RE: Thinking differently: What if Steem was a company?
There's an implied assumption that growing to larger market capitalization is a goal of a company. Is it? Does a company care about its stock price? Should it?
Yes, yes, and yes. Investors care about growth, so a company should care about growth. If not, it won't have investors. The goal shouldn't be to directly manipulate the price, but rather to rearrange the health of the company so that the stock price goes up as a reflection of the business reality - which, I think, was reflected in my follow-up questions.
Part of the problem is that there are a lot of misaligned incentives.... (e.g. lots of debt, overpaid executives with buyout clauses in their contracts, etc.)
I agree that incentives are fundamental, but that shouldn't be an excuse for doing nothing. Beneficiary rewards already make it possible for any entrepreneur to align incentives however they want - almost without limit, but there's been very little experimentation or innovation. What's really needed (IMO) is leadership, vision, and action. If those things are cultivated, incentives will follow.
We don't really have lots of debt, given that "the firm" is only paying ~$0.80 on the dollar right now, and more than 50% of debt is locked up in the SPS, where it cannot be redeemed.
Either way could involve some potential pain for existing stakeholders.
True, but I did specify a 5-year plan. Investors will tolerate short-term pain, if necessary, but even in a turnaround situation the 5-year goal should be targeting growth.
A lot of people think that the "shareholder value" movement in corporate governance has been a problem in that it led to lots of short-term thinking and financial engineering to produce numbers that looked good rather than robust, healthy businesses. Why not just try to build a robust, healthy business directly and treat the stock price as something that can be easily disconnected from long term value by chaotic trading? (Asked partly, but not completely, in a devil's advocate sense).
I agree. But it seems like with the current social dynamics of the chain, the only leadership people seem inclined to follow requires already having lots of money. I can't see any reason why an outsider with lots of money would want to use it to come fix the issues in this ecosystem when they could do literally anything else with their resources. So I think the ecosystem has to try to grow and fix itself from within rather than trying to lure in outsiders.
I was using that as an analogy of the kinds of problems a business could have, not a problem I was saying Steem literally has. Steem has some other problems, like the dominance of the vote-bot business model, the PR landmines that the Hive split seeded into the world that make it harder for the owners of the Steemit stake to take a leadership role without being accused of undermining decentralization, and other things.