Seems like most Ycombinator backed IPO would've have been bad bets. Once shares are floated in the public market, retailers are an after thought.
Have there been any successful sustainably profitable tech companies to go public since Facebook?
AMZN wasn't profitable for 7 years, then fell to unprofitable again in 2012 and 2014[2].
AAPL was net in the red from 1996 to 2003[3].
So, were all these companies "Ponzi schemes" during the eras where they were investing in growth?
And if your only qualification is to "be profitable" for something not to be a Ponzi, then why are you here ragging on places like Coinbase? Coinbase is a 5.7 P/E company with $4b in net cash right now.
[1] https://www.fintopea.com/quote/FB/income-statement
Everyone though that Amazon would never make a profit. Even today most of Amazon’s profit comes from AWS.
If your definition of "Ponzi Scheme" is simply that a company is profitable the moment they go public, then not even the original Ponzi Scheme was a Ponzi Scheme.
Disclosure: i just loaded up on this today
You'd have to normalize of the giant tidal waves of financial flows to see of YC IPOs are good or bad thing in reality.