What is a company anyway?

Someone at a party in Schwabing asked me why crypto isn’t worthless. “Stocks and shares are tied to companies that make things,” they argued. “Crypto doesn’t.”

My own political position on crypto is probably more nihilistic than the industry itself - I don’t see salvation there. But I do find it fascinating. Especially meme coins, where value appears and disappears almost arbitrarily, as if speculation itself were the only product required.

In some ways, this isn’t far from what companies already are. Imagine a business that’s formed and folded in an afternoon. That’s crypto today: fleeting communities, sudden capitalisation, collapse, dispersal.

From my decade in marketing, I’ve come to think of a company less as a sacred entity and more as an architecture that stabilises flows long enough to sell something.

• Creativity: ideas, designs, code, stories, patents.

• Capital: financing, debt, speculative bets.

• Information: data, signals, gossip, algorithmic recommendations.

The company doesn’t (yet) own these flows; it organises, channels, and extracts from them.

So when I’m asked if SHIBADOGGYELONMARS coin “counts” as a company, I can only borrow former Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai’s line about the impact of the French Revolution:

It’s far too early to say.