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April 18, 2019 will be remembered as one of the most remarkable single days in the recent history of technology IPOs. Two very different companies — Pinterest, the visual discovery and digital scrapbooking platform beloved by millions of home decorators, wedding planners, and food enthusiasts, and Zoom, the video-conferencing software that businesses had been quietly adopting for years — both entered the public markets on the same day and delivered the kind of debut performances that had been conspicuously absent three weeks earlier when Lyft’s IPO underwhelmed. The two companies between them raised over $2 billion and added more than $25 billion in combined market value before the closing bell rang.

Zoom’s performance was, in a word, staggering. Priced at $36 per share — already above its target range — the San Jose-based company founded by former Cisco engineer Eric Yuan opened for trading on the Nasdaq at $65, an 81 per cent premium above its offering price. By the close, shares had settled at $62, a gain of 72 per cent in a single session, giving Zoom a market capitalisation of nearly $16 billion. This was particularly striking because Zoom was, unlike most of its peers in the 2019 IPO class, actually profitable: the company had reported net income of $7.6 million on $330 million in revenue for its most recent fiscal year. In a market increasingly sceptical of loss-making tech companies, Zoom’s profitability was a genuine differentiator. Yuan, watching his stock nearly double in a day, said the surge added pressure rather than relief. ‘I better go back tonight to get back to work,’ he told the New York Times.

Pinterest’s debut was less explosive but equally significant. The San Francisco company, founded in 2010 and boasting more than 250 million monthly active users, priced its offering at $19 per share — a deliberately conservative price designed to avoid the fate of Lyft, which had priced aggressively and then fallen sharply. The strategy worked. Pinterest opened at $23.75, up 25 per cent, and closed at $24.40, a gain of 28 per cent that gave it a market value of nearly $13 billion. CEO Ben Silbermann, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Alley from outside the New York Stock Exchange, took pains to distinguish Pinterest from the social media companies investors had grown wary of. ‘Pinterest isn’t a social network,’ he said. ‘We think of it as a utility.’ It was a telling piece of positioning: in 2019, being a social media company was a harder sell than it had been five years before.

The twin successes of Zoom and Pinterest washed away much of the anxiety that had built up since Lyft’s deflating debut, and they reframed the narrative around the class of 2019 in important ways. They showed that investors were still hungry for technology growth stories — but that they would discriminate between companies with credible paths to profitability and those without one. As analysts turned their gaze toward the next and largest IPO on the horizon — Uber, which was preparing to go public the following month at a potential valuation of close to $100 billion — the message from the market was clear: show your work, price it honestly, and the money will follow. For companies that ignored that advice, the road ahead would prove considerably rockier.