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

0:00Hey, 2026 could be an all-time record for IPOs. The AI IPO of the year so far. That company is Cerebris. Cerebris Systems founder and CEO Andrew Feldman. We are participating in something extraordinary. On everything we do, we are the fastest bar none. Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet Labs. Space and AI are really a match made in heaven. They're getting married, in fact. Just like Google figured out how to index the internet and make it searchable, we are indexing the earth and making it searchable. He's got his glasses, the famous red glasses. Brad Gerstner is here, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, a leading tech investment firm.

0:40I believe that the wave is the biggest wave in the history of technology. It will be incredibly beneficial for America. I'm rooting for all of them because I'm rooting for America. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Brad Gerstner, Will Marshall, and Andrew Feldman.

1:02We switched it up. Nice to see you, my guy. Hey. Nice to see you. Last time I saw you, we were in Davos. Yes. We were in Davos causing trouble. Another name drop. Another J.K.L. Do you know that little Davos? Yeah, we were just, you know, it was pre-IPO. we're chopping it up davos we're in davos hanging out at davos well no listen i was everybody knows the story i'm supposed to go on my yearly japan ski trip sax calls me with tucker yeah well anyway we don't drop that name but i'll pick it up for you put it over here anyway so i cancel on tucker i cancel skit because sax calls me he says listen potus needs you the world's greatest moderator in Davos.

1:43No problem. I said, Sachs, FOTUS, and Davos. So, I said, when? He says, in three days. I say, you got it. I go and they give me a badge and it's like the special green badge and they buzz you through the security and I look at the monitor and it says, Jason McCabe Calacanis with Donald J. Trump. Oh, wow. How did you feel? I thought it was hilarious. So then I went and we did a great interview there. And we did like six or seven of these great all in interviews. And it was fun.

2:16Jason Calacanis:Let's start this because the two of you guys run two of the most interesting and consequential newly public companies in the stock market. Andrew Feldman is a founder and CEO of Cerebris. Will Marshall is the founder and CEO of Planet Labs. But you are also the insight and a gateway for all of us to understand these two big trends. One is in AI silicon. The other one is in space data centers. I think it would be a really interesting thing to... And emerging. And emerging, yeah. But let's just take one step back. You just heard the last conversation about being public, going public early. Let's just talk about that because I'm just very curious.

2:54Jason Calacanis:How's it been? It's been three weeks or so for you. It's been about a year and a half or two years for you. Was it everything that you thought it would be? What's clear so far is I need to upgrade my name drop game. That was a tour de force. By the way, you were in Davos with J-Cal. I was. I was there. Tour de force. 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 values added.

3:46You 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. If you need new supply or if your relationships with your vendors are bad, they're still bad. If they're good, they're still good. And so I think what we've seen is your employees have a party everybody's really excited you put your head back down you high five and you go back to work okay can i can i just give a little context and then we'll hear from will you know if i can andrew you know we were investors in cerebris i was on the board a year earlier where we were trying to go public um and you know aside from just being a warrior who weathered a decade worth of storms that would have taken out any normal human being, the path to going public for Cerebris was a particularly challenging one.

5:06One of their investors was the UAE, so there was questions about CFIUS, you know, under the Biden administration, challenging to get public. My observation outside looking in is everything was really hard until it got really easy. Like nine and a half years of really hard and then 12 months of really easy where everybody wanted to get in. They priced the IPO at 185, which the range was taken up two times. The stock opened at$320 a share, I think. Today, it's at$230 a share,$50,$60 billion in market cap. For a business like, and Andrew is just one of these people, let's get back to work and build shit.

5:54But my just add-on question to that is, from an employee morale perspective, like distraction perspective, et cetera, has the last three weeks, you got a lot more capital, you got a lot more profile. Presumably, it's easier to sell to enterprise customers today. Net-net, if you were advising me, if I was in a similar position, would you say, go public? I think the first thing is a lot of people asked us about how we got the timing right. Right. And I think the answer is by getting it wrong for a decade. That's really the right way to get timing right. I think first, we've been at this for more than a decade.

6:37And we brought everybody who'd been with the company more than nine years to share. And we brought their families. And first, I learned that engineers own ties. I didn't actually know that. And they didn't die when they wore them. And second, I was surprised at how big a deal it was for them and their family. They're really proud in a way that sort of their parents might have heard of it or that somehow this was like a bar mitzvah or quinceanera or something. And then you had the children of immigrants. One of our leaders, her father, Chinese immigrant, said, I thought it would have happened faster.

7:23right and but I I think um we are sort of by nature uh sort of in the uh in the trenches people and so um we we love solving hard problems and so when when we had this excitement everybody went they were so excited and we had a party and And I think it gave external validation. And then everybody turned around and said, now what are we, now back to work. And so I think. And so you started off kind of bang right out of the gates. Will, you had a little bit different experience in terms of, you know, the entry to the public markets. But over the last 12 months, your stock has gone from five bucks a share to 50 bucks a share, some 10x move in the public markets.

8:17So talk us through the other side of this where you come public, nobody really notices until they notice. Well, we were one of the first space stocks. And I think people just had no idea what Earth is going on in space, how it was changing everything. And they were just like, what the heck is that? But, you know, I have similar opinions. I mean, 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.

8:52And 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. Exactly. 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.

9:28It's legitimizing. And, you know, where the stock is any one day, you know, we're not focused on that day to day. We're focused on how we build long-term value for our shareholders, right? And, you know, the market is, I think, started to really understand where space is going, why it is changing the world. You know, people forget how space is part of your everyday life. Every time you use a phone, you're using communications, using satellites, or GPS using satellites, or satellite data in some way or another that's sort of integrated in your lives. You may not realize it, but it's just booming now.

10:06There's And the story's changed as well, obviously with SpaceX going public, but has the framing of Planet gone from like a data source for people who need data from space and maps to, hey, this is a tool to accomplish tasks and military. Like post Andrel's success, like you probably would have been bucketed into Andrel as a military tech company. So is that framing what's driving a lot of that? Well, I think it's a bit more nuanced than that. I mean, firstly, for the audience's benefit, what Planet does, we have satellites doing Earth imaging. We have the largest Earth imaging fleet, about 200 satellites.

10:42They image the entire Earth every day. So think of it like the Google satellite lay on Google Maps that you can look at, except it's today's date rather than three years old. And we have every day going back. So it's a time series analysis of everything going on on the Earth. That's useful for farmers. It's useful for energy companies. It's useful for civil governments, for flooding and fires. It's useful for security applications like you're getting at. And it's a wide variety of use cases. I think that where we're seeing this is that AI is now enabling the... It's basically reducing the barrier to entry so that more people can get access to this, right?

11:22And, you know, there's a lot more to say on that. But AI is only as good as the data is trained upon. What percentage is military? I'm curious. Sorry? What percentage of revenue customer base is military? It's about 60 % of our revenue today. Yeah. security is part of the initial thing that we said we would do out of the gate. But it's true there's a bigger fraction today than perhaps we would have guessed. But the needs of the geopolitical situation right now demand what we're doing. You know, just as an example, what this does is enable them to see threats around the corner. Yes. And then, you know, give them weeks or months advance warning of things.

11:59And then that enables them to more likely do things that stop conflict. So we believe this is really better for the world. Are you reticent to be perceived as a military company? Not really, but I wouldn't say we're limited to being perceived like that, right? We are helping farmers. We are helping energy companies, civil governments. We work with NASA. We work with what have you. And so it's a bigger play than that. But back to the space piece of it, what has changed, obviously, rocket costs have come down about 4 or 5x over the last 10 years, which has helped tremendously. But a thing that people don't know that is actually perhaps more important is that we've had a miniaturization of satellites, so that the same satellite that used to cost a billion dollars and weigh 20 tons now costs a few kilograms or a few tens or hundreds of kilograms and can do just as much stuff.

12:57if not more. It's the same as the sort of mainframe computer to desktop revolution. It's computer revolution for space and it's unlocking just like mainframes to desktops unlock loads of applications. This is unlocking loads of applications and it's so both go in combo. The launch cost coming down and this.

13:16Jason Calacanis:Let's build on this. So I think I'd like first you maybe take a few minutes and then I want to talk to Andrew the same question. Both of you guys are at the foot of what are probably huge secular trends in technology. How I would frame this is we are rebuilding the data processing infrastructure that has existed on the earth in the sky. And first you do the satellites, but I would love for you to explain space-based data centers because I think everybody's hearing about that. Are they really viable? What are they? How will they work, et cetera. And then, Andrew, this is the rebirth of silicon.

13:54Jason Calacanis:We're going to find the next version of Moore's Law, which I think is more time-bounded, not transistor density-bounded. We now hear a lot about domain-specific architectures. We hear, I mean, your chip was just a complete transformation in terms of the design principles that, you know, like at Grok, we took a very different approach. NVIDIA has taken a very different approach. You took a big pizza-shaped eye and said, fuck it, YOLO, this is it, and you were right. Just explain where we're going in silicon. So maybe, Will, you start, and then Andrew, you start. I mean, what we're seeing firstly in space is all these new applications based on data and AI.

14:31So, you know, we're collecting vastly more data about the planet, and with SpaceX and Starlink and OneWeb, they're transporting far more data around the planet. As you say, we're sort of changing the nature of data using satellites. And that's basically doing what was once the province of governments only and giving everyone else access to satellite capabilities. And that's going to, I mean, I estimate there's a 75 to 100 billion dollar market just on Earth observation. There's kind of data we collect and AI on top of that, unleashing all that application. So that's the near term thing. Applying large language models to Earth imagery data, unlocking agriculture, you know, energy, civil government applications, permitting, you name it.

15:16This is going to make everything more efficient. And then where we're going is indeed space is... We did a study with our partners at Google about eight or nine 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 right today. But that's come down about 10x in the last 10 years.

15:59On the current trajectory with Starship in particular, I would expect it the launch cost 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 addition And the intuition there that is that helps people understand that is you would naturally use solar panels for doing The 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.

16:41In 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 gonna be cheaper to launch all those solar panels and chips in the space Then putting on the ground and it turns out that's gonna be in a few years So we're partnering with Google to launch some of their TPUs into space.

17:22We've already launched in videos some of NVIDIA's GPUs into space. We're launching Google's TPUs into space on an early test. There's lots of technology to figure out. Let's have a conversation. But it's early days. But I think no question within 10 years, most compute will be putting in space, which, to give you a sense, is a lot of money, like trillions, and will be bigger than any of the other space businesses today. Coms, earth imaging, this is why we're getting into this game early on. Do you believe sending data centers to space makes more sense? Or is it just the regular...

18:05Jason Calacanis:Can you have him explain the business first? Oh yeah, of course. I think there, with all due respect, one or two hard problems still left beyond putting GPUs in space right now. I think we're not super good yet at building the clusters in space necessary for the communication. Between. Between, exactly. Between. We're not good at doing it on the ground. We're not good at doing it on the ground. We're really not good at doing it in space. I think this is an extraordinarily important and interesting problem and one we should be spending money and attacking. I've got it at a slightly different time frame, but one that certainly will occur.

18:47and the hard part is, is it one of those problems where the last 10 % is 80 % of the time? Now, self-driving was a problem like that, right? Where the last 10 % proved to be a decade's worth of work and just now we're over the hump. And we don't know yet, but I think the interesting work they're doing at Planet is really important. I think the fundamental driver to experiment, to even get insight into whether I'm right or not, is to get down the cost of the launch vehicles. Then you can start doing experiments and getting it wrong and fixing it and figuring it out. And until then, it was mostly on paper.

19:27Jason Calacanis:For the foreseeable future, you're going to be terrestrial. Explain your business and how you made these critical decisions that kind of took you on a different path. And you versus NVIDIA versus AMD and what you think the future of AI silicon looks like. I think there were two parts here. Your first question was around sort of the rise of silicon in general. And 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.

20:09We 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. Maybe we could find insight in images. Maybe not only could we store language, but we could generate it. Maybe we could understand it rather than storing it and regurgitating it. And what this did is it opened up sort of to compute huge areas that were previously foreclosed. And at the same time, we were adding to those areas. We were taking vastly more images, all right, terrestrially, in satellites.

21:01And what this did is it simultaneously opened up this entire area and allowed compute to attack it. And this is what's underpinning both NVIDIA's growth and sort of all the growth you're hearing about in AI compute is as a processor builder, as a hardware builder, suddenly our tools could attack more in different parts of knowledge. And that was sort of the first part to answer your question. Now, how you do that, there are lots of different strategies, tons of different ways to skin cats. What we saw in 2015 were several things. First, we saw that AI would be an enormous consumer of compute. And historically for computer architects, new workloads were the opportunity for share to change.

21:57Share changed when the rise of graphics emerged and you got the dedicated GPU, that's how NVIDIA was born. Share changed when cell phone compute emerged and Intel and AMD who had fabs and the best architects got zero share and it all moved to ARM, right? Share changed in the late 90s when Nortel and all these companies we've forgotten about couldn't build chips and couldn't do data networking and what you got with Cisco and Juniper and Arist and this collection of new company. So we knew that this new problem would present an opportunity for massive change. So we saw that. We made two bets. The first was dedicated silicon would be the answer.

22:48The 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, right? Your architecture can't look like them, right? 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 in our view are approximately zero. That led us to a fundamentally different architecture, all right? 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.

23:40By 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 open AI 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 counter factual question. how big is the market for slow search today?

24:25Right? Right? It's zero. How big is the market for dial-up? It's zero. How long do you wait for a website to resolve before you click away? Three seconds, five seconds. You will not wait for AI. We have to deliver it to you in real time. And that's what we saw. That's what we built. So the panel's on going public. A lot of LPs in the room. They need to get liquid. I'm curious about the journey for your investors. Okay. So, Will, you guys went public what year? 2021. 2021 by way of a SPAC. Correct. Okay. And your VCs were who? Draper Fisher-Jervison was one of the earliest. Capricorn, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund.

25:13Then we You got Uri Milner's, DST. Okay, so your investors come in. You go public at$2 billion via a SPAC. Now, we're four years later. Really, it wasn't until year three or four that 90 % of the value was created. Okay, so did those early investors capture this 90 % move? Did they stay in it? Most of them did, yeah. Most of them did, which is really smart on their part, obviously, I think. they should hold on even more. If I didn't think that, you should buy it. I'm a little bit self-interested. What's interesting about this is... No, but really they did. And I mean, Google hasn't sold a share.

25:55Their largest single investor, Capricorn, didn't until very recently. So basically most of them stayed really well in. And they got all of that upside and good for them. The reason I think this is so important is that there are a lot of LPs in this room who they're like, when a company goes public, But give us the shares. No, no, no. Give us the shares. This is a counter example, right? This happened to us in Mongo 10 years ago. We invested pre-IPO at a billion dollars. We distributed the shares, I think, at three or four billion. And then it went to 50 billion over the course of the next 24 months.

26:31And we had people who called us who said, well, why didn't you hold on to the shares? And we're like, because you're pounding on us, right, to distribute the shares. So you're an example. Now, in your case, Andrew, you have an innovation, right? You're just now public. So all of your investors are still under lockup, like Altimeter. But you guys have innovated with the banks on what I call a dribble lockup. So over six months, the shares can be dribbled out according to a bunch of performance hurdles, which SpaceX is going to have a very similar lockup. When did we start this process of the dribble?

27:08A dribble? You started it years ago. Yes. We're all of that age. With respect to the lockup, I think this is the most innovative. And I think SpaceX is going to have a very similar innovation. But Andrew, for your investors, if you were talking to my LPs right in the room, should Altimeter be distributing the shares when they come out of lock? Doc, how do you think about your VCs holding onto the shares kind of post-law? I think historically more money is 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.

27:53Yes. And so the amount of money that it's possible to put to work in most venture companies is very modest. I mean, there are two or three or five outliers. But for the most part, you can only put a relatively little bit of money to work. By the time we get public, there's a lot more money there. Things are going well. And the opportunity to make vastly more is after IPO, not before. If I could just add on that. One interesting question is what's going to happen with SpaceX on this? Because, you know, a lot of the value is in the future, right? But, I mean, most of the big tech companies went public at a few billion.