
PagerDuty pops nearly 60% in debut as tech IPO market heats up - romanhn
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/11/pagerduty-pops-more-than-50percent-in-debut-as-tech-ipo-market-heats-up.html
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romanhn
Fun fact - this is the second YC IPO, after Dropbox.

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maxxxxx
Just looked up Dropbox stock price. Not exactly pretty. This is not the 90s
when the retail investor could make money from tech stocks. SNAP is bad,
Dropbox doesn't look good. Neither does Lyft.

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defen
SQ up 5.8x since Nov 2015

TEAM up 4.1x since Dec 2015

TWLO up 4.7x since Jun 2016

SHOP up 7.4x since May 2015

OKTA up 4x since Apr 2017

ZS up 2x since Mar 2018

Retail investors can definitely still make money.

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xan_ps007
How does the IPO works in US? Do retail investors get to subscribe to the IPO
shares before the listing date? Or the retails investors can only "buy" the
shares once they start trading on the exchanges?

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defen
> Do retail investors get to subscribe to the IPO shares before the listing
> date?

Generally no, especially if it's in high demand. My broker allows retail
investors to place bids if they have over $250k in their account and agree, as
a condition of having access to future IPOs, not to sell within 30 days.
However there's still no guarantee of having your order filled.

The prices I quoted were from the first day of trading, not the IPO.

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sushid
Which brokerage is this?

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defen
TD Ameritrade. You can either have 250k in your account or 30+ trades in the
past 3 months. You'll need to fill out FINRA Form 5130.

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raiyu
Looks like investors were very hungry for this one and the high jump on the
first date indicates that they are viewing Pagerduty in the same market
segment as MongoDB and Twilio. Same set of customers, expanding market as each
of those customers increase their server foot print.

Also with the 50% pop looks like investors were ready to give them future
growth so the company definitely left money on the table with their IPO
pricing.

But none the less amazing IPO. Hopefully stock stays in the range on Friday.

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shhehebehdh
I don’t really get what makes this an amazing IPO. Afaict they left 33% of the
money on the table. How is that a good thing for the company or the
shareholders?

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sb8244
It would be good for people who bought in (higher margin), good for people
selling in 6 months (employees), and bad for the company (money on the table).

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dcaisen
Don't forget about the underwriters (investment bankers) who will be paid a
hefty sum by Pagerduty (despite underpricing the IPO) and who also just got a
ton of goodwill from their top trading clients who got those IPO allocations

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losvedir
Good for them. IIRC, don't they use a lot of elixir? Is this the first public
company to have a big elixir tech stack?

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zinclozenge
The extent of their usage of Elixir is highly questionable. One of their
employees was at elixirforum.com for recruiting but could not, or would not
answer how much they use it for. There's also some partially substantiated
rumors that the Elixir was a single employee's experiment, and those services
were either in the process, or had already been re-written in Scala.

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romanhn
I left PD about 5 months ago, so my information might be slightly outdated,
but I can confirm that Elixir is used quite a bit internally, including for
highly available critical services that all event data passes through. While
there might be some truth to Elixir starting out as an experiment, its
adoption has not only spread to multiple teams, but it is also the language
most new services are to be written in, going forward. The unique thing about
Elixir is how it appealed to both Ruby and Scala folks internally.

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brianwawok
To ruby folks, it's like faster ruby. What is the appeal to Scala folks? As
formerly a Scala folk, it hasn't had much interest to me (but I have no
negative feelings about it either, it has always been a "cool another
language" to me)

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sb8244
Is Scala is beholden to Java garbage collection? I know one big advantage I
like is that each process has separate GC so you can run it in certain
situations without affecting the entire system

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brianwawok
Mostly (there are some projects to do Scala not on the JVM, but I have never
seen them be more than a toy). That said, the JVM GC is the (IMO) best GC out
there, it is really good for many many situations. And then there are some
paid JVMs if you want to trade latency guarantees.

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julianlam
Very interested in seeing the opening days of both Pagerduty and Zoom (next
week). So far PD has exceeded my expectations.

Their product ain't half bad either

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dalbasal
Something scary about the current surge in IPOs.... Kinda feels like PEs are
deciding the time to cash-out is now.

