IPO valuation is pretty much always set to undervalue so it gets a good pop(1). The market cap after 90 days of trading (generally speaking when insiders lock-up provisions expire and there is no longer a limit on the number of shares that can be sold) is a much better estimate of the actual value of the company. We don't have that yet, but right now the stock is ~3x the valuation that Adobe was going to buy at. Every equity owner is currently booking this as a win. We'll see what the price is when the lock-out provisions end, but right now definitely the shareholders are glad that they didn't merge.

I know that because if the metric you cite was something that the investors and managers cared about, they could have done other things to boost it (see footnote 1). They didn't, ergo they don't consider that metric to be a useful gauge of the company value. It sure looks like you tried to find the worst performing metric to claim that there was a loss, when so far this has been a major win for the shareholders(2).

1: If you don't want this and want to IPO at the highest valuation, you do a direct listing like Spotify did, or a SPAC reverse merger like Trump Media did. But there are reasons that the vast majority of companies choose to do a traditional IPO. For most companies, this is a one-time transaction that will make the managers very very rich, and they want to get the best guidance on navigating it- and are willing to pay handsomely for that guidance, since this is the only time in their lives they will be CEO for a major company that is starting to list. So they follow the IPO/greenshoes/pop route.

2: The most important nuance on that statement is that it took them a year and a half to extract that extra value by doing an IPO, and now they are exposed to market risk. We will have to see what the market conditions are like in another few months when the lock-ups expire.