What is a company anyway?
In this article I dive into a concept I’ve thinking of lately.
Last week I was at a party at a friend’s house in Schwabing and got into a debate about crypto. First - point of order - there are two things you should never mention at a party. The first is AI. The second is crypto. That said, I want to try to unpack my argument here.
Their position was essentially: stocks and shares are tied to companies that make things; crypto isn’t.
My own political position on crypto is probably more nihilistic than the industry itself. I don’t see it as a path to salvation, nor as an alternative to capitalism with insurgent roots. But I do find it fascinating - especially meme coins, where value appears and disappears almost arbitrarily, and the only product being sold across the entire ecosystem is speculation itself.
And yet: people clearly perceive value in something. Which got me thinking - what is a company, anyway?
After a 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.
A company doesn’t (yet) own these flows; it organises them, channels them, and extracts value from them.
In the crypto world, even memecoins fulfil this criterion - albeit on massively compressed timelines. You could argue that some crypto entities are businesses that form and fold in an afternoon. The ecosystem exists. There is a community. It simply thrives on sudden capitalisation, collapse, and dispersal.
Most people would say that isn’t a company. Fine. I’d argue it’s only not a company according to how we traditionally agree a company should behave.
So when I’m asked whether SHIBADOGGYELONMARS coin “counts” as a company, I prefer to quote Zhou Enlai, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution:
It’s far too early to say.
