L ast week, I sold my shareholdings in two companies. It was a coincidence that both deals completed on the same day. One business I helped to co-found more than nine years before; one I had backed about four years ago. In each I made reasonable returns, and for different reasons it seemed the right time to depart.
As the poet Cecil Day-Lewis said: “There’s a kind of release/And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.” So it feels appropriate, as the year draws to a close, a time when we look both back and forward at the start of a new year, to reflect on what it means to be a partner in an enterprise.
The first proper companies were called joint-stock, and that is the nature of a commercial undertaking – a combination of management and capital for mutual advantage. The journey together is frequently haphazard, for commercial life is an unpredictable rollercoaster for most of us. The invention of these limited liability corporations made possible the modern world: how they arise, and how they die, matters.