Lessons From the Last Three Years of IPOs

Talk about hangovers in the wake of initial public offerings! It’s a telling sign when you have to go back to 2019 to find a decent number of tech IPOs that are still above water. As we recounted today—and demonstrated in a cool chart—the vast majority of last year’s IPOs are underwater. The group from the year before isn’t doing much better. But the crop from 2019, when companies such as Bill.com, Zoom Video Communications and CrowdStrike debuted, had a few winners.

Emphasis on “a few,” because that year was also when Peloton, Uber, Lyft, The RealReal and SmileDirectClub went public, and that group is so deep underwater you’d need a submarine to find them. Investors turned up their noses immediately at some of that year’s debutantes (Uber, Lyft), while others lost favor only when the fragility of their business models became apparent post-pandemic (Peloton). What’s notable is that those are all consumer names, while the best performers from that year were primarily enterprise software stocks.