I always wonder why not more companies are using more creative approaches like Google's Dutch auction to set their IPO price.

It seems direct listings gained some popularity but overall most companies seem to rely on the traditional underwriter model.

According to [0] -

> 22 companies went public on major exchanges using IPO auctions in the U.S. between 1999-2008, but there have been none since then, as of May 2025. Starting in 2018 when Spotify went public, there have been at least 20 companies that have gone public using a direct listing. With both IPO auctions and direct listings, underwriters do not have discretion to allocate shares to their preferred clients.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO

The Dutch auction wasn't all that smooth, with Google having to adjust prices at the last minute. Most results show that it didn't really produce all that much of a benefit over a traditional IPO, where (the issuing company) at least gets a guaranteed minimum amount of money to raise. Pretty much the only alternative is a direct listing for companies that want to go public, but don't need to raise money. (Well, there's also SPACs, but that's a different beast).

When banks, pension funds and other institutional investors are fighting to outbid each other to get a slice of your IPO why would you care about finding an accurate value and being "fair"? Whether the price goes up and down post IPO isn't really the company's concern. They already have the cash.

thats been replaced with spac deals

also: can't pump the ipo and get exit liquidity for vc through a dutch auction

Google's process produced a price of IIRC $85/share and on first-day trading soared to >$100 so there was a lot of discussion at the time about how efficient that process was.

But really that's how all IPOs work, basically. You have one of more investment banks that underwrite the offering. They're basically guaranteeing to sell a certain number of shares to their clients at a given price. Those clients can be institutional investors, pension funds, high net worth individuals and so on. But there's a feedback loop here where clients might push back on a certain price.

IPOs love these sorts of investors because they tend to buy and not sell. If everyone sells the IPO will flop. Retail investors are far less "loyal".

The IPOing company also has levers where they can manipulate the price, most notably on the supply side ie by limiting or expanding the size of the float. SpaceX's float (as a percentage of the company) was actually really small.

What's unique about the SpaceX IPO was that it would immediately become one of the world's most valuable listed companies so there'd be a lot of induced demand from index funds. The underhanded (IMHO) aspect to all this was that the rules were deliberately changed so passive investors would be exposed almost immediately rather than first allowing some form of price discovery by the market. NASDAQ capitualted. S&P did not.

I guess the real manipulation here is the fiction that SpaceX is an AI company, which ultimately goes back to a series of bailouts for terrible decisions going back to the Twitter purchase. SpaceX's AI pitch was orbital data centers, which make no sense, and using their ill-gotten NVidia chip allocations to rent them to Google.