And so the “first day pops” that really bothered everybody became an issue in the late 1990s, but then the market actually corrected itself. Why did it take so long for someone to follow through on Steve Jobs’ observation?īetween 1980, when Apple goes public, and 2018, when Spotify does the first direct listing, there are obviously a lot of boom and bust cycles in tech stocks. Steve Jobs hits upon flaws in the IPO process in the late ‘70s/early ‘80s, but then it takes 40 years for the next leap forward, as becomes obvious in the book. That's what the folks who show up later in my book set out to change. And then 40 years later, that playbook sort of remained the same. It really struck me that here's a guy we give all this credit to for being smart in the tech realm, and lo and behold, he saw right through the investment banking playbook all the way back in 1980. And then they say, “Well, we think $18 is a good price.”Īnd he says, “Well, hold on a second, if you sell my shares of Apple to your best clients for $18, aren't they going to be super happy when they can turn around the very next day and sell them for $24 or $26 or $28?” And in that moment, Steve Jobs, who's obviously a brilliant designer and a brilliant business mind around hardware technology, saw right through one of Wall Street's systems in a way that a lot of people weren't doing. And they tell me that they think I could price it for $20 to $24 or even $26.Īnd the Morgan Stanley investment bankers are sort of quiet. And Steve Jobs listens, and then he says, 'But hold on, I've been talking to people, too. The Morgan Stanley bankers proceed to tell Steve Jobs how they are planning to price Apple stock, that they've talked to lots of investors, and they think they can price it around $18. I mean, Steve Jobs is sitting in a building in San Francisco's Financial District, meeting with bankers at both Morgan Stanley, who are the big investment bank at the time handling tech IPOs, and with Hambrecht & Quist, a much smaller sort of boutique investment bank. I talked to people involved with some of the biggest IPOs of the last 100 years or so, including Ford Motor Company and Apple Computer, and Steve Jobs seemed to have seen right through the conflict of interest that has sort of come to represent the IPO market for a lot of people. I soon learned that the IPO market has a rich history, and things hadn't always been done this way. On the back of some coverage I did for Insider, I got interested in going down the rabbit hole of how that particular deal fell apart and how the IPO market worked, but I came to learn that the entire system had been built up in a way that didn't necessarily advantage startups and technology entrepreneurs. Including its ad-supported members - a listening tier Apple Music doesn't have - Spotify has 159 million monthly active users.In the last few years, around 20, the WeWork IPO going off the rails really made me think there was a lot going on under the surface that I didn't quite understand. Spotify has 71 million paying premium subscribers, well over Apple Music's 38 million paid subscribers. Measured by monthly active users, Spotify crushes Apple Music - its 'closest competitor,' according to Spotify management. as Apple Music continues to gain steam in the domestic market, Spotify is still the top streaming music service. Though its market share has likely declined in the U.S. Also in 2016, the company boasted 41%, 42%, and 59% of streaming revenue in the important markets of the U.S., Brazil, and the United Kingdom. In 2016, Spotify dominated the streaming music market with 42% of global streaming revenue, it said in its recent F-1 filing. Though Prime Music, Google Play Music, and Apple Music are backed by massive balance sheets and seamlessly integrated ecosystems of products and services, Spotify has still managed to become the world leader in streaming music as measured by revenue share.

Spotify plans to go public