Wall Street’s ‘meh’ response to tech IPOs shows Silicon Valley’s valuation problem
Instacart celebrates their IPO at the Nasdaq on Sept. 19th, 2023.
Courtesy: Nasdaq
After a 21-month tech IPO freeze, the market has cracked opened in the past week. But the early results can’t be encouraging to any late-stage startups lingering on the sidelines.
Chip designer Arm debuted last Thursday, followed by grocery delivery company Instacart this Tuesday, and cloud software vendor Klaviyo the following day. They’re three very different companies in disparate parts of the tech sector, but Wall Street’s reaction has been consistent.
Investors who bought at the IPO price made money if they sold right away. Just about everyone else is in the red. That’s fine if a company’s goal is just to be public and create the opportunity for employees and early investors to get liquidity. But for most companies in the pipeline, particularly those with sufficient capital on their balance sheet to stay private, it offers little allure.
“People are worried about valuations,” said Eric Juergens, a partner at law firm Debevoise & Plimpton who focuses on capital markets and private equity. “Seeing how those companies trade over the next couple months will be important to see how IPO markets and equity markets more generally are valuing those companies and how they may value comparable companies looking to go public.”
Juergens said, based on his conversations with companies, the market is likely to open up further in the first half of next year simply because of pressure from investors and employees as well as financing requirements.
“At some point companies need to go public, whether it’s a PE fund looking to exit or employees looking for liquidity or just the need to raise capital in a high interest rate environment,” he said.
Arm, which is controlled by Japan’s SoftBank, saw its shares jump 25% in their first day of trading to close at $63.59. Every day since then, the stock has fallen, and it closed on Thursday at $52.16, narrowly above the $51 IPO price.
Instacart popped 40% immediately after selling shares at $30. But by the end of its first day of trading, it was up just 12%, and that gain was practically all wiped out on day two. The stock rose 1.8% on Thursday to close at $30.65.
Klaviyo rose 23% based on its first trade on Wednesday, before selling off throughout the day to close at $32.76, just 9% higher than its IPO price. It rose 2.9% on Thursday to $33.72.
None of these companies were expecting, or even hoping for, a big pop. In 2020 and 2021, during the frothy zero interest rate days, first-day jumps were so dramatic that bankers were criticized for handing out free money to their buyside buddies, and companies were slammed for leaving too much cash on the table.
But the lack of excitement over the past week — amounting to a collective “meh” across Wall Street — is certainly not the desired outcome either.
Instacart CEO Fidji Simo acknowledged that her company’s IPO wasn’t about trying to optimize pricing for the company. Instacart only sold the equivalent of 5% of outstanding shares in the offering, with co-founders, early employees, former staffers and other existing investors selling another 3%.
“We felt that it was really important to give our employees liquidity,” Simo told CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa in an interview after the offering. “This IPO is not about raising money for us. It’s really about making sure that all employees can have liquidity on stocks that they work very hard for. We weren’t looking for a perfect market window.”
Odds are the window was never going to be perfect for Instacart. At the tech market peak in 2021, Instacart raised capital at a $39 billion valuation, or $125 a share, from top-tier investors including Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and T. Rowe Price.
During last year’s market plunge, Instacart had to slash its valuation multiple times and switch from growth to profit mode to make sure it could generate cash as interest rates were rising and investors were retreating from risk.
Growing into valuation
The combination of the Covid delivery boom, low interest rates and a decade-long bull market in tech drove Instacart and other internet, software and e-commerce businesses to unsustainable heights. Now it’s just a matter of when they take their medicine.
Klaviyo, which provides marketing automation technology to businesses, never got as overheated as many others in the industry, raising at a peak valuation of $9.5 billion in 2021. Its IPO valuation was just below that, and CEO Andrew Bialecki told CNBC that the company wasn’t under pressure to go public.
“We’ve got a lot of momentum as a business. Now is a great time for us to go public especially as we move up in the enterprise,” Bialecki said. “There really wasn’t any pressure at all.”
Klaviyo’s revenue increased 51% in the latest quarter from a year earlier to $165 million, and the company swung to profitability, generating almost $11 million in net income after losing $11.7 million in the same period the prior year.
Even though it avoided a major down round, Klaviyo had to increase its revenue by about 150% over two years and turn profitable to roughly keep its valuation.
“We think companies should be profitable,” Bialecki said. “That way you can be in control of your own destiny.”
While profitability is great for showing sustainability, it isn’t what tech investors cared about during the record IPO years of 2020 and 2021. Valuations were based on a multiple to future sales at the expense of potential earnings.
Cloud software and infrastructure businesses were in the midst of a landgrab at the time. Venture firms and large asset managers were subsidizing their growth, encouraging them to go big on sales reps and burn piles of cash to get their products in customers’ hands. On the consumer side, startups raised hundreds of millions of dollars to pour into advertising and, in the case of gig economy companies like Instacart, to entice contract workers to choose them over the competition.
Instacart was proactive in pulling down its valuation to reset investor and employee expectations. Klaviyo grew into its lofty price. Among high-valued companies that are still private, payments software developer Stripe has cut its valuation by almost half to $50 billion, and design software startup Canva lowered its valuation in a secondary transaction by 36% to $25.5 billion.
Private equity firms and venture capitalists are in the business of profiting on their investments, so eventually their portfolio companies need to hit the public market or get acquired. But for founders and management teams, being public means a potentially volatile stock price and a need to update investors every quarter.
Given how Wall Street has received the first notable tech IPOs since late 2021, there may not be a ton of reward for all that hassle.
Still, Aswarth Damodaran, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, said that with all the skepticism in the market, the latest IPOs are performing OK because there was a fear they could drop 20% to 25% out of the gate.
“At one level the people pushing these companies are probably heaving a sigh of relief because there was a very real chance of catastrophe on these companies,” Damodaran told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday. “I have a feeling it will take a week or two for this to play out. But if the stock price stays above the offer price two weeks from now, I think these companies will all view that as a win.”
WATCH: NYU professor explains why he doesn’t trust SoftBank-backed IPOs
An illustration photo shows Sora 2 logo on a smartphone.
Cfoto | Future Publishing | Getty Images
The Creative Artists Agency on Thursday slammed OpenAI’s new video creation app Sora for posing “significant risks” to their clients and intellectual property.
The talent agency, which represents artists including Doja Cat, Scarlett Johanson, and Tom Hanks, questioned whether OpenAI believed that “humans, writers, artists, actors, directors, producers, musicians, and athletes deserve to be compensated and credited for the work they create.”
“Or does Open AI believe they can just steal it, disregarding global copyright principles and blatantly dismissing creators’ rights, as well as the many people and companies who fund the production, creation, and publication of these humans’ work? In our opinion, the answer to this question is obvious,” the CAA wrote.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The CAA said that it was “open to hearing” solutions from OpenAI and is working with IP leaders, unions, legislators and global policymakers on the matter.
“Control, permission for use, and compensation is a fundamental right of these workers,” the CAA wrote. “Anything less than the protection of creators and their rights is unacceptable.”
Sora, which launched last week and has quickly reached 1 million downloads, allows users to create AI-generated clips often featuring popular characters and brands.
OpenAI launched with an “opt-out” system, which allowed the use of copyrighted material unless studios or agencies requested that their IP not be used.
CEO Sam Altman later said in a blog post that they would give rightsholders “more granular control over generation of characters.”
Talent agency WME sent a memo to agents on Wednesday that it has “notified OpenAI that all WME clients be opted out of the latest Sora AI update, regardless of whether IP rights holders have opted out IP our clients are associated with,” the LA Times reported.
United Talent Agency also criticized Sora’s use of copyrighted property as “exploitation, not innovation,” in a statement on Thursday.
“There is no substitute for human talent in our business, and we will continue to fight tirelessly for our clients to ensure that they are protected,” UTA wrote. “When it comes to OpenAI’s Sora or any other platform that seeks to profit from our clients’ intellectual property and likeness, we stand with artists.”
In a letter written to OpenAI last week, Disney said it did not authorize OpenAI and Sora to copy, distribute, publicly display or perform any image or video that features its copyrighted works and characters, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Disney also wrote that it did not have an obligation to “opt-out” of appearing in Sora or any OpenAI system to preserve its rights under copyright law, the person said.
The Motion Picture Association issued a statement on Tuesday, urging OpenAI to take “immediate and decisive action” against videos using Sora to produce content infringing on its copyrighted material.
Entertainment companies have expressed numerous copyright concerns as generative AI has surged.
Universal and Disney sued creator Midjourney in June, alleging that the company used and distributed AI-generated characters from their movies despite requests to stop. Disney also sent a cease-and-desist letter to AI startup Character.AI in September, warning the company to stop using its copyrighted characters without authorization.
People walk past a billboard advertisement for YouTube in Berlin, Germany, on Sept. 27, 2019.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images
YouTube is offering creators who were banned from the platform a second chance.
On Thursday, the Google-owned platform announced it is rolling out a feature for previously terminated creators to apply to create a new channel. Previous rules led to a lifetime ban.
“We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance,” wrote the YouTube Team in a blog post. “We’re looking forward to providing an opportunity for creators to start fresh and bring their voice back to the platform.”
Tech companies have faced months of scrutiny from House Republicans and President Donald Trump, who have accused the platforms of political bias and overreach in content moderation.
Last week, YouTube agreed to pay $24.5 million to settle a lawsuit involving the suspension of Trump’s account following the U.S. Capitol riots on Jan. 6, 2021.
YouTube said this new option is separate from its already existing appeals process. If an appeal is unsuccessful, creators now have the option to apply for a new channel.
Approved creators under the new process will start from scratch, with no prior videos, subscribers or monetization privileges carried over.
Over the next several weeks, eligible creators logging into YouTube Studio will see an option to request a new channel. Creators are only eligible to apply one year after their original channel was terminated.
YouTube said it will review requests based on the severity and frequency of past violations.
The company also said it will consider off-platform behavior that could harm the community, such as activity endangering child safety.
The program excludes creators terminated for copyright infringement, violations of its Creator Responsibility policy or those who deleted their accounts.
YouTube’s ‘second chance’ process fits with a broader trend at Google and other major platforms to ease strict content moderation rules imposed in the wake of the pandemic and the 2020 election.
In September, Alphabet lawyer Daniel Donovan sent a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, that announced the platform had made changes to its community guidelines for content containing Covid-19 or election-related misinformation.
The letter also claimed that senior Biden administration officials pressed the company to remove certain Covid-related videos, saying the pressure was “unacceptable and wrong.”
YouTube ended its stand-alone Covid misinformation rules in December 2024, according to Donovan’s letter.
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