The year is wrapping up — the decade is wrapping up! — and that means it’s time to take a look back through the Spaceship lens at some of our favourite moments of 2019, whether they were controversial, brilliant, surprising, or just downright rubbish.
In the beginning, 2019 promised to be a pretty stellar year for IPOs.
From Uber to Lyft, Slack to WeWork, there was no end of unicorns readying to go public. But it’s not easy being a unicorn, apparently. The weight of expectations is heavy.
We wrote about Uber and Lyft’s duelling IPOs in April. Lyft had already gone public (in March), and Uber was set to float in May. At the time, Lyft shares had slid, and we were on the fence about whether ridesharing companies could ever be profitable.
Now it seems as though we were right to be hesitant. Since going public, both companies have reported record losses. No surge pricing to be found!
Uber, in particular, has had a gruelling time. Just last month, London declined to renew its license and in the American state of New Jersey, the company was hit with a US$640 million bill for misclassifying drivers as independent contractors. Oops.
But at least Lyft and Uber made it to Wall Street, right?
Two other companies we wrote about — Endeavour and WeWork — did not.
For Endeavour, it came down to weak investor demand. Just a few days before the talent agency was set to go public, it looked like the company would only raise around US$360 million from the IPO, when previously up to US$600 million was forecast.
Rather than go down that path, Endeavour postponed its IPO indefinitely.
For WeWork, well, that’s a longer story. It involved private planes, ousted co-founders, buy outs, and more. Essentially, after filing its public offering paperwork in August, WeWork found itself at the center of a storm. We questioned whether its business model worked.
Answer: not enough.
In around a month, the company’s valuation was cut from US$47 billion to around US$10 billion. Adam Neumann was removed as CEO. And then finally the IPO was delayed.
Since then, WeWork has been taken over by its biggest investor, Softbank.
Maybe WeWork had too lofty a goal. (Wink!)
Or perhaps it just didn’t align with the values of consumers.
In October, we wrote about how both millennials and Gen Zs, in general, will let their wallets speak for them by supporting companies that align with their values.
You (our readers) proved that when, in November, we wrote about Saudi Aramco, the world’s most profitable company. We received an army of email replies, many of which implored us to avoid investing in Saudi Aramco due to Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.
Message received.
On the flip side, though, consumers have loved Beyond Meat.
The company had one of the more surprising floats this year. It went public at a price of US$25 a share and then promptly exploded!
So much so, we had to order in Beyond Meat burgers to see what all the fuss was about.
The share price reached a peak in July — hitting an impressive US$234.90 — but since then it has fallen quite rapidly and is hovering around US$76 as I write this (though that is still triple what it went public at so, you know, not too shabby).
All up, 2019 has been quite the rollercoaster ride for unicorns, which means 2020 will probably offer up its own series of surprises.
