The End of the IPO as We Know It?
I would summarise this post as:<p>&quot;Public markets didn&#x27;t like a few bad Softbank backed IPOs. This clearly is <i>not</i> because only Masayoshi Son loves giant bonfires they can shovel cash into, but instead means that public markets are just horribly broken, and everything we think we know about finance, economics, and the market is wrong.&quot;<p>After listing a bunch of loss-making stinkers (Uber, Lyft, Peloton, Pinterest, Caspar) we get the line:<p>&gt; How is it that the hottest growth companies have stumbled out of the gate?<p>If you have to ask the question of why public markets might not think a company whose business strategy is <i>mailing people mattresses below cost</i> is worth a billion dollars, then really, you&#x27;re not going to understand the answer.<p>Also, note this:<p>&gt; And B2B player Zoom, the videoconferencing software company, which had a juicy pop of 72% on its first day of trading, has seen its fortunes seesaw, falling from a high of $102 to roughly $88 at press time, even as the broader market, especially the tech sector, has been on a tear.<p>Zoom is one of the only <i>actual</i> profitable companies discussed, but the author tosses them into the list of disasters like WeWork. But let&#x27;s unpack that: They IPOed at $36 a share, and they&#x27;re down to $88, and the lesson here is &quot;oh man, public markets hate startups&quot;?  ...like, really?<p>The entire article is just one long &quot;wow, profitable companies are valuable, I wonder what deeper lesson entirely unrelated to profitably we can draw from this if we ignore the obvious answer&quot;.<p>&gt; But as they watch the public drubbing suffered by the likes of Adam Neumann [...] founders are more apt to see themselves as mistreated and even harassed by various gatekeepers<p>If you are a founder, and the person you feel the closest kinship too is <i>Adam Neumann</i>, you probably don&#x27;t deserve to be treated very well by the markets. The issue is <i>you</i>.<p>What a infuriatingly obtuse article.