On the one hand:

Tech Startups Feel an IPO Chill

Dropbox Inc. had no trouble boosting its valuation to $10 billion from $4 billion early last year, turning the online storage provider’s chief executive into one of Silicon Valley’s newest paper billionaires.

But the euphoria has begun to fade. Investment bankers caution that the San Francisco company might be unable to go public at $10 billion, much less deliver a big pop to recent investors and employees who hoped to strike it rich, according to people familiar with the matter.

BlackRock Inc., which led the $350 million deal that more than doubled Dropbox’s valuation, has cut its estimate of the company’s per-share value by 24%, securities filings show.

Dropbox responds that it is continuing to increase its business, added 500 employees in the past year, including senior executives, and has no need for additional capital from private or public investors.

Still, the company is a portent of wider trouble for startups that found it easy to attract money at sky’s-the-limit valuations in the continuing technology boom.  The market for initial public offerings has turned chilly and inhospitable, largely because technology companies have sought valuations above what public investors are willing to pay….

Many U.S. based companies that went public this year have seen their stock prices suffer, posting a median return of zero compared with their IPO price…..

Since going public in December, online-lending marketplace LendingClub Corp., located 10 blocks from Zenefits in the trendy SoMa district of San Francisco, has seen its valuation shrink from $8.5 billion after its first day of trading to $5.4 billion. The share price has fallen amid concern that competition and regulation threaten LendingClub’s business model of matching borrowers with lenders.

New York City firefighter Brian Gitman bought 250 shares of LendingClub during the IPO and held on to them as the price slid. He regrets it.

Knowing that big-name investors put money into LendingClub when it was private gave Mr. Gitman, 33 years old, a false sense of security, he says. “It feels like that should be like the bumper in bowling,” he says.

meanwhile, in entirely unrelated news:

J.P. Morgan, Motif to Give the Little Guy a Taste of the IPO

A new effort is under way to put the public back in the initial public offering.

J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and Motif Investing Inc., an online brokerage, are joining in a program to allow individuals to invest as little as $250 in IPOs.

It is the latest of several efforts by banks and brokerage firms—including startup online broker Loyal 3 Holdings Inc., Fidelity Investments andMorgan Stanley—to make the IPO market more accessible to the smallest investors, who can find it almost impossible to buy into new stock offerings.

Since late 2013, at least 17 companies, including four billion-dollar-valued startups, have offered small portions of their IPOs to the public or customers through new online platforms. And more deals of this kind are in the works.