The IPO window that never closes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a bit of a turn-about. Kate was off this week and Alex was back, so we brought back a few favorites to tide us over until our regular leader returns. For this IPO-themed episode, we had TechCrunch and Extra Crunch’s Danny Crichton in the studio along with Deloitte’s Barrett Daniels, a prior guest on the show and one of our favorite humans.

It being roughly the middle of the year, we decided to do a bit of a run through the first two-quarters’ worth of tech IPOs. There was, as you can expect, a lot to get chatting about.

We started with notes on how the Chinese venture capital market is changing, most notably in terms of its share of the world’s largest venture rounds. After leading the world for what felt like years, venture investment into China-based companies is slipping. And the declines are picking up attention (here, here).

But not all the news was gloomy on the show this week. Indeed, while some global data relating to the global IPO market wasn’t exactly sparkling, the U.S.-listed tech IPO market is doing really well.

After we went over a number of the companies that went out and did well post-IPO (nearly every company aside from the ride-hailing players), we conceded that things are pretty damn warm for companies going public. At the same time, we couldn’t agree on how long the IPO market would remain so welcoming.

If it stays open, more unicorns will make it out. If the IPO window closes soon, we’ll see hundreds of unicorns trapped on the wrong side of the glass.

And we wrapped with notes on everyone’s favorite space-faring SPAC. We’ll see you all really soon.