Why you should invest in founder-owned businesses
Should it make a difference to investors if a company is owned by its founder? You might argue that a founder-owner would have a deeper interest in the long-term success of his or her corporate creation. Or perhaps having the owner hanging around the management board would inhibit risk taking. But here’s the strange thing: as far as I’ve been able to establish, no studies have ever been done asking if founder (as distinct from family) ownership is a factor in the share performance of various companies. So my colleague Viktoria Lyttkens and I spent six months looking in to it – and the results are quite remarkable.
