The grass always seems greener on the other side. Managers of public companies want to be private so they don’t have to hit quarterly targets. And strong private companies would love public capital to grow without micromanaging oversight from their VC overlords.Even though being public is positioned as a black and white binary decision I think it’s far from that, the value of being public comes from the company itself.

Let’s take an example of something that is public, parks, to see why. There are public parks and there are private parks.In both cases a park is a piece of property that exists to benefit some party. A park is a perfect analogy for public companies. Parks come in all shapes and sizes, for tiny one acre plots stuck in the corner of a subdivision to the massive and well known Grand Canyon. In the United States it’s hard to travel far without encountering a park of some sort, either a large national park, or a small local township park. Just as there are people everywhere, there are parks everywhere.

Parks vary in their quality. The majestic National Parks are considered in a class of their own. They’re destination parks with scenic features unmatched anywhere else. These are the large caps of the market, the companies that everyone knows that are capitalistic national treasures. The thing with National Parks is that while they’re beautiful they don’t hold a monopoly on beauty. George Washington National Forest is just as scenic as nearby Shenandoah National Park, yet one is known while the other isn’t. Likewise there are many state parks and local parks that harbor stunning attractions too.

The scenery between parks varies as does the care and quality of parks. If you listened to Americans for long enough you’d have the impression that public parks are universally trashed and full of nepotistic park management. This view is probably derived from that fact that most Americans visit a park exactly once a year, on the 4th of July, when they do the trashing while watching the fireworks.