If a company starts up as three geeks in a garage, it is no big problem that the shareholders – probably just the three of them – do not have access to all the tools for equity management and trading that are available to investors in listed companies.

That will change if the three founders achieve the dream of all garagistas and hit the big time, but their company is still privately owned. By then there will probably be many more shareholders on board - employees, angel investors, venture capital firms, big banks, asset managers -owning different types of shares and even wanting to trade them. Managing all that on an Excel spreadsheet could get tricky.