[arbuge]

"You might not have heard about these “real tech” companies—like Zscaler, Anaplan, and Smartsheet—because they mostly sell business-to-business software or cloud services. But all of them are trading more than 100 percent above their listed IPO price."

All of those are also down significantly from their all time high though.

[SpicyLemonZest]

Sure, but that isn't relevant to the IPO dynamics. Investors threw hundreds of millions at Zscaler, heavily subsidizing their growth, because they drew some charts saying they'd be profitable in the future. I'm sure that in 2014 you could have written an explainer about how suchandsuch Zscaler product is only competitive with Symantec because of VC money - or you could have written the reverse explainer, about how the Zscaler product isn't really competitive at all and they're duping people into using it using VC money and modern buzzwords. Both those genres are pretty popular about consumer-facing unicorns.

But it turned out the charts were right, and Zscaler is now profitable, although they still aren't making as much as investors at the all-time high expected.