Blue Apron went public today. It was not the easiest road for them as they had to cut the originally proposed price range of $15-17 to $10 and closed the first day just around that at $10.01. As one can imagine, the media commentary was not pretty, calling the IPO a disappointment, the stock stale out of the box, and lamenting that the stock forgot to pop.

What I missed in most of this commentary was the fact that Matt Salzberg and his team had created a company with over $800m in revenues and a $2b valuation in a short 5 (!) years. This is an incredible entrepreneurial achievement that very, very few founders ever get to. Zulily suffered from a similar negative narrative: when it got sold to QVC for $2.4b, some people called the exit disappointing given that the company was once valued at over $7b in the public markets.

You don’t have to love the product, you don’t have to like the business model, and you definitely don’t have to buy the stock – but I hope that you appreciate the incredible entrepreneurial achievement in your analysis of a company that just went public and perhaps mention it in a phrase or two.