The tech bubble that 2016 threatened didn't burst, prompting observers to heave a sigh of relief. But it turns out there was a bubble, but it was just growing slightly out of sight, in private startup funding. Now the public market is showing just where it exists. Exemplifying this trend are two of what were once the hottest startups in Silicon Valley: Snap and Blue Apron. And to make matters worse, today Blue Apron's nightmare is coming true, as Amazon launches its own meal-kit competitor.

The tagline of Amazon's new kit is Blue Apron's business model in a nutshell: “We do the prep. You be the chef.” Though the Amazon kits are only available in certain test markets right now, the company is already packaging up competitors' kits. On Monday, as news of the Amazon service broke, Blue Apron's stock promptly fell to an all-time low of $6.45 within the trading day—down 35 percent from its $10 IPO price, and way below the company’s original proposed IPO range of $15 to $17 a share. And Snap experienced similar woes last week: On July 10, shares of the company fell for the first time below the company’s IPO price of $17—and haven’t recovered. The financial firm Morgan Stanley, one of Snap’s lead investors, downgraded the stock and said the company was not innovating as fast as they expected. “On competition, we believe Instagram has become more aggressive in competing for SNAP's ad dollars,” the analyst note reads.

One way to look at it is that two of the most high-profile tech companies to IPO this year are getting hammered by two tech giants that offer the very same products and services, but at scale. (For the record, that’s Amazon and Facebook, which owns Instagram.) But more than that, Snap’s and Blue Apron’s plummeting stocks offer the clearest examples yet of the public market deflating the Silicon Valley bubble.

Though bubble talk hit a crescendo last year, as far back as 2014, famous venture capitalists like Bill Gurley were already cautioning the public about a new incarnation of “the bubble,” aka, too much money pouring into the tech industry, just like in the dot-com era.

Snap and Blue Apron appeared to take this worry into consideration, both slightly conceding to investors before they went public by lowering their initial stock prices. Though that worked for the electronics company Square, Snap and Blue Apron had no such luck. Snap’s stock did well when it first went public, but it’s now dipping in a clear downward direction. Blue Apron followed in Square’s footsteps of low-balling its IPO price, but even then, public investors were bearish on the company.

In large part, this disconnect has to do with just a handful of investors agreeing on the value of a private company, says Brad Slingerlend, an investor who manages a technology fund for Janus Henderson Investors. “The late-stage funding round set up a difficult valuation framework for going public,” he says. “There’s no good price discovery.” Whatever that small handful of Square, Snap, and Blue Apron investors agreed on as the worth of those companies when they were private was clearly at odds with what the public market set the price at.

Kathleen Smith, a manager of IPO-focused exchange-traded funds at Renaissance Capital, says it’s an interesting environment in both private and public markets today. For one, she says, being one of the many multibillion-dollar private tech companies that have emerged in the past few years automatically makes that company a bad bet for being acquired. “It’s very hard to find an acquirer to buy a company that doesn’t have earnings with that kind of valuation,” she says. Take Uber, for instance. What we do know of its (leaked) financials is that it still isn't profitable—sacrificing that aspect of its business in order to keep growing. Yet, the private ride-hailing startup is valued at nearly $70 billion, making it a highly unlikely acquisition target. And that's just one extreme example. There were 98 companies valued at $1 billion or more in the US at the end of 2016, according to the research firm CB Insights, and any one of them would be an extremely expensive acquisition. “You begin to value yourself out of any reasonable financial transaction," Smith says.

When there have been this many highly-valued private companies, Smith says the markets will do one of two things. “Either the public market goes into this hyper-irrational exuberance,” she says, “or the private market goes into a big meltdown.” And yet neither is happening. Nowadays, the overall stock market is at an all-time high—meaning, if it keeps rallying, investors stand to make plenty of profits—which should both encourage private companies to go public and investors to bet on stocks. “But the IPO market is a rather discerning place,” says Smith.

In her view, this may have to do with how crowded the venture capital space is these days, with so much excess capital earmarked for investing, boosting the private markets. At the same time, the global financial crisis of 2008 is nearing its tenth year now, with the big lessons from that period becoming entrenched wisdom in people’s individual investing habits. “[After the 2008 financial crisis], Wall Street was basically regulated and punished for recommending stocks to individuals, so the behavior of Wall Street changed,” Smith says. “The retail investors and small advisors have basically abandoned individual stock selection and moved on to recommending indexes, which has a mix of asset classes—and the advisor would not get into trouble for recommending individual equities.” The players left in the IPO market, then, are the much more sophisticated investors, Smith supposes.

One good sign for tech companies that have yet to go public: VCs are still investing at a steady pace. In the first six months of the year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, nearly 4000 companies received about $40 billion in financing—a pace near to, or set to surpass, the rate of investment in 2016. “The industry is in the middle of a self-correction as valuations come down and the marketplace cools off,” says Bobby Franklin, president of the NVCA. “Investors… are returning to a steadier pace of investing.” Meanwhile, quarter over quarter, capital invested in venture-backed companies is up by 36 percent, while the number of companies receiving investment is stable. More capital is going into late-stage companies while investments in early-stage companies is declining. This more sober rate of investing is a positive thing, but startups—especially late-stage ones—shouldn't wait to accrue too much value over a long time period.

So while Blue Apron’s and Snap’s track records haven’t been encouraging, it could still make sense for other tech companies to go public sooner rather than later. It is still a way to cash out, and it’s a good bet to do it while the overall market is high. Otherwise, companies run the risk of waiting out the optimism in the markets entirely—missing the chance to recoup value for investors. But any startups planning to IPO soon should hope there isn't the equivalent of an Amazon Meal kit waiting in the wings, preparing to stomp on its dreams.