The conventional logic is that you don't want to try picking up nickels in front of a steamroller by pricing your IPO too high and having it sag out of the gate. You want demand for the shares and then let the market price them. If Twilio had priced their shares at $24 they almost certainly wouldn't have sold them all and it would have been a really ugly IPO that resulted in a lower total market cap.

tl;dr sentiment is very important for IPOs

> sentiment is very important for IPOs

Who cares. Compare Twitter ("popping" IPO) vs. Facebook ("sagging" IPO).

I don't see the point in comparing the two but if you want to, Twitter had much better near-term post-IPO performance than Facebook did. We all know what happened after that. It's almost as if during a period where little fundamental information is available (post-IPO), something else must be driving trading (sentiment), while when more fundamental information is available (first earnings report), fundamental information plays more of a role.

Why would then companies want to cater to sentiment-driven investors?

How are investors supposed to value the company right now at this moment?

By selling at $20, they would have picked up another $50 million.

Probably, GS and JPM got a lot it instead.

Define missed in this context. Missed to means they had an opportunity to sell those 10mm shares @ $23.99 elsewhere. I don't think that would have been remotely possible.