The warm reception that Lyft’s IPO has enjoyed is not lost on other companies looking to go public.
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Following news that Lyft’s IPO, despite adding billions to its valuation and the company’s path to profitability looking either long or nonexistent, is oversubscribed, Pinterest is looking to pick up the pace. Pinterest, a perennial IPO candidate, is accelerating its IPO process according to the Wall Street Journal.
According to the paper, Pinterest “is preparing to make the filing public as early as Friday and list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-April.” The fact that we could see a Pinterest S-1 today is notable and exciting.
Recall that Lyft also filed its public document on a Friday earlier this month.
Lyft’s IPO is not the only recent public offering to see huge demand. Levi’s, the venerable clothing company, saw its shares fly out of the gate when it debuted this week. Jeans, ride-hailing, whatever, investors are hungry for growth and are willing to gamble on offerings to get it.
It makes sense that Pinterest wants to get out while the getting is good. Uber, a Lyft competitor and domestic champion of deeply unprofitable unicorns, is also looking to get its shares out quickly.
We’ve covered the Pinterest IPO in detail on Crunchbase News, including its historical revenue growth, its 2018 growth rate, when it picked bankers, and when the San Francisco decacorn filed privately.
Financial questions still abound regarding Pinterest. Off the top of my head, I’m unsure about recent year-over-year growth rates (think Q1 2019 compared to Q1 2018, and Q4 2018 versus Q4 2017), its gross margins (a key metric to test revenue quality), the company’s cost structure (is it suffering from Facebook-style rising content moderation costs?), and its current pace of losses (Pinterest is not expected to be profitable at the time of its IPO).
If the S-1 drops today, we’ll have all that for you and more.
Pinterest does have something non-financial going for it, however. It recently lost its CTO to Airbnb (a decacorn tipped to go public sometime before the next ice age, maybe). But then it hired Walmart’s CTO to come run its engineering team. So I suppose that’s a trade that might net-out positive for the private company; Walmart, after all, is pretty good at driving revenue.
More when the S-1 drops. Pray that it is today.
Illustration: Li-Anne Dias.
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