Every year for the past several years, the same prediction circulates: This is the year the IPO market comes back. We said it in 2025. We said it in 2026. We’ll probably say it again in 2027.

And every year, a handful of headline-grabbing offerings get held up as proof. This cycle it’s , and . The narrative writes itself: the window is open, the giants are listing, the market is back.

But here’s the catch: those aren’t IPOs for the rest of the market. They’re exceptions to a rule that has been hardening for 30 years.

The IPO market isn’t closed. It’s shrinking.

The instinct is to treat the IPO drought as cyclical, a consequence of rate hikes, market volatility or investor risk appetite. Fix the macro, the thinking goes, and the listings follow.

The data doesn’t support that story.

In 1996, more than 8,000 companies were listed on U.S. stock exchanges. Today, fewer than 4,000 are, even as the U.S. economy has tripled in size.

The bar to go public has moved in one direction.

In 1980, the median company went public with around $64 million in revenue in today’s dollars. Today, the typical IPO candidate has revenue that would have made it a mid-cap public company a generation ago.

The result: Companies are staying private far longer, and the liquidity that shareholders were counting on keeps getting pushed out.

Every time the IPO window “reopens,” it reopens at a higher threshold than before. Waiting for conditions to return to historical norms isn’t a strategy. It’s a bet against a structural trend that has outlasted every rate cycle, bull market and recovery in recent memory.

The companies left behind

When the bar rises high enough, it doesn’t just delay IPOs. It eliminates them.

There are thousands of private companies in the United States today with $50 million, $100 million, $200 million in annual revenue, with continued growth. Previously, companies at that scale formed the backbone of the public markets. Today they’re still private, and most will stay that way.

Not all of them are great businesses. Some raised at 2021 peak valuations and are quietly running out of runway. But a real subset has grown past the early venture stage. They have revenue, margins and years of operating history. The IPO was supposed to be the exit. For most of them, it won’t be.

Who’s actually suffering

Employees at these companies made a bet: below-market salaries, equity instead of cash, years of building. Their equity was supposed to be liquid by now. It isn’t. Meanwhile, life has continued: mortgages, children, aging parents, career crossroads.

I lived this at . When I left, exercising my options triggered a tax bill I couldn’t afford without finding liquidity for shares I didn’t know how to sell. The market for these shares exists in theory. In practice it’s opaque, fragmented and slow. A transaction that should take weeks can take months, if it closes at all.

Venture general partners are in a different bind. Their funds are locked in companies with no exit path. Distributed to Paid-In capital is near historic lows. Limited partners who expected returns from prior vintage funds are still waiting, either holding back re-commitments or concentrating capital into the megafunds that can generate deal flow regardless of exit conditions. The mid-tier manager without DPI is struggling to raise.

A small number of the most prominent companies can run tender offers, giving employees a company-sponsored, structured opportunity to sell their shares.

For everyone else, there are brokered secondary marketplaces that work, slowly and imperfectly, for a narrow slice of the most in-demand names. According to , 90% of all venture secondary volume was concentrated in just 15 companies last quarter. For the rest, the market barely functions.

We’ve been here before

This situation has a historical parallel most people in finance have forgotten.

In the late 1800s, the was the only legitimate listing venue, and it was selective. Hundreds of real companies couldn’t meet the requirements, so brokers took matters into their own hands. They gathered on Broad Street, outside the NYSE, and began trading unlisted stocks on the curb. Literally on the sidewalk. It was chaotic, informal, fragmented. No centralized pricing. No standardized process. No real infrastructure.

But the companies were real. And the demand was real.

Over time, the curb traders organized. They moved indoors. They built rules and infrastructure. The Curb Market became the . The companies that traded there weren’t defective, the system was.

The private secondary market today looks a lot like that sidewalk. Fragmented brokers. Inconsistent pricing. Transactions that depend on who you know. The companies being traded are real. The demand is real. The infrastructure doesn’t exist yet, but it’s coming. Markets that serve real economic needs don’t stay informal forever.

The original Curb Market didn’t fail. It grew up. What’s happening in private secondaries today will do the same. The only variable is timing, and the shareholders waiting on liquidity are the ones absorbing the cost of that delay.

�� is the founder of and managing partner of Earlyasset Capital, where he is building infrastructure for and investing in the venture secondary market. Earlier in his career, he was part of the original founding team at .

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• The IPO Window Won’t Stay Open On Its Own
• Forecast: 2024 Was Slow For Tech IPOs, But 2025 Could Be Different
• Crunchbase Predicts: IPOs Picked Up In 2025 And The Outlook For 2026 Is Even More Optimistic

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At least not these days. The space and AI pioneer posted a net loss of $4.28 billion in the first quarter of 2026, up more than 700% from a year ago. Revenue, meanwhile, totaled $4.69 billion in Q1, up 15% from a year ago.

As a public company, SpaceX is reportedly seeking a valuation of around $1.5 trillion or more, . It’s aiming to raise up to $80 billion or more in the offering, which would make it the largest IPO in history.

At its target valuation, SpaceX would join a rarified club of just seven U.S. public technology companies with market caps of $1.5 trillion or more. Of those, just five have crossed the $2 trillion mark.

Of course, those companies took time to grow into their 13-digit valuations. But at some point, they too made their first public IPO filings. And they too had revenue.

The similarities end there. For a sense of how SpaceX compares at IPO time to other members of the trillion-plus-club, we took a look at their original S-1s from the 1980s and onward. Here’s what their numbers looked like just before their public market debuts:

: Today, the Silicon Valley chip designer is a $5.3 trillion market cap company. Anyone who invested in its 1999 IPO, needless to say, has done extraordinarily well.

At the time of its market debut, of course, such a trajectory was not obvious. Still, it looked like a solid bet. The company, which then focused on designing 3D graphics processors for the PC market, had $93 million in revenue for the three reported quarters prior to its IPO, growing severalfold year over year. Over the same period, it posted a modest $3.5 million loss.

: Google was already the dominant player in online search when it went public in 2004, with impressive financials to boot. Revenue for the first half of that year totaled $1.35 billion, more than doubling in a year, paired with a $326 million profit.

While that was impressive, so is Google’s ongoing growth. Currently, its market cap is $4.7 trillion and it posts more than $400 billion in annual revenue, with massive profits as well.

: The iconic smartphone and computing giant knows a thing or two about longevity. Apple turned 50 last month, and it went public over 45 years ago, in 1980.

It was an impressive and attention-getting offering for the time, with $118 million in sales and nearly $12 million in profit. It helped that Apple was already a prominent consumer brand at the time due to its popular home computers. These days, its market cap hovers around $4.5 trillion.

: Microsoft went public in 1986, so it’s had some 40 years to grow into its current $3.1 trillion valuation. But even back in the era of big hair and floppy disks, the software giant’s IPO prospectus showed clear signs this would be no ordinary market entrant.

In the year before its IPO, Microsoft had revenue of $140 million and net income of $24 million. That income figure, however, includes stepped-up spending on marketing and R&D. Without those expenses, profit margins looked astoundingly high for a time before software business models were status quo.

: At the time of its public offering in 1997, Amazon was known as an online bookseller, branding itself as “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore.” All the other stuff came later.

Still, it was a compelling offering at the time, with Amazon growing annual sales from zilch to around $16 million in just two-and-half years after its inception. It pitched losses as part of its growth strategy, which called for investing heavily in marketing and promotion, site development and operating infrastructure.

Needless to say, things worked out well, with Amazon currently valued at more than $2.8 trillion.

SpaceX is not like the others

If we look at the most valuable public tech companies, a few commonalities about their earlier days stand out. All went public relatively early in their operating histories and debuted with sharply growing revenue and either profits or losses in the single-digit millions.

SpaceX, founded in 2002, looks by comparison like an oldster for a company on the cusp of a public market debut. It’s also worth pointing out that Google, founded in 1998, is only four years older than SpaceX. That means, it’s had 28 years to grow into becoming a company with over $400 billion in revenue over the past 12 months and $138 billion in operating income.

SpaceX, by contrast, has had 24 years to grow into becoming a company that loses $4.3 billion in a single quarter.

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• The IPO Pipeline Finally Gets Interesting
• PwC’s US IPO Lead On The 2026 Outlook, IPO Timing And The Secondary Boom
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Just through mid-May, China-based robotics companies this year have raised $5.6 billion across 176 deals, Crunchbase data shows. That sum matches total investment to the nation’s robotics companies in all of 2021, the peak of the funding cycle. Investment in the sector has also already eclipsed the $4.3 billion raised by China-based robotics companies in all of 2025.

Startup funding in Asia overall surged to $27.4 billion in Q1, its highest level in over three years, with China capturing $16.5 billion — 60% — of that total, according to recent Crunchbase data. Robotics contributed meaningfully to that $16.5 billion total, with startups in the sector raising $3.3 billion across 126 deals.

Embodied AI boom

A review of Crunchbase data shows that investors now are no longer funding mostly pre-programmed hardware, but increasingly backing China-based startups working on embodied AI —��or artificial intelligence with a physical body that interacts with the real world in real time.

That shift toward artificial intelligence-driven robotics mirrors a global surge in investment into robotics and other physical AI startups. It’s also thanks to the rise of advanced, open-source reasoning models that have fundamentally changed how robots operate. Startups are moving away from coding robots line-by-line toward Vision-Language-Action models that allow physical machines to observe, reason and execute physical tasks end-to-end.

In China, robotics startups at the intersection of the software and hardware integration are drawing the largest checks in the space and often back-to-back funding rounds. They include:

• , a 1-year-old humanoid robotics company that integrates embodied intelligence that last month raised a massive $513 million seed round led by and . The Shanghai-based company was valued at $1.9 billion.
• , which develops robotic systems and automation solutions for industrial and service applications, closed a $140 million Series A extension round in January from investors including . Then just three months later, it raised $293 million in a massive Series B round co-led by and
• In February, Beijing-based , which says it’s building a “universal brain” for robots, raised a $290 million Series A led by and . The 2-year-old company was valued at $1.5 billion. Then in April, it announced a $145 million Series A extension financing, bringing the total round to $435 million.
• Humanoid robotics company in February raised a $145 million Series B led by . The 2-year-old China-based company was valued at $1.4 billion. In April, it announced a $290 million extension to that round, bringing its total to $435 million
• Shenzhen-based , a builder of humanoid and quadruped robots, raised a $200 million Series B last month led by and . The 2-year-old company’s robots will be deployed for traffic, security and retail. It was valued at $1.5 billion.

Top investors

Crunchbase data shows the most active investors in the space are largely Asia-based. The busiest this year has been Hong Kong-based , taking part in six deals, including a $200 million round last month for humanoid robotics and embodied intelligence developer .

Among lead or co-lead investors, three China-based firms — , and — have each taken part this year in deals totaling $290 million or more.

Exits gain steam

Venture investors are likely feeling confident as the sector notches notable liquidity events, including IPOs and acquisitions.

The of , targeting a $3 billion to $7 billion valuation, is a milestone for the industry. The company in March filed for an to list on the , and its IPO would likely spur other startups in the space to pursue their own public-market debuts.

The sector has already seen some notable exits.

They include Hong Kong-based ,�� a Shanghai-based startup that makes lightweight industrial robots. The company on May 18 listed on the , raising about $86 million. And it did not disappoint. Robotphoenix closed its first full day of trading at HK$53.75 ($6.86 U.S.), up nearly 80%. (Interestingly, Chinese robotics firms as their primary liquidity hub.)

On the M&A front, in what is widely considered a historic first for China’s embodied artificial intelligence sector, AI robotics unicorn in July 2025 engineered a two-stage consortium takeover to in legacy manufacturer for about $290 million. AgiBot’s co-founder formally stepped in to chair Swancor, effectively turning the publicly traded shell into a direct extension of AgiBot.

Ultimately, it seems that 2026 is the year China’s robotics companies are pivoting from raising early venture rounds to mass production, as a domestic market that currently accounts for more than 43% of global robotics venture investment, per Crunchbase.

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We’re not talking about confidential filings either. Sure, they signal serious intent and contain valuable information for regulators. But for the rest of us, it’s the public S-1 filing that signifies an IPO is actually imminent.

By this latter measure, the past few weeks have been pretty busy for venture-backed startups. , the designer of speedy AI inference chips, filed publicly last week for an offering expected to raise around $2 billion. The Silicon Valley company, which withdrew plans for an IPO last fall, is reportedly seeking a valuation upwards of $35 billion this time around.

That alone would be enough to set IPO market watchers abuzz. Per Crunchbase data, it stands to be the largest initial share offering of a U.S. semiconductor company to date.

However, Cerebras wasn’t the only venture-backed company seeking a multibillion-dollar IPO valuation.

Power players

Another, albeit smaller, contender is nuclear power startup , which is making its debut today. The Rockville, Maryland-based company priced shares at $23 each late Thursday, above the projected range, raising around $1 billion. Shares closed up 27% in first-day trading Friday.

Meanwhile, on the geothermal power front, is also looking to take its clean energy ambitions to the public market. The Houston-based company filed last week for a offering that could bring in around $250 million.

Biotech IPOs heating up

Biotech is also heating up. Last week delivered a big debut from , a Waltham, Massachusetts-based developer of oral and injectable treatments for obesity and metabolic disease that $718 million in its Nasdaq offering. , a Fremont, California-based startup applying proteomics to early disease detection, made its market entry as well, securing a current market cap around $1.6 billion.

More biotech debuts are on deck too. Austin-based , a venture-backed developer of a nerve stimulation device for stroke survivors, filed last week for an offering. The prior week brought S-1 filings from Boston’s , a developer of medicines for depression, anxiety and other neuropsychiatric disorders, and , a Denmark-based biotech which focuses on treatment of blood coagulation disorders.

Space and defense on the rise

Of course, everyone knows the Texas-based company on deck to publicly file for a space tech offering of unprecedented magnitude. for an IPO a few weeks ago, with media reports pegging its target valuation around $1.75 trillion. If the company forges ahead with reported plans for a June market debut, a public filing should follow in the next few weeks.

In the interim, another, much, much smaller offering in the defense tech space is on track to hit the market much sooner. , a Herndon, Virginia-based developer of radio frequency intelligence for military customers, filed earlier this month for a offering. It comes amid a period of heightened investor appetite for defense tech, with an expectation of more debuts in the space likely in coming months.

Now we just need some software

Of course, it’s not an IPO market that is welcoming to all venture-backed startup sectors. One area noticeably absent from the impending offering list is enterprise software. While SaaS has long been a mainstay of the IPO pipeline, the sector has taken a hit of late amid investors’ concerns of AI disruption.

That said, it’s still encouraging to see a swathe of other sectors dipping a toe in IPO waters.

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• After Swarmer’s Soaring Debut, Here Are 12 Other Potential Defense Tech IPOs
• IPOs Are Holding Up In 2026, But SaaS Debuts Aren’t Happening

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Then, the SPAC and IPO boom of 2020-2021 arrived. All of a sudden, companies in scores of sectors once confined to venture capital portfolios were widely available on public markets. Developers of technologies tied to self-driving vehicles were particularly well-represented, launching market debuts with collective initial valuations of over $50 billion.��

But investors’ love affair with the space didn’t last. A Crunchbase analysis of 14 companies developing technologies tied to self-driving vehicles 1that went public in the past couple of years shows an average post-debut decline of more than 80%.

The worst performers—a list that includes autonomous truck developer and LiDAR technology companies and —are down over 95% or more. Both Quanery and Embark also completed reverse stock splits this year to lower the danger of delisting, only to see further valuation declines.

For a full rundown of how these 14 companies have performed, we put together a chart, seen below, showing valuations at time of debut compared to now:

VCs are still investing

Given the public market’s rapidly decelerating interest in the space, one might expect to see venture investors put the brakes on big rounds for private companies tied to autonomous driving. That hasn’t entirely been the case.

We’re still seeing some big rounds this year. For instance, London-based , developer of what it describes as a “next generation” autonomous vehicle technology driven by machine learning, pulled in $200 million in a Series B, bringing total investment to over $450 million. (It should be noted that this was in January, before public markets posted their most severe declines).

Meanwhile, , a developer of advanced roadways tailored for connected and autonomous vehicles, pulled in $130 million in an April Series A co-led by . Several China-based companies have also secured big rounds, including , a developer of autonomous vehicles, and , which focused on automating vehicle safety features.

Still, things are way down from 2021, particularly for large, later-stage rounds. We aren’t seeing financings similar in stage or size to last year’s biggest round in the space, a $600 million Series D for , which makes self-driving electric vehicles for local deliveries. Obviously, pre-IPO rounds aren’t happening either, given both the state of the IPO market and the condition of already public companies in this industry.

It’s not about profits

As we ponder the causes of the great 2022 sell-off of stocks related to LiDAR and self-driving vehicles, one possibility can immediately be stricken from the list.

No one is dumping shares in these companies because profits are down. They never had profits in the first place.��

It’s also unclear to what extent revenues might be a driver. Those that have sales are by-and-large early in their scaling, while others are still pre-revenue. This was never a bet on present earnings but rather on the future potential of a massive technological shift.

If we look at valuations of the worst performers on our list, it appears investors have mostly given up.��

Take Embark Technology, which develops software to power self-driving trucks. The San Francisco-based company was valued around $5.2 billion when it went public in November through a SPAC merger. It had raised over $117 million as a private company, pulled in another $614 million for its public offering, and counted and among its lead backers.

Just a year after its debut, Embark is valued at less than the cash reserves it had at the end of its last quarter. Shares are down a whopping 97% from their debut price.��

So, just to put it in perspective: This would be like if the price of your $1 million California house went down in a few months to just $30,000. It’s pretty catastrophic.

For Embark, which is pre-revenue, it’s tough to say what could be the catalyst for such a cataclysmic decline. By the same token, it’s also difficult to surmise what supported that $5.2 billion valuation just 11 months ago. Investors just aren’t paying what they used to for this kind of thing.

In coming quarters, it’ll be interesting to see which companies that went public during the 2020-21 window of opportunity have regained investors’ favor. For now, it’s looking like pretty much the whole autonomous driving unicorn herd has headed downhill fast.

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Yes, it does sound like fiction. But that actually is the situation facing , founder of e-scooter network .��

VanderZanden, who this past week from his post as Bird CEO, was expecting his stake to be worth hundreds of millions when the company inked a in the spring of 2021 to go public through a SPAC merger. The agreement reportedly set a valuation around $2.3 billion for the then 4-year-old company, of which VanderZanden owned a roughly 13% stake.

As it happened, the timing of the SPAC deal coincided with a growing tech world fascination around Miami, which had been attracting an influx of prominent VCs and crypto entrepreneurs. Though Bird was founded and based in Santa Monica, VanderZanden joined the Florida-bound flock and went house shopping. Bird also later moved its headquarters to Miami.

VanderZanden’s Florida starter home was a splashy one. In August 2021, shortly before the merger closed, the scooter mogul a $21.8 million mansion in a posh waterfront gated community in Coral Gables. Featuring nine bedrooms, 11 baths, an infinity edge pool and private dock, the property checked the boxes one would expect at that price point.��

The home also comes with an interesting history. It was purchased in 2016 by a Panamanian shell company linked to Samark Jose Lopez-Bello, a narcotics trafficker on the ICE . The federal government later seized the property and reportedly it in 2020 for $12.5 million.��

By the time VanderZanden came around in 2021, scooters were looking like a much more attractive and legal path to fast wealth. Bird’s following the SPAC deal announcement called for the company to have an initial offering value in the billions. VanderZanden’s ownership stake, at that point, looked like enough to afford a whole portfolio of similar mega-mansions

High-flying Bird falls to earth

Things didn’t work out that way. Bird stock has been heading steadily downward since shortly after the merger closed in November, hitting a new trough around 33 cents per share this week. Bird’s market capitalization is a mere $94 million now. And VanderZanden’s stake—13% in the last annual report—is worth around $12 million.

Given this decline, it’s not surprising to see that the Florida mansion is back on the market. This time, per , there’s a $39.9 million —a surprisingly ambitious markup for such a short duration of ownership.

Notably, this isn’t the only mega-mansion that VanderZanden has purchased, or even the highest-profile one. In 2020, he paid $21.7 million to buy a Bel Air mansion formerly owned by Daily Show host . (That went up for sale again too, though it’s unclear what the current status is.) Before that, the would-be scooter mogul bought an $8.1 million Santa Monica property, which he shortly resold for $9 million.

It’s also unclear whether Bird is VanderZanden’s only source of wealth. He served as COO of from 2013 until 2014, and left work as VP of global driver growth at in 2016, before launching Bird. (Lyft later him for allegedly breaking his confidentiality agreement, before settling for an undisclosed sum.)

One thing that is clear, however, is that VanderZanden did not become as rich as he expected to become with Bird. Nor did a host of the company’s very high-profile investors, including , which led its Series C and D, and , which led the Series B.����

The scooter space, in general, just didn’t work out as planned for the early mover crowd. As we documented a couple months ago, VCs pumped billions into the space, only to find that public markets weren’t at all receptive to hoped-for valuations.

For what it’s worth, VanderZanden’s tony Florida enclave also doesn’t look like the kind of place where scooter networks would work. In a gated community where homes come with multicar garages, it’s pretty well assumed that last-mile transport comes with four wheels, not two.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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Yesterday was a pretty big day in the earnings cycle. Each quarter, public companies disclose their recent financial performance. It’s a key moment for every concern, showing off recent performance to investors, and usually making projections for the future.

Three tech companies that we care about reported their own results yesterday: , which we care about as it’s a high-profile decacorn built with an ocean of private capital (our coverage). , because it’s a recently-public SaaS company growing quickly, making it a measuring stick for how public investors are valuing unprofitable growth (our coverage). And, , as a SaaS company selling SaaS-tooling, is a firm that is an obvious temperature-check for SaaS itself (our coverage).

Let’s quickly examine these, digging up in each case the lesson for private companies.

Uber

Yesterday Uber reported its as a public company. After releasing its results, shares in the company rose and fell before settling up about 2 percent.

What did the firm do to earn the bump? Here are the vital statistics, making comparisons to the year-ago quarter:

• Gross Bookings: $14.6 billion (+34 percent)
• GAAP Revenue: $3.1 billion (+20 percent)
• Adjusted Net Revenue: $2.8 billion (+14 percent)
• Operating Loss: $1.0 billion (-116 percent)
• Adjusted EBITDA: -$869 million (-210 percent)
• Net Cash Used In Operating Activities: $722 million (-143 percent)
• Contribution from Core Platform: -$117 million (year-ago result positive)
• Contribution from Other Bets: -$71 million (-255 percent)

That’s a lot of numbers, I admit. Let me walk you through them. First,��spend on Uber’s platform is rising faster than both revenue, and Uber’s adjusted revenue metric. That means that Uber is building��gross spend over time that it takes less of a cut from, meaning that its newly acquired gross bookings are less efficient for its business. Uber Eats did over $3 billion in gross booking during the period but generated revenue of just 17.4 percent of that total. In the same quarter Uber’s ride-hailing business brought in 20.7 percent of its own gross bookings total.

Moving on, Uber’s operating loss shot higher, as did its adjusted EBITDA. Its net loss also worsened, but I didn’t share it above as the year-ago result was impacted by a divestment. Finally, Uber’s two businesses both had negative contribution. That means after they paid for themselves, they contributed negative profit to the company.

But as Uber had signaled that all this was coming, its shares rose. The lesson here is that normal rules don’t appear to apply to Uber. The firm just posted slim year-over-year growth for a growth-oriented company while losing a pile of money and watching its core business fail to contribute to the rest of the company’s costs.

If you can figure out why Uber’s stock picked up a few points after all that, email me.

Okta

Since its IPO, Okta has been busy growing somewhat outside the media spotlight. Worth a little over $12 billion, the firm doesn’t have the same profile as, say, which is worth just a smidge more, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting shop.

Following a revenue beat and a promised uptick in spend, shares of Okta rose 6 percent in after-hours trading.

I caught up with its COO, , after its . The firm is in Asia-Pacific to serve that customer base (replete with the ability to constrain customer data to��those servers so that their information doesn’t touch the United States for obvious reasons), and announced a few new high-profile clients including the newly-famous .

But all that is company-specific. What can we take away for private companies? That revenue growth is still well-liked by public market investors. Okta grew by 50 percent year-over-year, its subscription revenue grew 52 percent year-over-year, and customers that pay the firm $100,000 or more each year grew 53 percent.

And while Okta’s GAAP net loss sharply grew 41.4 percent to $51.8 million in the quarter, it generated $21.3 million in cash from operations. There’s more information in those figures. Notably that you can spike your all-in losses provided that at-scale growth is hot. And, I’d argue, that you are still a firm with a clear path to profitability. Strong operating cash flow means that Okta can reign in its GAAP results in reasonable time.

So startups, if you want to start the year just over $60 per share and break $110 by the end of May, follow Okta’s performance.

Zuora

If Okta is a bull case-study, Zuora is a bear warning. Shares of Zuora fell by just over a third after-hours, following its .

Zuora, a company that provides billing tooling to subscription companies, beat expectations regarding its quarterly loss while essentially meeting revenue forecasts. But the future is what tripped the company up. :

[T]he company said revenue for the full fiscal year will come in at between $268 million and $278 million, well below the $291.1 million average analyst estimate, according to Refinitiv.

Splat. If the top-end of your revenue guidance is under the consensus mark, that’s bad.

The lesson for private companies in this is that if you are going to continue to lose money as a public company, you still must have the growth to back it up. The market had one set of expectations for Zuora, and Zuora had a very different set of projections. And the market repriced Zuora from the former to the latter after it found out.

I am not sure if we should view weakness in Zuora’s results as indicative of weakness in SaaS. But certainly the company’s struggles can’t be viewed as overly rosy for the sector, Okta aside.

And now, back to our regularly-scheduled private market coverage!

Illustration: .

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The troubled IPOs of Lyft and Uber have taken center stage in the media, their scale obscuring earlier debuts as they settle into life as public companies.

But what about the other companies we’ve seen go public in the tech and venture-backed space this year? Lots of other firms have already made it through the IPO gauntlet that aren’t merely focused on getting you to brunch.

Let’s take a quick peek at the current crop, comparing their IPO price and their current price as of this morning. Ready?

• IPO price: $45
• Current price: $40.61

• IPO price: $25
• Current price: $89.25

• IPO price: $11
• Current price: $10.96

• IPO price: $19
• Current price: $28.46

• IPO price: $36
• Current price: $75.36

• IPO price: $24
• Current price: $53.35

• IPO price: $72
• Current price: $53.13

• IPO price: $11
• Current price: $8.54

That’s the list so far and the results to date. It isn’t hard to see some patterns emerge.

Quickly-growing SaaS is doing well. Ride-hailing is not. And Beyond Meat has excited the market to the point that it is trading on a valuation/gross profit ratio that would make a bubbly price/earnings ratio blush.

So the market isn’t as bad as some might make it out to be. Yes, Uber and Lyft’s failures to launch well are troubling for many who tied their money up into the massively unprofitable companies. But for investors who stuck to companies who retained a path to profitability through high-margin revenue, things seem nice and healthy.

And that’s good news for Fastly and Slack and other companies looking to go public next. Luckin Coffee, on the other hand, could struggle.

Illustration: .