Everything Is Going Great for Lyft

Lyft Inc. is a ride-sharing company that loses a lot of money every year and is in second place in an apparently winner-take-all industry. It is going public as part of a huge wave of expected initial public offerings by big-name tech companies, including, presumably, its much bigger competitor Uber Technologies Inc. Its founders “will own just under 5 percent of the company’s stock but control 49 percent of the company’s votes” after the IPO, a dual-class structure that big institutional investors vocally oppose and that will cause Lyft to be excluded from some indexes. How do you think its IPO is going?

“Amazing, couldn’t be better,” is the obvious answer, not only because I wouldn’t have bothered with that whole setup if the answer was “bad,” but also because Lyft wouldn’t have bothered with that whole setup if the answer was going to be “bad.” Lyft is going public with huge losses and dual-class shares because now is an amazing time to bring a tech company public with huge losses and dual-class shares; it’s doing it as part of a unicorn stampede because everyone else recognizes that too. (It’s doing it before most of those other unicorns, and especially Uber, because it is smart and eventually the window will close.) Everything in that previous paragraph is not just a random independent fact about Lyft; it’s a sign of the market’s high level of receptivity to big tech IPOs. So of course the market is going to be receptive to this one.