Uber Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in a memo today to hang tight as the company’s stock dropped even further on its second day of trading.

The ride-hailing giant made its public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Friday and was sold off from the get-go, opening at $42 a share, down from its initial public offering price of $45 per share, and then closing the day down almost 8%, to $41.60. The decline continued Monday, as Uber stock dropped nearly 11%, to $37.10 — down almost 18% from its IPO price.

Khosrowshahi (pictured) assured employees that better days would be ahead and that although the company’s stock did not perform as well as expected, others also had rocky debuts on public markets.

“Remember that the Facebook and Amazon post-IPO trading was incredibly difficult for those companies, he wrote. “And look at how they have delivered since. Our road will be the same.”

Khosrowshahi also noted that the IPO had allowed Uber to raise additional capital that will be reinvested into improving margins and profits.

Despite the spin, the Uber IPO is already being called by some as the biggest IPO bust ever. Uber is now worth about half of its peak private valuation of $120 billion and Uber investors from 2016 to 2018 have seen a combined loss of $2.27 billion.

“The bottom line: A whopping 81% of the $29.55 billion in equity that Uber has raised is underwater,” Felix Salmon said in Vanity Fair. “Investors who bought Uber shares three years ago have lost 15% of their money, before fees. The opportunity cost is even greater: Investors in the S&P 500 have seen their money grow by 50% over the same period.”

Arguably Uber owns much of the blame, but the post-IPO decline has come at a tumultuous period for equities markets as a trade war between the U.S. and China continues to heat up, with China applying new tariffs to American goods today.

The NYSE Composite Index dropped 2% on the news, far less than Uber’s share price. But as Ygal Arounian of Wedbush Securities noted, investors are shying away from riskier assets given U.S.-China trade tensions.

“Uber’s highly anticipated IPO coming out of the gates on Friday was clearly not a ‘storybook start,’” Arounian said. Uber is a “prove me situation and thus not going to be an overnight success story.”

Photo: Financial Times/Flickr