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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm not really wise to the world of finance and what-have-you, but how many S-1s do I need to see in short succession before I start to ask: "What's going on, guys?"

Like, is this a indication that a lot of people are trying to exchange their companies for hard cash as quickly as possible? It kind of looks a lot like that. This is what, the 3rd or 4th one to hit the HN front-page lately?

Is... is that a bad sign?

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When one post is on HN's front page it's common for there to be a rush of follow-up posts. Usually we downweight these since there's a power-law dropoff in how interesting they are. Some of the moderation principles relating to this:

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

I'm wondering which of these S-1s are particularly interesting to discuss in their own right, vs. which are just follow-up/copycat-style threads? Unity is getting a specific discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24261559) but the other ones seem pretty generic. Oh yeah, that's another relevant principle: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....

Business was at a standstill in 2008. It takes 8-10 years to go from embryo to IPO these days. Thus, a lot of companies got started in 2010-2012, and are now reaching IPO maturity. I think this is a "ketchup bottle" effect rather than a sign of the end times.

(That being said, the end times may ALSO be upon us, but not because of this particular sign.)

There's been an IPO winter for about 20 years, so yes this flurry of S1s is exciting for tech folks

http://www.bretswanson.com/index.php/2017/01/reasons-for-opt...

5 from companies in the Bay Area alone. There were more.

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