Greetings from New York, where I spent the week with subscribers and catching up with the industry that Silicon Valley loves to hate (but doesn’t really): Wall Street.

With tech giants like Snapchat and Dropbox eyeing IPOs next year, I was curious what bankers would tell me about the preparations. More importantly, I wanted to know how the public markets would view these tech darlings that have been hiding in private for so long.

I was surprised.