Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

Since Facebook's IPO, which tech unicorns still feel bullish?

Here are the tech IPOs I can think off the top of my head. Maybe it's selection bias (I only remember the ones that don't look healthy), but this is what I thought of, and they all are not doing well compared to their IPO price, or were on a heavy downward trend:

- Box http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BOX?ltr=1

- Pandora http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/P

- Twitter http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWTR

- Tableau http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DATA

- Groupon http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/GRPN

- Twilio http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/TWLO (too short of time to tell, but including it here anyway)

LinkedIn had fallen far from its high until Microsoft bought it: http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/LNKD

King (Candy Crush, etc.) was bought by Blizzard but even with the premium it sold at, it was still about 25% off its IPO: http://fortune.com/2015/11/03/activision-blizzard-king-digit...

Of course there have been other unicorns, less sexy media (including non-American) darlings that might be doing just fine. And of course Facebook still looks strong, but FB always seemed like it would do string, at least out of all the other social networks. I admit that I'm not much of a Snapchat user, even though many of my friends have migrated over. But does it really have the same potential as FB to integrate itself into all areas of digital life? Even if SNAP has strong underlying numbers, it'd be an outlier if it remained strong 3-5 years from now.

On a sidenote, would love to see an update to this NYT interactive at the time of Facebook's IPO: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/17/business/dealb...

edit: added KING (Candy Crush makers)

SHOP (Shopify) is doing pretty well and their upcoming plans/platform seem to bode well for them.

I didn't even know Shopify was in the unicorn category. I previously worked on a project that generated coupon codes programmatically for a Spotify shop. I just closed my testing account a couple days ago, and thought to myself 'wow, Shopify is still a thing'. No offense, I'm a programmer so I'm completely ignorant to the value I guess.

For any retailer selling a physical product, Shopify makes it super simple to list products and connect them with platform apps for fulfillment, marketing, etc.

My company, Pavlok (http://pavlok.com), is built on Shopify, and it's helped us hook up all our shipping/billing/marketing/payment services. Shopify is also a really awesome company -- we were one of their 2015 winners of their Build a Business Competition where they flew us to Necker Island to spend a week with Richard Branson, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Daymond John, etc. Not many companies make a trip like this happen :) https://youtu.be/tmuF1xaW3Z0

How about Slack and Docker? Do you think they're going to IPO soon?

Docker has not, to my knowledge, actually found a working and scalable business model quite yet. Doesn't mean they won't find one, of course, but that's kind of a prerequisite for an IPO.

Slack CEO's most recent comments suggest that IPO won't happen this year at least; they are also quite savvy (not the first rodeo for the founding team/leadership and they have plenty of investment demand plus the founders are all financially secure). I'd be surprised if we see a Slack IPO even in 2018.

Besides the ones listed I also got killed on Hortonworks http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/HDP/?p=HDP

Yelp, Square, Etsy. Yeah I dont understand this tech boom. Why are people starting companies when no one wants them? For the non-existant profits? Maybe Yahoo will buy them lol.

Ah well at least MSFT is back where it was in '99.

> Why are people starting companies when no one wants them

I think people want them, but private equity over evaluates them making it difficult to fulfill their promises. Millions of people use Twitter, but that doesn't mean they are worth the amount they are supposed to be worth.

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