<story><title>The wave of unicorn IPOs</title><url>https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/04/17/the-wave-of-unicorn-ipos-reveals-silicon-valleys-groupthink</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>romanhn</author><text>I see the profit angle brought out often in these discussions, and as someone that has worked at one of these unicorns with a recent IPO, I&amp;#x27;d like to point out that profitability is not a black-and-white consideration. A company has many financial dials and switches, and ours specifically could have easily been profitable if they had chosen to do so. It was a very intentional decision to funnel money towards further growth, which frankly I had&amp;#x2F;have no issues with. I suspect that is the case with many B2B unicorns; not sure the B2C ones could make a similar transition as easily if circumstances called for it.&lt;p&gt;Not sure the dotcom crash is comparable - those were the days of companies getting millions without so much as a business plan, and going public months after being born. Sure, the companies without solid fundamentals are not going to survive in the long run, but as an industry, I don&amp;#x27;t think we&amp;#x27;re anywhere close to the crazy old days.</text></item><item><author>olivermarks</author><text>As Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners, a venture-capital firm, and the co-author of a book about blitzscaling, puts it: “In a connected world, someone will build an Amazon. The only question is who and how.”&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x27;...what they also lack, in 11 cases out of 12, are profits. Today, according to Jay Ritter of the University of Florida, 84% of companies pursuing ipos have no profits. That is remarkably high. Ten years ago, the proportion was just 33%. To see profitlessness as rampant as today’s you have to go back to the peak of the dotcom boom in 2000.&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in the Bay Area and this late stage of the tech business cycle reminds me a lot of the build up to the dot com bust.
for Enron see Theranos (and possibly even Tesla), along with lots of mega deals over basically profitless platform companies posturing around dominance of future markets...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>JumpCrisscross</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;ours specifically could have easily been profitable if they had chosen to do so&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;There is a big difference between &lt;i&gt;e.g.&lt;/i&gt; Amazon, which is unit profitable and could be more profitable at any time, Uber, which is unit profitable in some markets but not so in other markets, and something like WeWork, which is not unit profitable.</text></comment>
<story><title>The wave of unicorn IPOs</title><url>https://www.economist.com/briefing/2019/04/17/the-wave-of-unicorn-ipos-reveals-silicon-valleys-groupthink</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>romanhn</author><text>I see the profit angle brought out often in these discussions, and as someone that has worked at one of these unicorns with a recent IPO, I&amp;#x27;d like to point out that profitability is not a black-and-white consideration. A company has many financial dials and switches, and ours specifically could have easily been profitable if they had chosen to do so. It was a very intentional decision to funnel money towards further growth, which frankly I had&amp;#x2F;have no issues with. I suspect that is the case with many B2B unicorns; not sure the B2C ones could make a similar transition as easily if circumstances called for it.&lt;p&gt;Not sure the dotcom crash is comparable - those were the days of companies getting millions without so much as a business plan, and going public months after being born. Sure, the companies without solid fundamentals are not going to survive in the long run, but as an industry, I don&amp;#x27;t think we&amp;#x27;re anywhere close to the crazy old days.</text></item><item><author>olivermarks</author><text>As Reid Hoffman of Greylock Partners, a venture-capital firm, and the co-author of a book about blitzscaling, puts it: “In a connected world, someone will build an Amazon. The only question is who and how.”&lt;p&gt;&amp;#x27;...what they also lack, in 11 cases out of 12, are profits. Today, according to Jay Ritter of the University of Florida, 84% of companies pursuing ipos have no profits. That is remarkably high. Ten years ago, the proportion was just 33%. To see profitlessness as rampant as today’s you have to go back to the peak of the dotcom boom in 2000.&amp;#x27;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m in the Bay Area and this late stage of the tech business cycle reminds me a lot of the build up to the dot com bust.
for Enron see Theranos (and possibly even Tesla), along with lots of mega deals over basically profitless platform companies posturing around dominance of future markets...</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>qqqwerty</author><text>One potential issue in the B2B space is how dependent (or not) these companies are on other non-profitable companies for their revenue. If all of these yet-to-be-profitable unicorns are selling to other profit-challenged vc funded startups, than that could cause some problems if VC&amp;#x27;s pull back.&lt;p&gt;I think interest rates play a key role here.  I was expecting rates to rise more, but it seems like the Fed is getting nervous and pausing rate hikes. So we may end up in a semi-permanent low interest rate environment, which should keep the VC money flowing for now.  So at this point, I am not really sure what to expect.</text></comment>