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Comment by itsryanirl | Hacker News Reader

This. Companies that IPOd in 2019 were lucky. So many organizations had to and are going to have to wait out covid, the looming recession, etc...

The next few years will be interesting. I'm excited to see which domains are recession-proof. Something tells me enterprise software is going to be where the moola is made.

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Strong agree. It feels like a different lifetime to think back to 2018 and 2019; back then, everyone in town was hyper-fixated on a whole raft of companies that kept teasing their IPOs.

I did some very quick and lazy Googling [1][2], and even I was surprised by just how long the full list of familiar names is, looking at 2018 and 2019 IPOs. Just to drop a few incredibly-familiar ones:

  - Uber
  - Lyft
  - Pinterest
  - Zoom
  - PagerDuty
  - Beyond Meat
  - Dropbox
  - Spotify

I personally know a bunch of people that spent months (or years) of their lives in suspense waiting for one of these. (I'm one of them, for what it's worth.) It's wild to think how different so many lives would have been if even one of these companies had decided to postpone their IPO for a year or two.

[1]: https://coventryleague.com/blogentary/30-largest-ipos-of-201...

[2]: https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2018/12/07/top...

> I personally know a bunch of people that spent months (or years) of their lives in suspense waiting for one of these.

8 years for me. I was an early employee at a YC startup that is now pretty close to having an IPO. At least, I used to think that. Now I'm not sure how much longer I'll need to wait.

Companies that raised in 2019 or early 2020 and didn’t raise another round after that are in for a really tough time. Their coffers are running dry by now and its getting really, really hard to raise more now.

I suspect we’ll see the global list of unicorns shrink quite a bit by 2024

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