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Instacart is expected to make its public debut next week, with a filing on Monday showing the company could be valued at up to $9.3 billion.

Back in 2021, the company was valued at $39 billion.

And though the company has seen its valuation taken down at several points over the last two years, the biggest lesson this headline discount teaches other tech unicorns on an IPO track is that they should not delay in going public.

The hard work of running a public company is about navigating the ebbs and flows of markets and the economy that are well beyond any management team's control. Better to get the process going early to avoid periodic distractions about potential future exits.

Now, in many ways, the Instacart going public today is a better business than the one that raised money at a valuation four times higher two and a half years ago.

In the first half of this year, revenue at Instacart totaled $1.48 billion while gross margins reached 75%, putting full-year revenue on track to rise about 60% from the $1.83 billion seen in 2021 while margins are up 8 percentage points.

But back in 2021, Instacart was riding the tailwinds from a pandemic that had dramatically shifted shopping habits, consumers that were flush with cash, and a low interest rate environment that boosted valuations across the investment universe.

Two years later, shopping habits have normalized — Instacart's total orders grew less than 1% in the first half of 2023 when compared to the same period in 2022 — and interest rates have risen aggressively.

All else equal, higher rates mean lower valuations. And few periods in market history have seen future growth discounted as aggressively as we've seen over the last two years.

Investors discounting future growth, however, doesn't make public markets entirely inhospitable to slower growers. It merely adds a constraint on management teams that might otherwise wave away shifts in the landscape were they not held to daily marks.

Take Instacart peers and fellow pandemic-era winners Airbnb (ABNB) and DoorDash (DASH), for instance.

Both companies made the leap to go public in late 2020. And both companies saw their shares rise sharply before correcting hard in 2022 as interest rates rose.

In 2022, Airbnb fell about 50% while DoorDash stock lost nearly 70% of its value. And DoorDash is still down more than 50% from where it closed on its first day of trading, while Airbnb has fared better, rising about 5% from where shares closed on their first day of trading. This year, both stocks are up more than 70%.