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Tech IPOs are popping. A lot.

All but one of the 15 large tech listings so far this year popped on their first day of trading.

Tech IPOs this year have had to launch in unusual, volatile circumstances. But for the most part, they've got one thing in common: gigantic pops.

Looking at the 15 large tech listings of the year so far (not including Unity, which listed Friday), all but one popped. On average, they ended their first day of trading 81% above their IPO price, and some traded much higher: BigCommerce, which had the biggest pop, tripled in value.

Research from Renaissance Capital suggests that, though pops are normal, this year is particularly abnormal: Across all industries, the average first-day performance has been a 36% rise, well above the historical average of 14%. And Ipreo data shows that tech, with an average gain of 28%, only lags health care in terms of its first-day performance.

The pops have reignited debates about whether the IPO process is broken. Critics argue that companies are leaving money on the table and giving handouts to large institutional investors. Proponents, meanwhile, point out that the first-day trading price might not accurately reflect what an entire IPO block could be sold for. They also point to the risk that investors take on by buying illiquid stock — something that investors in Rackspace, the only tech stock to fall on its first day of trading this year with a 22% plunge, know all too well.

 Shakeel Hashim

Shakeel Hashim ( @shakeelhashim) is a growth manager at Protocol, based in London. He was previously an analyst at Finimize covering business and economics, and a digital journalist at News UK. His writing has appeared in The Economist and its book, Uncommon Knowledge.

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source code podcast

Big Tech’s big job shuffle

Protocol reporters discuss a big week of moves in the tech industry, from Jack Dorsey to Gigi Sohn to Square – sorry, Block.

Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

On this episode of the Source Code podcast: Issie Lapowsky joins the show to discuss Jack Dorsey’s sudden exit from Twitter, the waning cult of the founder, and what’s next for the social network. Then, Ben Pimentel joins to chat about why Dorsey wanted to focus on Square, why Square is now called Block, and the company’s crypto-first future. Finally, Ben Brody chats about the confirmation hearings for Gigi Sohn and Alan Davidson, and what happens next in the Meta/Giphy antitrust saga.

For more on the topics in this episode:

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David Pierce

David Pierce ( @pierce) is Protocol's editorial director. Prior to joining Protocol, he was a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, a senior writer with Wired, and deputy editor at The Verge. He owns all the phones.

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With great open banking innovation comes great responsibility for consumer data

The fintech developers who made mobile banking as routine as texting or online shopping aren't done. The next frontier for innovation is open banking – fintech builders are enabling consumers to be at the center of where and how their data is used to provide the services they want and need.

Most people don't even realize they're using open banking services today. If they connected their investment and banking accounts in a personal financial management solution or app, they're using open banking. Perhaps they've seen ads about how they can improve their credit score by uploading pay stubs or utility records to that same app – this is also powered by open banking.

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Bob Schukai
Bob Schukai is Executive Vice President of Technology Development, New Digital Infrastructure & Fintech at Mastercard, where he leads the technical design, execution and support of innovative open banking and fintech solutions, as well as next generation technologies to support global payment and data capabilities. Prior to Mastercard, Schukai’s work focused on cognitive computing, financial technology, blockchain, user experience and digital identity. He is also a member of the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
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rebranding

Meta, Block, Alphabet: Why some companies outgrow their old names

When tech becomes Big Tech, sometimes the names feel too small.

What do you do when your company becomes many companies? You might have to rebrand.

Photo: Block

What’s in a name? For tech companies, quite a lot.

Most companies in tech are named for their first product, whether it’s a social network, a shopping website, a search engine or a messaging service. But as big tech companies grow, their ambitions tend to sprawl, and their founding names often can’t keep up. So in recent years, tech giants like Meta, Block and Alphabet shifted from the names of their flagship products to something all-encompassing. But companies taking on a sleek new name isn’t just a marketing play. Brands often take new names to create distance between themselves and their flagship product.

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Nat Rubio-Licht
Nat Rubio-Licht is a Los Angeles-based news writer at Protocol. They graduated from Syracuse University with a degree in newspaper and online journalism in May 2020. Prior to joining the team, they worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal as a technology and aerospace reporter.
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venture capital

Loom, Zoom, boom: How Rippling raised $250 million with a demo video and a memo

Video app Loom has become the founder’s tool of choice for pitching venture capitalists.

Rippling CEO Parker Conrad recorded a product demo on Loom and sent it to investors as a fundraising shortcut.

Photo: Rippling

Parker Conrad has come to deeply loathe PowerPoint slides. He’s raised money for three different startups, and sending investors slides of a pitch deck feels like sending them only half a presentation, he said.

“It’s like sending someone a song and some of the tracks of music are missing,” Conrad, the co-founder and CEO of HR startup Rippling, told Protocol. “Any slide that you put together is meant to be accompanied by your voice track. And so if you’re sending slides without that, it’s a terrible way to convey information.”

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Biz Carson

Biz Carson ( @bizcarson) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol, covering Silicon Valley with a focus on startups and venture capital. Previously, she reported for Forbes and was co-editor of Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Before that, she worked for Business Insider, Gigaom, and Wired and started her career as a newspaper designer for Gannett.

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The cry-laughing emoji has absolutely earned this

Is it always sincere or even trendy? No. Does it serve its purpose? Absolutely.

The laugh-cry emoji has provided us with a codified process for indicating that we are all having a fun time here.

Photo: atomicstudio via Getty Images

In a stunning victory for the rights of people who find out about TikToks via Instagram Reels and have fond memories of Warped tour, the cry-laughing emoji has once again emerged from the fray as the most-used emoji of the year, according to data from the Unicode Consortium. The tearful grin, whose Christian name is “Face with Tears of Joy,” hasn’t relinquished its stranglehold on the top spot since 2015, when we as a nation were reeling from Zayn Malik’s One Direction exit, marveling at the Sisyphean efforts of pizza rat and becoming slowly numb to Uptown Funk. That was the same year that the teary-eyed grin was named Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year.

This is the second year that the Unicode Consortium, a nonprofit organization tasked with digitizing language, has released data (the first was in 2019). Other emoji in the top 10 include the red heart, sobbing face, face with heart eyes and Old Faithful, the venerable smiley face 😊. The Consortium notes that many of the most-used emoji’s placements have stayed consistent from its 2019 data, although the pleading face emoji (🥺) did make a noticeable leap from 97 to 14.

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Becca Evans
Becca Evans is a copy editor and producer at Protocol. Previously she edited Carrie Ann Conversations, a wellness and lifestyle publication founded by Carrie Ann Inaba. She's also written for STYLECASTER. Becca lives in Los Angeles.
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