whatever reason).

>My strategy would be to only invest in small or medium-sized companies whose founders I can trust and who can manage their risk.

Good luck with that. Personal trust is not a replacement for limited liability though, especially not if shares are publicly traded.

How would a creditor decide how much to lend to a company if the personal assets of all shareholders are used as collateral?

If I owned shares in Microsoft, would I have to provide a payslip and a bank statement to Microsoft's bank? Would they do a credit check? And if I sold my shares, would Microsoft have to pay back part of a bank loan if the buyer's net worth was less than mine?

I don't think you have thought this through.

What, to you, is the difference between these two situations?

1. One person decides to form a company and has all the shares. After six months, he realizes he should really have worked with a cofounder, so he closes that business and opens a brand new one with this cofounder, the two of them now equally owning half the shares.

2. One person decides to form a company and has all the shares. After six months, he realizes he should really have worked with a cofounder, so he hires a very high level early employee and gives him half the shares.

How does this change based on the number of co-founders/early hires? Why does it make a difference if their need for a new person surprises them, so they start all over with the distribution of the equity of a new "business," or they plan for it in advance and set equity aside for such hires?

What a strange claim. Protecting people from scams is literally what the Federal Trade Commission is for, among other agencies. Bankman-Fried was arrested due to breaking existing laws that define what some scams are ahead of time.

> Nobody’s Labour ever makes a difference.

I can see why some people with little to no experience in business or starting companies can get this impression and form pessimistic opinions based on negative stuff you hear in the news or social media. Fortunately, it’s only true of the worst offenders, and not generally true. People’s efforts do make the difference to the success of startups all the time. Having money for sure helps, and primarily affects whether people can afford to try, and for how long, but it’s not as good at ensuring success, effort and timing and luck play larger roles there.

> The bigger the company, the higher the risk.

Why do you believe this? I’d guess fund managers and most investors would outright disagree. The safest single company stocks are the largest companies. A bigger company may have more to lose, but they’re bigger in the first place only because they survived the small and medium phases. The probability of a company failing is much higher when small, and most startups fail before ever getting to small company size, and most of those fail before getting to the medium or large company size.

Most businesspeople think the same.

Is GP sure they are imagineering solutions, and not much larger problems?