Audio · 2026-06-06 · 32m · 6 moments

The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public | All-In Liquidity IPO Panel

(0:00) CEOs Andrew Feldman (Cerebras) and Will Marshall (Planet Labs) join the Besties! (2:05) Both CEOs on going public: Impact on employees, customers, and business operations (13:18) Timelines for datacenters in space (19:28) Cerebras business breakdown, AI's impact on the silicon market (24:45) How Founder/CEOs think about liquidity on the road to going public Thanks to our partners for making this possible! EY - Great tech starts with a big idea. From startup to scale, EY helps ✦ AI generated

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GUEST Will Marshall GUEST Brad Gerstner / Andrew Feldman GUEST Andrew Feldman

timeline · colored by role

Anecdote

Going public involves an enormous amount of garbage — endless meetings, document review where commas move and no value is added — and the next morning you've sold nothing more and your engineering projects have made no progress.

Andrew Feldman describes the IPO process as full of wasteful meetings and document churn that adds no value, and says the core business doesn't change the day after.

transcript

Andrew Feldman: Look, I think you do all this work. And I think it's really difficult to overestimate the amount of garbage that's involved in going public. The number of meetings where you look on the Zoom and there are 130 attendees. And the amount of times you review these documents and the commas move and just no value is added. You go there and you have this enormous event. And 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.

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Claim◆

Going public provides liquidity for early shareholders, gives the company cash, and — more importantly — confers legitimacy and permanence that is critical when selling to governments and large enterprise customers who need to know you will be around.

Will Marshall explains that going public offers liquidity, cash, and — most importantly — credibility with government and enterprise customers who depend on the company's long-term survival.

transcript

Will Marshall: In the end, you've just got to get on with executing the business. Going public gives you access to liquidity for early shareholders, whether that's the early employees or early investors. And that's great. It gives you cash for the company. That's great. And I do think it helps your business as well because the maturing event gives you more credibility to various customers. And for us, we work with biggest agricultural customers, big governments, civil governments, defense and intelligence, all of those sort of actors, they want to know you're going to be around. And not going to disappear. I mean, we have countries that are fully dependent on us giving them information. They don't want to just disappear, so they really care that we're going to be around. And being a public company gives you the kind of force in the world that people go, okay, you're here to stay and you have access to capital if you need it and so on. It's legitimizing that.

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Prediction◆

Space-based data centers will be cheaper than terrestrial ones within a few years, driven by falling launch costs and the fact that solar panels in sun-synchronous orbits can collect five times more energy without batteries.

Will Marshall explains that when launch costs reach $200-300/kg — likely within 2-3 years on the current trajectory — space data centers become cheaper than ground ones, because solar panels in dawn-dusk orbits get 24/7 sun at 5x the energy per panel with no batteries.

transcript

Will Marshall: We did a study with our partners at Google about 8 or 9 years ago, looking at what are the costs of data centers on the ground, what are the costs that it would take to put them in space, and when might it make sense to do it non-terrestrially. And we figured out that when launch costs come down to about $200 to $300 a kilogram, it would be cheaper, just simply cheaper to put the data centers in space. Now we're about $1,000 a kilogram, just over that in right today. But that's come down about 10x in the last 10 years. On the current trajectory with Starship in particular, I would expect the launch costs to come down there in two to three years. Elon might say it's next week, but at least realistically a couple of years. So we're not far away from it literally just being cheaper than in a day. The addition, and the intuition there that helps people understand that is you would naturally use solar panels for doing, the data centers are a power problem, it's a power game. And you would normally use solar panels, that's the cheapest way to get a watt today by far, but you don't want intermittent power. So then you have to have batteries, or then you have to have gas, or then you have to have nuclear, and then it gets really expensive. In space, you can put a solar panel in a sun-synchronous dawn-dusk orbit where you're 24-7 looking at the sun. So you can have a solar panel that collects and gathers five times more energy per solar panel than on the ground. And you don't have to have batteries or anything else. So the infrastructure for computing space is literally just solar panels and the chips and then the RF signals up and down. So it's actually really quite simple. It was just a question of when it's going to be cheaper to launch all those solar panels and chips into space than putting it on the ground. And it turns out that's going to be in a few years.

explains mechanism · 1provides context · 1

Context

AI opened up compute to entire new problem domains — images and language — that computers were previously bad at, and that expanding aperture is the fundamental driver of the AI compute boom.

Andrew Feldman explains that before AI, computers could only handle numbers well; AI opened the door to images and language, vastly expanding the addressable market for compute.

transcript

Andrew Feldman: I think what AI did, and it's rarely sort of framed this way, but it allowed computers to address a class of problems that before AI, computers were bad at. We were bad at images. For almost the entire history of compute, we could store them, and that's about it. We were bad at language. We could store it, but that's about it. We could transform numbers. We were magical with numbers. And what AI did, starting in about 2015-16, is it opened the door, the aperture, to say, maybe we could use computers on images. All right? Maybe we could find insight in images. Maybe not only could we store language, but we could generate it. All right? Maybe we could understand it, rather than storing it and regurgitating it. And what this did is it opened up to compute huge areas that were previously foreclosed.

explains mechanism · 1gives example · 1

Mechanism

To be 20x better than Nvidia, you can't build a GPU — you need a fundamentally different architecture. Cerebras solved the memory-to-compute bottleneck by building a chip the size of a dinner plate with memory right next to compute, making it 15-18x faster than a GPU.

Andrew Feldman explains that Cerebras bet on dedicated silicon that couldn't look like a GPU. By building a wafer-scale chip with memory next to compute, they achieved 15-18x speedup over GPUs for OpenAI, which he argues is critical because users won't wait for slow AI.

transcript

Andrew Feldman: We made two bets. The first was dedicated silicon would be the answer. And the second was it couldn't look like a GPU. And our view as computer architects is if you want to be 20 times better than somebody, your architecture can't look like them. It can't. They have enjoyed and eaten all the low-hanging fruit. So if you build a GPU, the odds that you're better than Nvidia and our view are approximately 0. That led us to a fundamentally different architecture. The hard part here, the hard part is moving data from memory to compute. This is the fundamental problem in AI. And we solved it with a way that very few others had even attempted, which was to build a very big chip and to put memory right next to compute. And by building a big chip, a chip the size of a dinner plate, whereas most chips are the size of a postage stamp, we could use a different type of memory. And by using a different type of memory, a memory that was vastly faster, we opened up all sorts of opportunity. So when OpenAI uses us, we're 15 or 18 times faster than a GPU. That means your answers are delivered more quickly. It means your engagement with the AI is more enjoyable. It means you can use the AI to solve harder problems and not wait. And the way to think about this is sort of to ask yourself the counterfactual question. How big is the market for slow search today? Right? It's 0. How big is the market for dial-up? It's 0. How long do you wait for a website to resolve before you click away? Three seconds, 5 seconds? You will not wait for AI. We have to deliver it to you in real time.

explains mechanism · 1

Claim

More money is made after an IPO than before it, and the pendulum is swinging back from staying private forever toward companies going public at smaller valuations, so that public market investors — not just private ones — capture the upside.

Andrew Feldman and Brad Gerstner argue that historically more value creation happens post-IPO, and that the 'stay private forever' era is ending, with companies now choosing to go public earlier so public market investors share in the growth.

transcript

Brad Gerstner / Andrew Feldman: 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. [...] We have three mega IPOs that we keep talking about that are multi-trillion. All of that value accrued to private market investors. Planet Labs is a great example of venture capital in the public markets where the 10x has occurred in the public markets. We're all advocates of these companies coming public sooner. [...] I think the public market's maybe shifting back in this direction. And a lot of the companies in our portfolios are now thinking about going public at a billion or 3 billion or 5 billion. We had this period of a decade where Andreessen was really pushing stay private forever. And I see the pendulum swinging back.

extends · 1rebuts · 1supports · 2

Highlight slides

Why Planet Labs Went Public✦ from: Going public provides liquidity for early shareholders, gives the company cash, and — more importantly — confers legitimacy and permanence that is critical when selling to governments and large enterprise customers who need to know you will be around.The Legitimacy Factor✦ from: Going public provides liquidity for early shareholders, gives the company cash, and — more importantly — confers legitimacy and permanence that is critical when selling to governments and large enterprise customers who need to know you will be around.Space data centers cheaper than ground within years✦ from: Space-based data centers will be cheaper than terrestrial ones within a few years, driven by falling launch costs and the fact that solar panels in sun-synchronous orbits can collect five times more energy without batteries.Why space wins: 5× solar energy, no batteries✦ from: Space-based data centers will be cheaper than terrestrial ones within a few years, driven by falling launch costs and the fact that solar panels in sun-synchronous orbits can collect five times more energy without batteries.

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