Does anyone know if a crowd funding project (or similar) has been done like this before, in order to be the major shareholders of a public company?
I have in mind the large London train companies - this would be, in my very naive understanding, be one way of ensuring people had a say in the direction of companies such as Govia and SouthEastern.
Please correct me if I’m way off. The Kickstarter-style investors would receive a share certificate somehow as proof that it’s not a scam.
Say the kickstarter bought a majority share in the company, who would decide the direction of the company and why not just buy regular shares and vote that way?
That would mean one person or a few steering the company rather than the project funders. I suppose it could work if there were clear rules or principles set out in the funding of the project, including whether the money is ever returned to the funders.
A small follow up to this: I researched Thameslink and SouthEastern trains, who are owned by Govia, which are themselves owned by Go-Ahead group.
The number of shares available from Go-ahead group is apparently 43 million. They’re £20 a share or there abouts:
So even if everyone provided £20 each, and 51% of those shares were available (I’m sure their price would rocket on the back of the project being announced) the project would need 22 million people funding it.
May I ask why?
Is this not illegal in some countries? This sounds like speculation and conspiracy. Wall Streets Bets on Reddit have advocated for this, buying a penny stock on margin and firing the board 
Extinction Rebellion have probably reseached it due to the free time they seem to have. If we buy it they’re getting reefed off them trains
Extinction Rebellion members would have gotten together to buy the jubilee line as payback
Ha ye if they could spell jubilee
I’m not sure buying stock in a company is quite the same as lying in the road stopping traffic, this is more about getting the company to act in the interest of their customers (without petitions and lengthy government interventions). It would be far from fall proof as it would basically be done via open letters to the board of the company, and through establishing some principles at the start of the fund raising project.
The open letter format is fairly common with big investors who want to publically shame the company they’re invested in, to influence the share price too. “We believe Go-Ahead should be doing xyz”.
Sadly Go-Ahead is dividend stock so this technique wouldn’t be quite as effective.
Not that it’s a financially viable idea anyway, as I said.
This idea isn’t new by the way, it’s based in the idea that your staff and customers are the major stakeholders, not the shareholders, and comes under ethical investing now I think, and in the world of angel investing is known as Zebra startups. Gi-Ahead won’t ever change to the stakeholder model so owning their stock would be the next best thing.
Maybe Bill Gates could help us sad London commuters out?! I’m sure non Londoners will have zero sympathy for this either.
If you don’t know the background of these train companies - GoAhead makes hundreds of millions in profit each year on what is essentially a monopoly in London, with very little reinvestment of the money into their services, doing the bare minimum. There’s 1000s of tweets and forum posts to demonstrate this, I think there was a Thameslink petition a year ago with 100k signatures. Luckily I don’t have to travel with them every day but it will be effecting the mental health of the people who do.
TFL owning and running the train companies would probably solve the issues.
So like a profit sharing scheme but for shareholders? I met a guy from Leeds yesterday and he was making about 5% of the profit and he was so happy in his job
What’s a profit sharing scheme?
So employees own a portion of the business. He gets around 5% of the net profits a year. Company sold sandwiches! 14,000 sandwiches a week he said they make.
That just sounds like an employee share scheme with dividends, or possibly a mutual insurance.
Ye you guys might use a different term for it in the UK. So he has shares in the company that amount to 4/5% and yes youre right dividends are paid to him in January for the preceding year.