Uber is going public: How today's tech IPOs differ from the dot-com boom

Many of these companies, including Uber, are going public to provide their founders, early investors and employees an opportunity to cash in at rich valuations

When Uber begins trading on Friday, it will cap one of the largest ever tech IPOs and join a crowd of big-name start-ups making their stock market debuts this year.
 
Not since the dot-com boom have so many richly valued tech companies gone public in such short succession: Lyft and Pinterest are now trading shares, and soon Slack, WeWork and Palantir are expected to follow.
 
But this crop of tech companies is markedly different from those that came up during the late 1990s.
 
Many rode the rise of mobile connectivity and cloud computing in the last decade