The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public | All-In Liquidity IPO Panel
Going public is not a finish line—it's a starting gun. Both Cerebras and Planet Labs demonstrate that the real value creation happens after IPO, not before. Studies consistently show more money is made post-IPO than pre-IPO, both in percentage and absolute terms. The key is staying focused on solvin
32mKey Takeaway
Going public is not a finish line—it's a starting gun. Both Cerebras and Planet Labs demonstrate that the real value creation happens after IPO, not before. Studies consistently show more money is made post-IPO than pre-IPO, both in percentage and absolute terms. The key is staying focused on solving hard problems rather than getting distracted by the validation and excitement of going public. The next morning after your IPO, you've sold no more products and made no engineering progress—so get back to work.
Episode Overview
Brad Gerstner interviews Andrew Feldman (CEO of Cerebras) and Will Marshall (CEO of Planet Labs) about their recent IPO experiences and the massive secular trends in AI silicon and space-based data infrastructure. The conversation explores the realities of going public, the innovation happening in AI chip architecture, and the convergence of space and AI technologies that could fundamentally transform how we process and understand real-world data.
Key Insights
The IPO Reality Check: Nothing Fundamental Changes
Despite months of preparation and enormous excitement, going public doesn't change the core parts of your business. Your engineering projects make no new progress, you've sold no additional products, and if your vendor relationships were good or bad before, they remain exactly the same after. What does change is access to capital, employee morale (engineers do own ties, apparently), and credibility with large enterprise customers who need assurance you'll be around long-term.
Most Value Creation Happens After IPO, Not Before
Historical data consistently shows that more money is made after a company goes public than before—both in percentage terms and absolute dollars. Planet Labs exemplifies this: going public at roughly $2 billion in 2021, the stock languished initially but then 10x'd from $5 to $50 per share over the following years. The opportunity to deploy significant capital and capture massive upside often comes in the public markets, not the private ones.
AI Unlocked Entire Categories Previously Closed to Computers
Before AI (circa 2015-2016), computers were magical with numbers but terrible with images and language—they could only store these, not understand or generate them. AI opened the aperture for computers to attack vast new problem spaces: understanding images, generating language, finding insights in unstructured data. This simultaneously created enormous new markets while making compute an essential tool for previously inaccessible areas of knowledge.
Architectural Differentiation Requires Fundamental Rethinking
If you want to be 20x better than an incumbent like Nvidia, your architecture cannot look like theirs—they've already eaten all the low-hanging fruit. Cerebras took a radically different approach: building a chip the size of a dinner plate (versus postage stamp-sized GPUs) and placing memory directly next to compute to solve AI's fundamental problem—moving data from memory to processing units. This enabled 15-18x faster inference than GPUs for applications like ChatGPT.
Space and AI Are Merging Into Planetary Intelligence
Current large language models are powerful but "blind"—they only know the text of the internet, not real-world conditions like farm fields, floods, or security situations. Combining miniaturized satellites (200+ imaging the entire Earth daily), decreasing launch costs (down 10x in 10 years), and AI creates "planetary intelligence"—systems that can see threats around corners and answer real-world problems. Within a decade, most compute may move to space where solar power is constant and 5x more efficient than on Earth.
Notable Quotes
"I think the first thing is a lot of people asked us about how we got the timing right. And I think the answer is by getting it wrong for a decade. I mean that's really the right way to get timing right."
"The next morning you've sold no more stuff. Your engineering projects have made no progress since the day you weren't public. And you go back to work and you have some new constituents that you have to address and communicate with, but the core parts of your business, you have more money in the bank, but not a damn thing changes in the important parts of your business."
"How big is the market for slow search today? Right. Is zero. How big is the market for dialup? It's zero. How long do you wait for a website to resolve before you click away? 3 seconds, 5 seconds. You will not wait for AI. We have to deliver it to you in real time."
"I think historically more money's made after IPO than before. I think every single study shows that there is more money to be made both in percentage and in what we care about which is absolute."
"Space and AI are really a match made in heaven. They're getting married. Just like Google figured out how to index the internet and make it searchable, we are indexing the earth and making it searchable."
"All the cool stuff that we're doing with LLMs now is really based on just the text of the internet being absorbed into these models which is incredibly powerful already but they don't know about the real world. I call them blind—they don't know about that farm field, that flood, that security situation around the corner."
Action Items
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1
Focus on Building, Not Celebrating Post-IPO
After going public, resist the temptation to let the celebration distract you. The IPO is validation, but the core work—shipping products, advancing engineering, serving customers—remains unchanged. High-five your team, then immediately return to solving the hard problems that actually create value.
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2
Think Long-Term About Public Company Shareholding
If you're an early investor or LP in a newly public company, resist the urge to immediately distribute or sell shares. Most historical value creation happens after IPO. Consider holding through lock-up periods and beyond, especially if the company is riding a major secular trend like AI or space infrastructure.
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3
Solve Different Problems, Don't Optimize the Same Ones
When entering a competitive market dominated by strong incumbents, your architecture or approach must be fundamentally different—not incrementally better. Study what the incumbent has optimized, then identify what they've necessarily sacrificed to achieve that optimization. Build for the opposite use case.
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4
Prioritize Speed in AI Applications
User tolerance for waiting is near-zero—we don't wait for slow search, dial-up internet, or websites that take more than 3-5 seconds to load. Apply this same principle to AI products: optimize relentlessly for inference speed and real-time responses, as this directly impacts user engagement and the complexity of problems your AI can practically solve.