Uber should have done a direct listing The company could have saved a lot in commissions and also could have avoided the disappointment of trading under the IPO price Last week I wrote that 2019 was a big year for IPOs. By then Lyft, Pinterest and Zoom, three important unicorns, had already gone public, and we still had Uber and Slack (technically not an IPO, but still) AND WeWork and Airbnb (I apologize for the omissions in the last article) in the pipeline. I also noted that “now a lot will depend on how well these offerings play out” and that “the most important will be Uber’s”. So Uber went public last Friday, and I would not say it worked out well. We started in October, with bankers telling Uber that they could take it public at a $120 billion valuation, which has steadily faded into an 80-90 billion range just before the IPO. Uber’s book of orders was three times oversubscribed, which might seem a lot, but, considering that Lyft was ten times oversubscribed, it cou...