A $700M SAFE, IPOs are back, and how one venture fund is transcending borders

Hello, and welcome to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. This is our Friday episode, in which we dig through the most critical stories from the week and chat through new and emerging themes. Listen here or wherever you get your podcasts. This week we … Read more

Reddit Stock Surges on Its First Day of Trading

A big concern ahead of the public listing was that Reddit, the platform that gave birth to the memestocks of 2021, could also suffer the wild price swings caused by large numbers of investors coordinating their strategy over social media, including Reddit itself, on forums such as r/wallstreetbets. Reddit’s IPO is a test of investor … Read more

Reddit IPO Filings Reveal the Company’s Hopes—and Fears

The amount of time Reddit reports that users spend with its service hasn’t significantly budged either. In September 2021, the company said that US users on average engaged for 28 minutes a day. It ticked up to 30 minutes that December. In December of 2023, the company specified a figure only for “logged-in” US users, … Read more

Reddit Is Letting Power Users In on Its IPO. Not Everyone’s Buying

Reddit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story. Unwanted Offer Reddit’s investment offer to users is known as the Directed Share Program. “Because you have helped make Reddit what it is today, you now have the opportunity to become Reddit owners at the same price as institutional investors,” the company wrote … Read more

Reddit’s IPO Filing Is Missing Something: Cofounder Alexis Ohanian

Advance, the owner of Condé, owns 30 percent of Reddit with other investors, board members, and employees holding the rest. Among them, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, an early user and investor in Reddit, has 8.7 percent of the company, according to Thursday’s filing. Some of Reddit’s power users in the US could join the ranks … Read more

Greece sells 30% stake in Athens airport operator, drawing strong investor interest

ATHENS, Greece — Greece completed a major privatization Friday, selling its 30% stake in the biggest airport operator in the tourism-reliant country during an initial public offering, officials said. Shares in Athens International Airport are expected to begin trading on the Athens stock exchange starting Wednesday, the airport said in a statement. Finance Minister Costis … Read more

So how about another 20 IPOs?

The third quarter is behind us, but the scores are still being totted up. This week will bring a deluge of numbers from major tech companies, helping us better understand the state of the market, for example. Another lens into the third quarter that has yet to gel are its venture capital results. We’ve covered … Read more

Tech IPOs get ‘meh’ response from Wall Street: Arm, Instacart, Klaviyo

Instacart celebrates their IPO at the Nasdaq on Sept. 19th, 2023. Courtesy: Nasdaq After a 21-month tech IPO freeze, the market has cracked opened in the past week. But the early results can’t be encouraging to any late-stage startups lingering on the sidelines. Chip designer Arm debuted last Thursday, followed by grocery-delivery company Instacart this … Read more

New York is a tech startup hotbed after almost a decade of IPOs

Olivier Pomel, co-founder and CEO of Datadog, speaks at the company’s Dash conference in San Francisco on Aug. 3, 2023. Datadog Albert Wang, a native Californian, moved to New York from Boston with his wife a decade ago and got a job as a product manager at Datadog, which at the time was a fledgling … Read more