Buying shares of stock in a company that doesn’t pay a dividend isn’t investing, it’s the textbook definition of speculation. You are buying something that you hope to sell at a higher price. Investing is when you put money into something, and it gives you more money back over a period of time. Buying and selling crypto is speculation.
Yeah but this reflects the fact that starting and growing a company in itself is a type of speculative activity. Any optimism about the future is a type of speculation.
If you have a proven profitable business model, that you see no way to scale, there's no reason to list the company in the first place.
The main reason to even list a company is to take it through a growth phase, and companies get taken off the stock exchange all the time when they don't see any forthcoming growth, because then it's only annoying for them to compromise with the power/ownership for no reason.
The stock market is an accelerator for companies, not a central bank that makes absolute valuations.
I agree about assets though. Book value of assets does need to be added to the value of shares, though usually that’s the smallest part of a share’s valuation.