Welcome to Axisprerata, where we take just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

Brought to you by Silicon Valley Bank, Ideas Bank here. I'm Dan for Mac. On today's show,

Boris Johnson faces his first takeover test and the White House's

latest broadside against Amazon. But first, creating the perfect IPO. So in the world of

startups, initial public offerings or IPOs are kind of akin to graduation, the moment when a

company goes from being owned by a small number of venture capitalists to a much broader universe

of mutual funds and hedge funds and moms and pops.

It's also when early employees and investors are able to begin cashing out.

So life goes on, but things are never quite the same.

Understandably, those of us in the business press therefore hype these things endlessly,

and the biggest headlines are often reserved for the so-called pop,

the amount a company shares go up

after pricing the IPO. For example, when Beyond Meat went public earlier this year, it priced

at $25 per share, but then the stock closed up 163%. Now, that sounds great, but remember what it

really means. Beyond Meat left all of that value, $2.4 billion on the table.

That's why some companies, like Spotify and Slack, have gone public through an alternative

called direct listings, which create kind of more perfected pricing. The only trouble is

that shares sold in direct listings are only from insiders, not from the company itself,

so no money is added to

corporate coffers. This issue of mispricing has caught the ire of Bill Gurley, the legendary

Silicon Valley venture capitalist whose investments have included Uber, Stitch Fix, and Zillow.

For example, after video conferencing company Zoom had a big post IPO pop, he tweeted, quote,

...