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But not every industry had a great year. A Crunchbase News analysis shows a number of major categories – including hardware, blockchain, delivery and electric vehicles — that are poised to show big year-over-year declines.

Below, we look at what the numbers reveal about these out-of-vogue sectors.

Hardware

Hardware investment showed a decline in 2019, as U.S. investors increasingly backed away from big rounds for startups developing consumer electronics, networking hardware, and other devices.

Per 1, U.S. hardware raised $1.97 billion in seed through late stage venture funding rounds in 2019. Direct year-over-year comparisons aren’t entirely fair at this point in the year, given that many rounds get reported late. Still, it’s hard to see much chance we’ll catch up to the 2018 total of $3.46 billion.

One of the big reasons hardware funding is down is that there were fewer supergiant funding rounds in the category this year. Just two companies raised known rounds of $100 million or more: , a maker of hardware and software platforms for data centers, and , a developer of adaptive, kinetic glass.

It should also be noted that the hardware category does not include a lot of robotics and autonomous driving deals. If we factored in funding rounds for startups such as , a developer of autonomous robotic vehicles that raised $940 million in February, the 2019 totals would be much higher.

Crypto And Blockchain

While the price of bitcoin has recovered from lows hit a year ago, dealmaking activity for crypto and blockchain has not followed suit.

Crunchbase data shows investor enthusiasm for crypto and blockchain deals remains far below peaks hit several quarters ago. Dealmaking activity appears to have hit its highest point around late 2017 and early 2018, when cryptocurrency prices kept soaring, and blockchain was the buzzword of the day.

For the first two-thirds of the year, private investors put an estimated $2 billion to work across at least 472 known rounds globally, per Crunchbase analysis (not including initial coin offerings (ICOs)). Initial data for the remainder of the year shows the space still garnering some deals, but well below prior highs. (In 2018, the peak year, investors put at least $4.65 billion into the space, not including ICOs.)

It also should be noted that the numbers include companies for which crypto or blockchain is a component but not a core focus of the business. For example, one of the  largest crypto-related rounds of 2019 was a $323 million Series E for , which offers cryptocurrencies but is best-known as a commission free stock trading app.

So when one looks at funding for more pure-play crypto and blockchain startups, the funding levels look more bearish.

Delivery

Food delivery is a tough category for making a profit, but in recent years it’s been a pretty lucrative one for raising venture funding. But if 2019 is any indication, the fast-growing sector is in the midst of a slowdown.

So far this year, food delivery companies brought in in venture and seed funding across at least 125 funding rounds, per Crunchbase data. That’s down from $11.1 billion that went to , across at least 223 rounds.

��DZ��dz�������’s had the largest single venture capital funding round of food delivery companies in 2019, bringing in $1 billion in its Series E round. also pulled in some serious cash, raising a total of $1 billion across two separate rounds.

The food delivery space has encountered its share of problems in 2019. DoorDash came under fire for its tipping practices and we’re still waiting on Postmates to go public. Lackluster post-IPO performance by Uber, which had been banking on growing its delivery business, also hasn’t helped.

That said, companies are still raising big sums, so this isn’t a sector that hasn’t petered out yet.

Electric Vehicles

If you are a venture capitalist and want a place to park lots of capital, the electric vehicle industry has much to offer. Companies in the space are notoriously capital-intensive, and while their risk profile is high, the returns on betting on the category leader can be high too, as evidenced by Tesla’s $70 billion-plus market capitalization.

However, history also shows that the bulk of electric vehicle investments don’t turn out so profitably. Perhaps that, combined with a slowdown in China-based supergiant rounds, is contributing to a global slowdown in venture-backed bets on the sector.

So far in 2019, venture investment in electric vehicle-focused companies , with just over $5 billion going to Chinese deals. In 2018, by contrast, investors put over $18 billion to work globally, of which more than $14 billion went to China-based companies.

The Big Picture

It’s noteworthy that three of the four shrinking categories highlighted above involve companies that operate in the physical world, either making things or delivering things other people made. The fourth, crypto and blockchain, saw declines in large part because of the bubbly levels of the prior year.

Looking at where the money continues to flow, it’s clear venture investors love affair with software revenue models has not abated. They’re more on the fence, it appears, when it comes to businesses that still incur high fulfillment costs for each customer they add.

Photo courtesy of via Unsplash.

This morning announced its , including 44.1 percent revenue growth to 27.5 billion RMB ($3.91 billion), and post-tax profit of 1.3 billion RMB ($189.1 million). Meituan improved from stiff year-ago losses on both an operating and net basis, making its growth and incomes all the more notable.

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The company, which provides deals, reservations, and on-demand delivery, went public last year worth around $55 billion. Today it is worth about $68 billion; shares of the company fell just over 5.5 percent in trading today, following the announcement of its results.

All that’s well and good, but what matters is that inside of Meituan Dianping’s earnings were positive notes regarding its food delivery business. Food delivery is a key growth driver for companies like and , and the entire game for firms like and . So, what Meituan has to say about the economics of food delivery matters; can the Chinese giant make it work?

It seems that the answer is mostly yes. Here are the key excerpts from its earnings report, regarding food delivery (emphasis Crunchbase News):

[R]evenue from our food delivery business increased by 39.4% year-over-year to RMB15.6 billion for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB11.2 billion in the same period of 2018. Gross profit from our food delivery business increased by 64.5% to RMB3.0 billion for the third quarter of 2019 from RMB1.9 billion in the same period of 2018, while gross margin expanded to 19.5% from 16.6%. Although gross margin decreased by 2.8 percentage points on a quarter-over-quarter basis due to unfavorable weather conditions, we were able to achieve positive adjusted operating profit for our food delivery business for the third quarter of 2019.

Food delivery made up about 57.5 percent of Meituan’s gross transaction volume (total platform spend) in the third quarter. Yes, the firm’s profit note regarding the portion of its business that we care the most about was adjusted profit (removing “share-based compensation expenses, amortization of intangible assets resulting from acquisitions,” along with various impairment charges), but that’s still better than nothing.

Recall that Uber and Lyft are only promising �ڳܱ���-���ܲ����Ա������adjusted profit to begin in 2021; Meituan Dianping is already there with its whole business and food delivery operation. Uber Eats, generated negative adjusted EBITDA (another adjusted profit metric) of $316 million off $392 million in adjusted net revenue ($645 million in un-adjusted top line). Those numbers are worse.

So What?

Meituan making money on delivery shows that it is possible to do so. And it was able to make money on food delivery in a market as competitive as China, and one that is slowing down. Turning a profit on delivery, it turns out, is not an impossible feat.

We don’t want to hold our breath for it, but perhaps if Meituan Dianping can generate adjusted profit on food delivery, others can too. (Food delivery is a crowded space in the U.S., which could complicate short-term profitability.)

It’s probably too bold to say that Meituan’s news will prompt Postmates to get off the sidelines public (Postmates’ CEO said market conditions are the reason for its delayed IPO, but it would be unusual for a company to go public in the midst of the holidays). Nevertheless, Meituan’s delivery profit is a good sign for all of the players in the space.

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Read the front page of influential technology news aggregator this morning and you’d think that things are hot in startup land. , a financial technology startup focused on the African market, from Chinese and Japanese investors. There’s a . You can find as well.

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But if you started the day with a newspaper, you might have on startups looking to raise extra rounds and conserve cash, and the latest from the WeWork implosion as the coworking startup .

Both sets of news are correct, but they tell slightly different stories. We might summarize both story collections by saying that while individual actions in the startup market paint a bullish picture, sentiment in startupland isn’t as strong as it was last year; there’s more fear in the market.

Of course, we’ve been here before. There was the , and tech stocks fell off a cliff so hard in late 2018 that everyone with a slide deck and venture dreams got nervous. And you can find “startup winter” worries in , , , and, as we reported recently, 2019.

We raise all of this as a reminder that while some shrugging off macro (the global economic slowdown) and micro concerns ( implosion), there is reason to be worried. Investment patterns can shift quickly in private markets. But while all of that is true, there’s still plenty of optimism and dry powder in the market. Shake a stick, and you find a new venture fund (some recent news here, here), while private equity has .

It seems fair to say that while Nasdaq remains near record highs, there’s little chance that the constitutionally-optimistic — founders and their private backers — slow down, there’s enough concern to warrant caution from the sidelines.

Before It Closes

Some companies are taking advantage of today’s warm waters even as concerns rise and the holiday season approaches. Most recently, payment software company filed for an IPO on Friday. While the Bill.com IPO is a positive sign for startups in general, don’t be surprised if it isn’t quickly joined by other companies looking to debut; it would be surprising to see any more startups file to go public after this week, as most companies try to avoid a public market debut around the holidays.

In the meantime, startups may raise extra cash to raise their walls a bit. After all, why shouldn’t they? There’s so much money in the market, why not put it to good use if a company isn’t quite ready to go public.

But there is some real hope that the good times will last a bit longer. After all, there are still a bunch of unicorns that still need to go public (looking at you, and ). Postmates’ CEO said just last month that the company was waiting for the right market conditions to go public, as the markets haven’t been too friendly to unicorns like Uber and Lyft so far this year.

Heading into the end of 2019, there’s scant reason to expect a major correction in the short-term. So, we stay in the middle of caution and hope. How long we can stand on this particular edge, however, isn’t clear.

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In a bid to shake up the narrative surrounding itself and its various comps, announced yesterday that it expects to generate adjusted profit in two years’ time. The news, coming on the heels of sagging share prices from Lyft and its domestic ride-hailing rival , pumped life into their public valuations.

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Made during a Wall Street Journal conference, however, the company’s promise was modest. After noting that Lyft had “never laid out [its] path to profitability,” the company’s CEO said that he was “excited to now go on the record” by announcing that Lyft will be “profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis a year before analysts expect us to.”

Green went on to clarify that comment, saying that Lyft would reach positive adjusted EBITDA, a profit-related metric that disregards a number of costs, in “Q4 2021.”

Shares of Lyft rose 6.5 percent on the day. Uber climbed 3.6 percent on the same news. In effect, Lyft affirmed part of what it promised during its roadshow. Rewinding to April, here’s how Crunchbase News described each company’s self-described future profitability:

Both Lyft and Uber reported expected future profit ratios. Adjusted profit, that is. Uber reported an expected adjusted EBITDA margin of 25 percent, and Lyft a similar metric [of] 20 percent[.]

Yesterday, Lyft didn’t promise a level of expected adjusted EBITDA. Instead, it simply said that it would post some of the stuff in the final quarter of 2021. From its promise of some adjusted EBITDA in Q1 2021, we can expect the firm to begin to grow the result on a percent-of-revenue basis until it reaches the 20 percent threshold it promised months ago, provided that everything goes to plan.

So What

The Lyft announcement is both good and bad news for ride-hailing and other on-demand companies.

The good news is obvious. Lyft expects, and has now publicly promised its investors, that it can get to something akin to break-even in two years’ time. The bad news is equally obvious: It’s going to take Lyft another eight quarters to stop losing money even after stripping out huge costs like share-based compensation.

Lyft, founded in 2012, while a private company. It during its IPO. That means it’s going to take $7.2 billion in capital (presuming that Lyft doesn’t hire more along the way) and nine years to still post GAAP net losses.

The company should be huge by then, provided that it can continue even a moderate growth pace. Lyft posted $867.3 million in revenue during Q2 2019, for example, up 72 percent from its year-ago period. Keep up even half that growth for two years and Lyft is huge. (Lyft’s Q2 results were well-received by the market, with the domestic ride-hailing unicorn beating on both growth and loss reduction.)

The company posted an adjusted EBITDA loss of $204.1 million in its most recent quarter.

But perhaps Lyft’s promise can help its yet-private comps. The and the of the world, companies worth billions and in need of eventual exits. Lyft put a flag in the ground, saying that on-demand companies can, at some point, break even post adjusted profit.

Next, let’s see if Uber follows suit and if the Lyft news can break the Postmates IPO filing free. We’d love to read it.

Illustration: .

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The startup submitted a confidential IPO filing in February, and there were reports that its S-1 would come out in September. But September has passed, and people (read: journalists) are asking: where is Postmates’ S-1?

“I’m asking myself the same question every day,” Lehmann said at TechCrunch’s annual Disrupt conference on Friday.

“The reality is that we will IPO when we believe we find the right time for the business and the right time in the markets,” Lehmann said.

He cited public market conditions–he called them“choppy” especially for growth-focused companies–as the reason for Postmates taking its time with its IPO. He wouldn’t say if the IPO would come in 2019, but said it depended more on the “macro” than the company’s own particular readiness to go public.

This year has seen many high-profile startups go public (, , ) and Postmates was expected to be among the Class of 2019. But many of those startups have seen lackluster results on the public market. Uber and Lyft stocks set record lows earlier this week, and WeWork pulled its IPO after a string of problems came to light last month.

Postmates has , according to Crunchbase. It most recently raised $225 million in September in a private equity round led by . The company, which was founded in 2011, counts and among its investors.

Lehmann said the company knows internally when it will be profitable, and that its most recent investment from GPI Capital was an “opportunistic” round.

Friday also marked Lehmann’s return to TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference after several years of absence. He Wednesday that he hadn’t been back to Disrupt since “totally butchering” Postmates’ battlefield demo in 2011. (He returned at least once in between, in London.)

The on-demand delivery startup is also looking to have robots make deliveries. It debuted its robot, named Serve, last year and in August Postmates received a permit to test it in San Francisco, according to the . Postmates is already testing Serve in the Los Angeles area and would like to test it in New York, Lehmann said.

Postmates didn’t spend as much on developing robotics as one would think, Lehmann said. Postmates spent less developing it in-house than it would have by acquiring another company.

Illustration Credit:

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The new capital comes after it was rumored that Postmates was targeting September as the month to release its IPO filing to the public, kicking off the final steps to becoming a public company. Crunchbase News was very interested in seeing its sums.

As a private company, Postmates has proven to be a prodigious fundraiser. Raising before its new round, Postmates has attracted capital from , , , , , among other investors. , a private equity firm, led its latest round.

Postmates’ valuation rose from $1.9 billion in early 2019, . Investors are therefore betting that Postmates has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in new value this year; that casts a positive spin on the firm’s trajectory.

That it is now able to, presumably, delay its IPO with a fresh infusion of private capital is more neutral. It’s hard to tell from the outside if the company is taking advantage of inexpensive capital from a ready source, for example. Or, if the delivery shop couldn’t quite get its IPO ducks in a row, leading it to take on more private capital in the interim.

Postmates has now raised around $900 million, all-in. The firm will crest the billion-dollars-raised mark when it eventually goes public.

The IPO

Postmates’ privately filed IPO is more interesting than most companies’ individual S-1 filings. Aside from ‘ portion of Uber’s earnings, it’s hard to tell how the on-demand unicorn cohort is performing financially.

And there are billions of dollars at stake with Postmates and grappling with each other for market share (more here on DoorDash.). With Postmates openly working on going public, full financial results for one of the best-known on-demand companies felt within reach. Now they appear further away.

Postmates’ new round means it has the capital it needs to keep growing outside of the public eye. But when it or another company of similar ilk does go public, expect nearly every VC in the industry to watch carefully. A lot of their collected bets are riding on those IPOs doing well.

Illustration: .

We’ve covered the dizzying rise of from food delivery unicorn to Vision Fund-backed, niche-defining decacorn.

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All it took was a bathtub of capital. The company’s market share has risen among key groups thanks to its epic fundraising activity. Its consumer market share in the United States has risen to a leading position, . And its recent acquisition of Caviar from will as well.

But it seems that even the company’s sights are a bit higher than merely using humans to deliver an ever-larger amount of food. Instead, DoorDash is snapping up self-driving talent. To what end, and at what cost, is a good question.

Robots, Not Cars

It doesn’t seem that DoorDash is in any danger of building self-driving car tech. What the firm is working on are self-driving robots that can scoot about cities, delivering food at a far lower cost (in theory) than what it costs to pay humans to do the same.

It’s not new work at DoorDash. You can find company notes August 2017 entry, extolling a new robot delivery vehicle that it was excited to announce. The post also noted that the firm had already started “testing robot deliveries on the DoorDash platform.”

Fast forward to this week, and the company appears to be very much still at it. Here’s :

DoorDash has been on an acquisition tear of late, with Scotty Labs as its latest target. […] [The company] is working on technology to enable people to remotely control self-driving cars, raised a $6 million seed round.”

TechCrunch also notes that DoorDash scooped up “the two co-founders from Lvl5,” a firm that works in mapping for self-driving tech. (Data on , and .)

Add the two deals to DoorDash’s history of work in robotics and it’s pretty simple to see that the company is still investing in building delivery robots. Of course, competitors like are working on the same thing.

Indeed, there appears to be a sort of two-prong battle in the world of autonomous wheels. The first deals with self-driving vehicles that can carry several things; cars, trucks, and other wheeled machines that can bring multiple people, or multiple tons of product to where they need to go. And the smaller end of the race, where box-sized robots want to bring small amounts of product to consumers’ places of work and rest.

It’s hard to fault delivery companies for working on their own tech. My read is that every single on-demand company wants to get rid of paying delivery humans as quickly, and completely as possible. This was evident even back when ride-hailing companies first decided to not pay their driving staff like staff. Since then, self-driving machines have been worked on by nearly everyone you can name in the ride-hailing market. Postmates and DoorDash, in the on-demand niche, are similar.

Postmates has filed privately to go public�����Ի� could reveal a public S-1 this year. If it does, we’ll be curious to see what sort of impact its robot delivery machines make on its R&D spend. Because we know that self-driving tech is expensive.

Ride-Hailing, Self-Driving

Ride-hailing generates no cash, let alone net income. I cannot name a single ride-hailing company of scale that makes money anywhere in the world. The model requires lots of capital until a later date when prices can rise to help companies cover costs. Or until self-driving tech can reduce costs in other ways, allowing delivery platforms to collect more money per delivery for themselves.

Now, read that paragraph again but swap in on-demand deliveries for ride-hailing, and you get a nearly-true set of statements. GrubHub makes money, so the edits don’t hold up, but you can see the point.

On-demand companies feel like they are suffering from a similar problem as ride-hailing companies. To generate lots of demand (revenue, and revenue growth), they need to charge a price point that doesn’t allow them to fully cover their costs. Self-driving tech could help either category, so everyone is investing in the stuff. (More on the issue here.)

But at what cost? We’ve noted that ride-hailing is a bit like fracking in the past, with lots of capital going in but very little coming out in the way of cash or profit. Autonomous work is similar. Indeed, the cost of self-driving tech is staggering. Billions and billions of dollars are being poured into the space, with little so far to show for it in the way of commercial performance.

So can DoorDash get robot deliveries right before Postmates does, or someone else? Or can it get the work done and scaled before its model runs out of fresh cash? We’ll see, but the company certainly is still hard at it.

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It may join in going public in the next few months, adding a second unicorn IPO to our to-do list.

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Postmates’ debut comes after ride-hailing startups and went public to disappointing reception, and while domestic on-demand rival is one of the hottest startups in the world. 

It isn’t entirely fair to directly compare on-demand companies that focus on bringing food and other items to consumers, instead of moving those same consumers around. But there is an overlap when we look at how these companies balance market demand and a network of contract labor. Plus, Uber does have a large on-demand food business.

Postmates’ expected IPO comes after the firm , and . In its history, the firm has raised angel funding, seed capital, and Series A through Series F venture rounds.

To-date, Postmates’ equity fundraising looks like this:

In the meantime, a competitor is raising cash at a head scratch worthy pace: .

, the company raised a $600 million Series G at a valuation of around $12.6 billion. Months before that news, the company was valued at $7.1 billion as it raised its Series F. And when it was raising its Series E about a year ago, the company was valued at $4 billion.

Put simply, in about a year, DoorDash has used fuel brought on by investors to triple its valuation.

Investors’ seemingly insatiable hunger for DoorDash is a good signal for Postmates as it nears a potential debut on the public market. If there’s faith in the private market, the public market might see that and hop onto a similar sentiment when it has the option.

did not immediately respond for a comment, but we’ll be back with more context if and when the company gets back to us.

For now, however, Postmates is trading Wall Street for sidewalks. The company just received conditional approval from San Francisco to start public trials of its delivery robot, Serve, on sidewalks across the city.

Update: Post and its headline were changed to reflect a September S-1 filing and a later IPO.

Illustration: .

After a busy year, today’s technology and venture-backed technology IPO pipeline is light. But while the present-day pipeline of public IPOs is low there are a few big offerings that are expected to land shortly. So let’s examine both this morning.

Upcoming, Expected

The upcoming IPO pipeline (Crunchbase News tracks tech and venture-backed offerings on U.S. exchanges, including companies headquartered in other countries who choose to float here) contains a single, known offering. It’s , a China-based company that is to raise around $34 million in its debut.

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And that’s where the expected roll ends. It’s a short list. You can pick a reason why, but what matters is that the unicorn IPO run has come to a pause. So, let’s look at who is supposed to get out soon.

Big Names

There are two large, expected tech and venture-backed IPOs coming later this year that we have have our eye on, those belonging to and .

WeWork is expected to go public in September. The company is fitting a number of pieces together for its debut. First, it’s raising debt to avoid an oversized IPO. Why is it raising debt before it goes public? As WeWork consumes cash to operate, it needs to raise capital in its public offering. Raising debt before is a way to limit future equity dilution.

As we’ve mentioned on these pages quite often, WeWork’s rich valuation may prove difficult to defend when it goes public. The company will stress its growth (fast!), its growing stable of software tools (neat!), and the economics of its buildings once occupied (supposedly good!). Against it are public-market comps that are priced very differently, and staggering losses.

Not since have we looked forward to an S-1 more.1

Cloudflare is a simpler beast. Back in the news over its decision to end digital protection for the odious 8chan, Cloudflare is a critical part of how the Internet works. Therefore, its numbers will also be incredibly interesting. Cloudflare most recently , meaning that its public offering will be sizeable.

The latest regarding Cloudflare’s offering is that it filed privately this summer, and will float in September (credit for breaking the news). This IPO won’t make the same splash as WeWork’s own, but I am stoked at the prospect of checking out the company’s gross margins.

And that’s where the list of expected, major offerings ends this morning.

There are other, anticipated offerings, but it’s a somewhat soggy list. Here are some companies long expected to go public, and why we don’t anticipate incipient S-1s:

• : This company just raised a bunch of money at a new valuation. It’s busy putting that money to work. And, given media coverage of some of the that led to the embarrassing “bank account” situation, the company probably still has some growing up to do before it goes public.
• : Postmates has filed, but we haven’t heard anything regarding its public S-1 landing soon. Not that we wouldn’t welcome such an occurrence, we just don’t see it happening in the next month or two. You can read our latest coverage of the company’s IPO march here. (The Postmates S-1 will be fun not only because Postmates is itself a neat company, but because it will also shed light on the on-demand space in new detail.)
• : Towards the end of every year every publication says that Airbnb could go public in the coming annum. And here we are, with no public Airbnb shares yet again.
• : A dark horse in the IPO chronicles, the social-media popular in-home exercise, and bragging-rights company is going to post an IPO document in time, detailing a mix of hardware (stationary bikes! treadmills!) and software (recurring fees for digitally-delivered classes) that will generate a fascinating blended gross margin figure. We’re stoked. But here again, other than expectant scuttlebutt there isn’t too much to report.

What we do expect are more SaaS-style offerings from mid-range unicorns. Yes, SaaS stocks have had a tough run of it over the last few days, but the category is still valued historically-high multiples.

There’s a jinx factor in saying that some companies aren’t set to go public quickly. I’m fine with that. If I accidentally induce, say, Postmates to publicly file then I’ll have committed a public service. More when we get any sort of new S-1.

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We’ll have some coverage out shortly regarding the newest mega-rounds, but I wanted to bring up a few newsy items not directly related to raising money this morning.

First, the latest from , a company that is in the process of going public. Second, a note on what we’ve been watching in . And, finally, a question regarding which private companies will report partial results regarding their second-quarter performance.

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The first will help us understand the IPO market, the second will help us grok what’s going on with crypto-related startups, and the final issue could help shape how we view which decacorns are ready to go public. Let’s go!

The Postmates IPO

Yesterday , CEO made a few comments on his company’s IPO process, and rumors concerning a possible sale of the company. (He was also on stage to talk about the company’s wheeled delivery vehicles.) Asked about going public, he said while he couldn’t comment, he would “love to take Postmates public.”

The answer was unsurprising given that Postmates has filed to go public. But when asked about articles noting that his company might sell to a rival, Lehmann had several interesting things to say. First, that his company is “growing twice as fast as , as .” Pinning down what “growth” means won’t be easy (revenue? order volume?), but the claim that the delivery-focused service is growing more quickly than larger, more valuable rivals is notable.

Lehmann also said that “if you take the necessary steps to prepare your company to go public you will get inbound” interest. This rings true, as we’ve seen some high-profile acquisition deals land right before some IPOs in recent years; it isn’t clear if Postmates is as healthy as was before it was snapped up on the eve of its public offering, but that Postmates is answering the phone, instead of making calls matters.

Regarding what to do with possible deals, Lehmann said that his company always takes a “look” at such interest, and then makes “the smart decision.”

Summarizing, the Postmates IPO is still on provided that a larger company isn’t willing to cut an outsized check to snap up Postmates. At least that’s the sentiment that Lehmann was hoping to cultivate. Regardless, let’s see the S-1.

Crypto: Up And Down

After an up year (2017) and a down year (2018), the world of cryptocurrencies was quiet in early 2019, before bitcoin and other popular blockchain-based products . The value of a single bitcoin pierced the $13,000 mark before falling back under $10,000.

If you aren’t into watching the cryptocurrency markets around the clock (shame on you if you aren’t; shame on you if you are) you’ve missed the latest action. But don’t worry, I don’t think there’s too much you have to retain from the recent appreciation in crypto-assets. Really you just need to know two things:

• When bitcoin’s price rises, it drives media interest, and mass-market attention. Bitcoin’s highest trading volumes come when it appreciates, along with spikes in search engine interest and the like. Thus, bitcoin appreciating is good for companies who work in the cryptocurrency space. Firms like , for example, who provide a consumer-friendly onramp into the world of crypto and make money on the buying and selling of cryptocurrencies.
• Bitcoin’s is growing once again. In the earlier days of the blockchain boom, bitcoin’s value was over 80 percent of the value of all crypto assets. That fell into the 30s in early 2018. Today the percentage is back to 65. This means that smaller coins are struggling once again and that the link between the value of bitcoin, and other similar products, could be loosening.

And with that, you can go back to not caring about bitcoin.

WeWork, And Who Else?

Now that the third quarter is underway, the public markets are gearing up for earnings season. For us covering the private markets, it’s usually a period of watching and not participating much. But in recent quarters, some private companies have taken on the mantle of public shops, at least when it comes to regular disbursements of financial data relating to their recent performance.

started doing this ages ago, and took part in the game as well before going public. also reports some performance. What do these companies have in common? They were (are, in the case of WeWork) some of the most valuable startups ever put together.

It seems that private companies worth $10 billion or more are disclosing information normally kept under wraps while they await going public. You can imagine why this is becoming more common. By sharing the information they want, decacorns can control their public narrative by disclosing their best figures. And, what better way to combat leaks than to disclose the information yourself in the manner of your choosing?

Also, regular reports of good performance could diminish calls for short-term liquidity from existing shareholders. A good report must renew faith among the shareholding. Of course, there are the normal risks that come from such disclosures, including providing asymmetrical information to yet-private competitors, and the chance that your results aren’t as good as you think, leading to ridicule.

Regardless of the fears, companies are doing this, and I want to encourage it. Which brings us to our final point of the morning. Namely, which company is next? I suspect we’ll see fresh Q2 numbers from WeWork in the next few weeks (here’s our take on its Q1 figures), but what company is the next to begin releasing earnings before going public? ?

Whichever firm it is, please know that I love email.

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