Equity transcribed: Why Om Malik thinks ‘the VC subsidized life is over’

It’s time for another transcribed edition of Equity. This week for the regularly scheduled episode we had the whole crew pop into the San Francisco studio. Kate Clark, Connie Loizos and Alex Wilhelm were joined by Om Malik, former journalist and current VC at True Ventures.

They convened just after Uber priced, so they had a lot to dig into: The low price, would it pop and would the former CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick be at the ringing of the bell in New York (he wasn’t).

But it wasn’t all Uber; they talked Carta, Cruise and Harry’s. Below is an excerpt. And come back soon for an emergency episode where Alex and Kate will go deeper on the Uber IPO. For access to the full transcription, become a member of Extra Crunch. Learn more and try it for free. 

Alex: Well, I want to go back to the price really quick because $82 billion is below the 90 we had heard after we’d heard the 120 back in October. So this is a dramatic downgrade in price, which I think as said Om said is actually pretty smart because they’ll have a nice pop and things will get better.

Connie: And also, when you look back, it never really matters that much. I mean, I feel like a couple of people have already pointed this out in the media today. But Google, Facebook, I mean, there’s been so many companies where their IPOs didn’t seem to even go very well. I just don’t think it really is going to matter in the long term what happens tomorrow.

Alex: Well, the difference though is Uber needs to raise a bunch of money to stay alive. I mean, Facebook when they went public had a relatively rough post IPO period, had $1 billion in trailing gap net income. They were fine. Their IPO wasn’t that important aside from the liquidity then. It wasn’t a fundraising metric. At this price, they are going to raise less money than they could’ve at a higher price, and they burn tons of it.

Kate: I think there are a lot of reasons why they probably did lower their targets, but I think one probably has to do with Lyft’s performance. So I think we should just quickly go over. Lyft did release their first earnings report this week, which was pretty interesting. The TL;DR is that they posted first quarter revenues of $776 million on losses of $1.14 billion, which did include 894 million of stock-based compensation related payroll tax expenses, which in other words, just major IPO expenses. So losses were huge, yes. The company’s revenues did surpass Wall Street estimates, which were 740 million. But of course, with all the IPO expenses, losses came in significantly higher.