It used to be that if you built a good company, showed solid growth, and had decent unit economics, you could go public. But today? The bar has been raised—big time.

Let’s take a trip through the last ~15 years of tech IPOs to put today’s market into context and zoom in on the most recent companies to go public.

* 2010’s: $100M is the Bar

* 2021: The Year of the Mega IPOs

* 2022-2023: The IPO Freeze

* 2024: The Rebound – But With a Higher Bar

* The New IPO Playbook

Today’s podcast is brought to you by Campfire.

You may know that we use Campfire as our ERP, and it’s been a game changer for our finance workflow. The interface is intuitive, migration was quick and painless, and it's freed us up to focus on strategic work instead of manual processes. In case you don't know, Campfire is an AI-first ERP powering next-gen finance & accounting teams. Helps you close fast, unlock insights and scale smarter.

If you’re curious about where finance tech is heading, and would like to hear more of my thoughts on the topic, don’t miss Campfire's Finance Forward AI Summit - the upcoming summit bringing together the sharpest minds in finance and operations.

You’ll hear directly from industry leaders on how they’re using AI to shape the future of finance, and how your team can get ahead of the curve. I'll be speaking on panels with finance leaders from Anthropic, Snowflake, Mercury and more. The summit is October 28th in San Francisco; I hope to see you there.

Sign up for the summit at campfiresummit.ai or learn more about Campfire at www.campfire.ai.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit cjgustafson.substack.com

BONUS: Maria Talks to Her Tech Team Who Escaped from Ukraine