Sometimes It's Hard for Owners to Talk to Companies

Public companies are, in one popular view, owned by their shareholders. A company's managers have a duty to act in the shareholders' interests. The managers answer to the directors, who are elected by the shareholders. The shareholder democracy isn't perfect, the duties to shareholders aren't absolute, the concept of ownership is inexact, and some companies play by different rules, but this is more or less a reasonable model for how companies work.

Since the shareholders are the owners, and since the managers' job is to make them happy, it makes sense that the managers might meet with shareholders every now and then to keep the shareholders up to date, see how they're feeling, listen to their opinions, ask if there's anything that the managers could be doing better, whatever. Of course, you can do this in big formal annual shareholder meetings, but that is sort of a stilted environment, and there are lots of small shareholders with idiosyncratic concerns who tend to dominate those meetings. If a big shareholder wants to talk about the business privately, well, the shareholders are the managers' bosses, and it is only polite to meet with your bosses from time to time to see what's on their minds.