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Postmates cites ‘market conditions’ in delay of initial public offering
Food delivery startup Postmates Inc. is delaying its initial public offering on concerns about “market conditions,” according to a report Tuesday from Recode Vox quoting people familiar with the matter.
The “market conditions” referred to in the report are Wall Street investors having finally worked out that money-losing tech unicorns aren’t all the same, and if they have never made a profit before, they’re likely bad investments.
Postmates, which describes itself as a logistics provider, filed its S1 IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in February. The company was claimed at the time to be floating on a $1.85 billion valuation, having raised a stunning $906.5 million in funding.
Founded in 2011, Postmates delivers food and sometimes other products. According to a report in July, it has a 10% share of the U.S. food delivery market. While an early starter in the food delivery market, Postmates has been trounced by later contenders such as Grubhub Inc., DoorDash Inc. and even Uber Technologies Inc.’s Uber Eats.
“A gloom is enveloping Silicon Valley and it’s making for unusual shows of contrition, internal debates in board rooms and insurgent attempts to change the Wall Street system that keeps delivering bad news to Silicon Valley,” the Recode Vox report said.
Wall Street has punished some startups on debut in 2019, but mostly bad startups, despite Recode Vox claiming that “tech’s highest-profile startups have largely bombed on the stock market since they went public this year.”
The standout cases are Uber, Lyft Inc. and more recently the SmileDirectClub, but dozens of others have found a willing audience. Rather than gloom and doom around all IPOs, the victims are mostly unicorns that have never been profitable and can’t show how they will become profitable.
By contrast, enterprise tech companies with tangible prospects continue to thrive on their public debut, such as Datadog Inc., Ping Identity Holding Corp. and Cloudflare Inc. — and that’s just in the last month.
Photo: Postmates
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