by Brenon Daly
After a brief but unprofitable dalliance with a popular consumer tech name, Wall Street is getting back to business. CDN startup Fastly is set to debut later this week, while business communications provider Slack and endpoint security specialist CrowdStrike have lined up expected offerings next month. All of those IPOs – which are built on more durable businesses than ride-sharing, for instance – should help put Uber‘s underwater offering in the rearview mirror.
Wall Street tends to run on a ‘what have you done for me lately?’ business. Uber’s offering didn’t do much for investors, except cost money to those who bought shares at the open. Of course, a week is a ridiculously short period to judge a company that will likely be public for years. But for now, with Uber shares still in the red, investors will shift their attention to where they can make money.
In IPOs, it’s been the offerings from tech vendors that sell to other companies that have generated returns. PagerDutystock is currently changing hands at twice where it priced its offering last month. Zoom Video Communications has also seen its shares double from their offer price, on a much larger scale. The firm has created an astonishing $19bn in market value.
Of the trio of enterprise-focused tech startups that are slated to come public soon, not one of them has figured out how to make money. But their losses are a fraction of the $3-4bn operating loss that Uber has posted in each of the past three years. When it comes to enterprise tech IPOs, companies don’t have to be profitable to be profitable bets for investors.
