If you follow tech news, you might think we’re in a downward spiral. Zynga reported “weak quarterly results,” Facebook results “rattle Wall Street,” and there’s more talk about new dot com bubbles.

Technology, however, is more than just social-media companies, and most tech IPOs are doing just fine. On average, tech companies since the beginning of last year are up 5%. It’s just those with a social element that are not fairing as well on average; in fact if you remove companies with any social element, the tech average jumps to 25%.

In the past few weeks, there have been sharp declines a few companies (e.g. Groupon and Zynga), but for some other tech companies, we’ve also seem strong gains (e.g. LinkedIn, Zillow). Jive Software, DemandWare, Splunk are all easily outperforming the tech average, and they are in good company. Even social review-aggregator Yelp is up 27% from its offer price, much better than its low of a positive 1% return in early June.

So if you look only at stock prices, many of the recent technology IPOs are doing fine. They’re just not the ones getting the attention.

Going public doesn’t just bring in new capital for a company, but it gives employees and early investors an opportunity to cash out, sometimes creating millionaires in an instant. So what do they do with all that money?

One potential purchase is real estate, as several people have pointed out. Have the recent string of tech IPOs influenced the Greater Bay Area? This viz with data from Zillow using their Zillow Home Value Index takes a look.

There seems to be some strong correlation between a rise in home values around the time of a major tech IPO. This is particularly evident around Facebook’s IPO wave. However, even in the case of Google in the years preceding the housing bust, there’s a clear jump in home values between when Google filed and went public.

Of course there are lots of factors that go into the price of real estate, but it’s interesting to see the potential effects of creating new millionaires in an already pricy market. We still have lots of expected tech IPOs in the future (Eloqua, Twitter, to name just two), so we’ll be able to see if this effect continues.

In our last post, we looked at what it takes to go public today and whether or not predictions made following the dot-com bust have become a reality. Compared with our sample of Top 100 Software Companies, today’s tech IPOs are increasingly going public with at least $100m in revenue but are still not profitable.

It’s difficult to qualify this trend, but it’s worth asking: Does reaching $100m in revenue mean that these IPOs are performing better?

The answer seems to be no. In fact, it’s the tech companies that made less than $100m in revenue which are outperforming their larger peers, both in the first few months of trading and based on current returns. Clearly going public with less revenue is not the answer to a better-performing IPO, so what is it about these companies that makes them successful? How much does going public at an earlier stage play a part?

There’s one observation to be made here: Many of the sub-$100m in revenue companies are the ones investing in business and enterprise-class software (such as Jive, Imperva, Brightcove and more), while some of the larger revenue-making companies are extremely consumer-focused (e.g. Groupon, Zynga, etc.). This is an observation we’ve noted in a previous post too.

What are your thoughts about the data?

When we first started IPO Dashboards, we wrote a post detailing a common refrain from investors in 2001 after the dot-com bust:

-Companies will need $100m in yearly revenue to go public
-Companies will need to be profitable

It’s now 2012, and we have seen the next generation of tech companies go public, including long-awaited giants like Facebook. Have those predictions come true?

The results are a mixed bag. There is a definite charge towards needing $100m in revenue–60% of tech IPOs since last year had that much revenue before going public. However, the requirement that companies be profitable is nowhere to be seen. Compare this to the Top 100 software companies we sampled in our original post, of which only 34% hit $100m in revenue before going public.

There are some interesting consequences of this trend. Naturally, it takes longer to reach $100m in revenue than $50m, and in many cases holding out for that number will mean that companies will grow less after their IPO. In other words, it’s easier to quintuple the sales of a $50m startup than one that just had a $500m year. On the other hand, increasing the revenue benchmark could also serve as a means to test which companies actually have a viable business. It’s also worth considering that companies may have postponed IPOs because of the recession, and therefore simply reached $100m in revenue by the time they felt the markets were stable enough.

What thoughts do you see from this trend?

The biggest IPO of the year has come, but news about Facebook’s offering hasn’t gone away yet. Much has been written about how its stock is down about 25% from its offer price. Questions have been asked about both underwriter Morgan Stanley and the NASDAQ exchange itself.

But is Facebook’s stock fall really that surprising? Haven’t we, ourselves, noted that the recent trend for social tech stocks is to fall after going public? Let’s compare Facebook directly to previous tech IPOs and find out.

The answer is grim, at least in part. The average tech IPO since 2011 has started strong, though it relinquishes some of those gains 13 days after its offering. Facebook, on the other hand, is underwater and with a -29% return from its offer price. At this point in time, the only other IPOs to be in the red are FriendFinder Networks, Zynga and CafePress, not exactly great company.

Several events have contributed to Facebook’s stock slump, including questions surrounding Facebook’s growth potential, underwriter Morgan Stanley’s supposed forecast changes, and NASDAQ system issues for which they are proposing a $40 million fix.

This isn’t to say Facebook has no growth potential, but it can’t be denied part of the issue is that Facebook is already so big. Companies used to IPO with annual revenues in the tens of millions and then grow to become billion-dollar enterprises. Facebook is already making $1billion in profit. It will be difficult for Facebook to see a level of growth like older tech giants, even in the long-term.

No IPO is garnering more attention right now than Facebook’s. Before that it was parade of Zynga, Groupon, Pandora and other major tech IPOs of the social media world. Companies like those are exciting, consumer-oriented and take up most of the tech headlines, leaving the business-focused tech companies in the dust.

But of the two, which group is performing better in the market?

We started tracking the IPO market in-depth starting last year. Since then, the average return on every tech-enterprise IPO is more than 50%. In contrast, consumer tech IPOs are averaging a loss of more than 6%. On top of that, the enterprise class on average not only starts trading higher, but also actually grows its return within the first few months of trading. Consumer-focused tech seems to be the exact opposite, with few exceptions.

There’s no doubt Facebook will be big. But if we want to talk about which companies will be the technology pioneers of the future, we may be looking in the wrong place.

If the venture capital industry reflects where investors believe future innovation lies, biotech and energy may be the companies of tomorrow. Ever since the dot-com bust, VC investors have steadily moved dollars away from traditional technology sectors such as networking and telecom companies. The latest VC stats from the National Venture Capital Association for the first quarter of this year continue that trend. Here’s a look at VC investments broken down by industry.

Both energy and biotech industries grew consistently in the past decade, relatively unaffected by the dot-com bubble. Compare that to nearly any other industry and the spike of the dot-com era really is striking. In fact, only software invesments continue to be relevant of the remaining computing sectors.

Even the dollars invested in medical devices seems to be steadily growing. Is this telling of where venture capital and the future of innovation is headed?

It shouldn’t surprise you that since 2011, California has led the nation in number of IPOs. However, did you know that Texas is right on its heels? Within the past year and a half, companies across a wide variety of industries in Texas have gone public, largely to great success. Another interesting point: Most of these IPOs are in the energy sector, one that is commonly associated as having a large part in the current economic recovery.

With so many energy companies going public, we can expect continued growth in the Texan energy industry in the near-term. We know that energy plays a large part in the Texan economy, and was a large contributing factor in the states evasion of the “great recession”. In fact, that’s exactly what we see in this viz that shows growth in economic activity since the recession began.

The IPO market continues to reflect the health of the economic recovery, even across various industries.

One of the game-changing industries in recent years has been social media. Many people point to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and more as an example of the future of where technology is headed–just ask Google and its social efforts. LinkedIn’s IPO was one of the biggest in 2011. Facebook’s impending IPO still makes headlines. The next wave of technology companies, it seems, belongs to social media.

But is social media really the future of technology? What about the quieter, but equally revolutionary companies that push what we’ve come to call the cloud? Companies like Salesforce? Jive? Let’s break down how both groups did in 2011.

Despite gaining roughly the same amount on the first day, cloud and social media IPOs quickly deviate in direction with social media beginning a stark fall into negative territory. In fact, without a strong LinkedIn, and to some extent Zynga, the group would be doing even worse. In contrast, the cloud group from 2011 has a positive 40% return on average. And what about the cloud IPOs of 2012 so far?

The 2012 cloud group is doing even better, with an average return in excess of 77%. There are plenty more cloud IPOs to come this year as well. They won’t grab the attention that Facebook and others will, but in the end they may perform better.