Spring Is Coming for IPOs

Some of the most valuable new companies are still private, but more may cash in soon.
Illustration: Ram Han for Bloomberg Businessweek

Don’t be so afraid of a down round.

That may be the message Silicon Valley takes from the initial public offering of Dropbox Inc. on March 22. In the weeks before the cloud-storage company’s stock market debut, it first targeted a price of $18 a share on the high end, giving the company a market valuation of $7.1 billion. That would have been about a third lower than the $10 billion it was valued at in its previous round of private fundraising—earning the IPO the “down round” stigma.