No matter where you look, the markets are rocky right now, and private companies are wary of going public amid the turbulence. Rightfully so. Investors like Lydia Jett, managing partner at SoftBank Investment Advisers, warn that some private companies may be ill-prepared for the current environment because they’ve been operating in an era of abundant cash and ambitious growth targets.
“We collectively built companies to build [in] a very different culture than the culture we have today, economically,” Jett said during a roundtable discussion at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen on Wednesday, admitting that the topic is “unpopular.” To adjust to the new reality, “I think these companies actually need to make a very material difference in the culture of how they operate prior to the capital markets being comfortable engaging and putting capital in,” she said.
The abundant cash that was available for growth-stage private companies last year “isn’t there today,” Jett said. That means a lot of companies need to practice more discipline, because Jett believes many haven’t transitioned yet in terms of focusing on predictability and profitability in order to please public markets investors.
Some firms are laying off employees to trim their expenses, but Jett suggested “a lot more has to come out of this market before companies start thinking about cash flow, which will take them into the public market successfully,” she said. Jett added, “I worry that we’re going to put weak companies out into the public market, which is not a great place—nobody wants to be a weak public company that can’t find price support.”
But private companies aren’t wholly to blame for their growth-at-all-costs mentality, Jett said. Investors need to take responsibility, too: “You read all of these blogs out there from investors saying, ‘Here’s what you need to do, companies,’ and the reality is, investors told companies to do a very different thing for the last two years,” Jett noted. “I think we collectively as investors need to acknowledge our huge role in this.”
The IPO market has noticeably cooled in 2022 as interest rates notch higher and the market digests weaker growth and shocks like the Russia-Ukraine war. According to a recent report from Ernst & Young, in the global IPO market, 305 firms went public in the second quarter of 2022, down 54% from the same quarter last year. Collectively, the deals raised $40.6 billion in proceeds, a drop of 65%.
Meanwhile, there is still a lot of dry powder in the private markets as venture firms sit on billions of dollars in their funds. But “there is a cap on how much private capital there is to go into companies, and they have to graduate to [become] public companies,” Jett said. “That’s what really releases liquidity. I don’t think the private markets are an alternative to the public markets.”
However, all that private capital has extended the timeline of when companies go public. And moving forward, “we’re going to probably go back to a little bit longer period of time before a company is ready to take that step into the public markets,” said Bonnie Hyun, the U.S. head of capital markets at the New York Stock Exchange.
When the IPO market does heat back up, it will reward companies that have developed good fundamentals. “I think the companies that are going to open the market, when it comes back, are going to be ones that have scale, that have that predictability, that have that profitability, because that’s what the buy side is looking for to mitigate the risk,” said Hyun.
Despite the market’s dramatic ups and downs, “there’s still demand from investors both in the private market and in the public market for growth,” said Isabelle Freidheim, the CEO of Athena SPACs. “There are still fundamentals, there are still technologies that are being developed that are fundamentally changing the way that we live.”
“That’s what gave rise to SPACs in the first place,” she noted. “It was the demand from both the private market and the public markets, public equity investors who were seeking to participate in the kind of growth that we were seeing in the private markets.”
Clarification, July 15, 2022: The headline of this story has been updated to more closely reflect Jett’s comments.
