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I always hear this line of thinking, but there aren’t ever supporting examples presented. Stripe reminds me of Cloudflare. Cloudflare is over 5x what it was at IPO (as of 6/14/21). Maybe what you describe is the case “on average” for most IPOs, but it seems to not be the case for extraordinary companies like Cloudflare (and maybe Stripe). Obviously just an n of 1 but I’m sure others could chime in with similar examples.

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There are numerous examples on both sides for sure. I would add that performance also does well for companies operating in a bull market.

In the case of cloudflare (And many tech stocks) they had a black swan event of a large portion of the global economy going online during the pandemic which has juiced their returns.

Not saying it doesn't happen but rather that it isn't how people typically price their IPOs to generate value to the retail investor.

Yep, makes sense. A little nitpick: I wouldn’t call it a Black Swan because multiple people called out the potential for such a global event to happen (Gates, Taleb, etc.), but to your point it certainly further accelerated the move to online commerce, mainstream remote work, etc. Cloudflare and Stripe are/were both well positioned for that type of world.

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