Why Skills-First Leadership Is Replacing the Ivy League Playbook in the C-Suite
05/23/2025
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The old prestige pyramid—where Ivy League degrees and blue-chip consulting backgrounds paved the way to the CEO seat—is cracking.
April 8, 2021: -On Wednesday, shares of Amazon-backed food delivery firm Deliveroo climbed by nearly 3% as retail investors began trading the company’s stock for the first time.
The company’s share price went from £2.80 to £2.91 in early deals on the London Stock Exchange before coming back to £2.85.
Around 70,000 Deliveroo customers purchased between £250 and £1,000 worth of Deliveroo shares at the £3.90 issue price before its listing on Wednesday.
However, due to conditional trading restrictions, these loyal customers were locked into their positions until Wednesday this week. Due to which they had to sit back and watch Deliveroo’s share price crash by around 30%, with the most significant decline happening on the morning of the company’s market debut.
On Thursday, some retail investors told CNBC that they’d lost hundreds of pounds in the IPO and that they regretted their investments.
Susannah Streeter, a senior investment and markets analyst in share trading platform Hargreaves Lansdown, said in a note on Wednesday that new retail investors are driving Deliveroo’s share price up.
“This will be some comfort for Deliveroo customers after being encouraged to buy a slice of the company but appeared to have thrown the dice on a disastrous debut,” she said.
“Now they finally have a card that can take them out of jail, but it seems for now that many have kept it in their back pocket, waiting it out for prices to stabilize,” added Streeter.
Streeter noted that IPOs should “offer an above level playing field from day one for all the investors.”
While the IPO helped Deliveroo introduced $1.5 billion, it has gone down on the London Stock Exchange for a large company. At one point, Deliveroo was aiming for an £8.8 billion market cap, but the company is currently valued at just £5.2 billion.
By comparison, U.S. rival DoorDash is valued at $42 billion. Still, its share price has also fallen sharply over the last six months as investors question how important food delivery will be after the pandemic.
Delivery Hero, Eat Takeaway, Ocado, and HelloFresh all saw their share prices fall on European markets on Tuesday.
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