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Sounds like an overly pessimistic view. You IPO to allow early investors to exit and raise capital to expand. There are a lot of very successful IPOs from before 2020 and some of those that went public in the last two years will be ok

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From the people buying an IPO a "very successful" one is one that was under-priced and goes on to produce outsized returns afterwards, this means the company owners sold below some "real value".

The most successful IPOs for the company are where it sells a bunch of stock at prices that then stay steady or even go down, they traded (potentially worthless) paper for real cash. I suspect the majority of IPOs are "successful" in the second way even though they're "sold" as being (a chance?) at the first way.

We don’t know that. We sometimes see small trades post IPO 100% higher than the IPO price but rarely would an investment bank turn down more money to give a better deal to a client. If there were 15 investors offering $100M at one time, they are going to be firm on the price they pay. A trade of 100 shares post IPO is not relevant. In fact, we did a bunch of SPACs because they offered better “price discovery” and we are seeing the results.

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