It seems everyone is going public these days. If you haven’t filed for an IPO yet, what are you even doing with your life? So, last week, it was your neighbour’s son who launched ‘PawPal’, a dog-walking app that also sells gourmet bones. Last you checked, it was valued at $500 mn – though it’s mostly just a list of pet-friendly parks. Gone are the days when you needed a business model or, heaven forbid, profits, something that seems to be oh-so-banal these days. Now, it’s all about potential. ‘What could we possibly do?’ is the new mantra. Business seems to be catching up with politics – minus the hokey catchlines, thankfully. Your company just needs to offer some form of vague hope that someday, somehow, money might come in. Got an idea for an app that tracks how long it takes your coffee to cool down? IPO it. Have a laundry service that’s only available on Sundays between 2 and 4 pm? Boy, sounds like a unicorn in the making.
Investors don’t want numbers – they want ‘narratives’, as if Dostoyevsky’s just shifted to the Valley. Just make sure your pitch deck includes words like ‘disruption’, ‘synergy‘ and, of course, ‘AI’. The goal is not to explain what you do, but to sound like you’ve single-handedly reinvented existence. In this brave new world of IPOmania, one thing’s clear – we’re all a few stock options away from la-la land.
