SpaceX, Anthropic and Discord IPO Outlook, Oura CEO on JPM 2026 & Future of Health | Jan 16, 2026

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Friday, January 16th. We are rounding up the week with a big edition of the Editor's Cut. We are unpacking the state of the 2026 IPO market, and we will talk about which contenders should go public and which ones absolutely should not. We'll then bring on our own Rocket Drew, who wrote this weekend's big read about Silicon Valley's latest buzz around the people now being called cracked engineers. What that means, Rocket will explain. And we'll end with a discussion with the CEO of Aura and the co-founder of Chai Discovery to talk about the latest health tech trends coming out of J.P.

0:56Morgan's annual health conference. It's going to be a great show to end the week, so let's get right on into it. The 2026 IPO slate could be one of the most interesting that it's been in years. You, of course, have big names like SpaceX leading the conversation, but then you also have companies like Discord and Crusoe and Kraken in the mix. The information published a deep dive on that roster today, and for this week's Editor's Cut, I want to bring on Martin Piers and Corey Weinberg to give us their view on all of this. Martin, Corey, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Hey, Akash.

1:31Hello. So, Corey, I want to get into this list, but before we get into any names in particular, The broad question I want to start off with here is, should these companies all even be going public right now? You've been on the show in the last few weeks talking about, I don't know, the 2025 slate was like not that great in some cases, right? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a slate of have and have nots to some degree. But that's kind of been the IPO slate the last few years. It's been a lot of venture-backed tech companies that have been around for 15, 20 years. They're not going to get sold. They're not going to get bought.

2:18And so IPO is the next best option for them. And so I think companies like Discord, like Strava, who we've talked about on the show before, they aren't going to be the biggest IPOs. That's for certain. But it's just whetting our appetite for the grand events, which are certainly SpaceX and maybe even Anthropic. Maybe we'll see a sprinkle of Databricks in there. We'll see. Those will be the big, big time events. OK, so, Martin, you're chuckling. So do you agree with this? I mean, yes, but I would put it a bit more directly. I think the question is not whether or not the company should go public as to whether or not investors should buy into these companies.

3:05And I would definitely say if you look at the track record of some of the companies we've seen going public over the last decade, I'm thinking of Snap, I'm thinking of Pinterest, of Dropbox, these companies which have just dead in the water, the stocks haven't moved for years. I would say do not go anywhere near Discord. That will not do well. Strava, I doubt, will also do well. That is the real issue. The companies, obviously, they have their own reasons for going public. It's because the investors want to get out. But really, investors should not buy into these companies. Warning. Now, you're kind of cherry-picking the consumer companies here, Martin.

3:48Well, because they have the worst track record of all, right? but martin you would have you would have missed out on applovin and robin hood and uh you know they're not really consumer names but you are right there's obviously these these other companies which have these which become meme stocks and do really well um and you can't always uh predict those ones but i think we can predict that discord in particular is not going to do well it's a social media kind of company with a very small business. It's been hanging around. They obviously have to go public because their investors are really desperate to get out.

4:32But believe me, that coming, that will be a disaster. I'll just let listeners know that Martin also dissuaded you from buying Reddit, which is up seven times. uh can i just point out that cory you agreed with me at the time read it i did get that one wrong uh i still think that's a bit overvalued by a huge amount but um true i get things wrong occasionally but i'm always happy to to admit that right i don't think i'll be wrong about discord though i mean you don't even have to go i mean let's just on strava let's remind listeners that you don't even have to go back to snap and you don't have to go back that far to kind of see that a lot of these sort of hot tech IPOs have just performed terribly over the past year.

5:21I've written about this phenomenon. Companies like Chime, like even Wall Street favorite Figma, even StubHub, even Nivon, these companies are down 5, 10, 20, 30, or 40 % since their IPOs just in the past year. So not a good event. Corey, what about Kraken? I mean, Circle had a big debut, too. But I mean, Coinbase hasn't done that great recently, at least. What do you think Kraken should do? I mean, crypto companies, you know, sort of have done well generally since going public. But, you know, Kraken, you know, is going to be comped to Coinbase. Coinbase has just been okay, you know, over the past couple of years.

6:03And so, you know, that's not great news for them. if they're in the stablecoin business, then it seems like it'll be a good listing. But just broadly, the crypto market is just doing okay. And Martin, I mean, some of these companies, I'm looking at names like Crusoe. I mean, in terms of the reasons why companies should go public, raising capital is obviously one reason. So as you look at some of the names in this list, I mean, Crusoe, some of these AI companies, data center companies, I mean, they need the capital, right? They need the capital. I would be very careful about Crusoe, Lambda, all of those companies that are around the AI infrastructure market.

6:48That, you know, I think the investor, you know, enthusiasm about those companies in the public market has dissipated a bit. And I just, I mean, I haven't seen the financials yet, but I would be wary. look cory what is the alternative then for these companies that you've written i you know they've been around for 15 20 years in some cases i think you've called them the the geriatric companies for the ipo slate i mean so i'm an investor i've been an investor in this company for 15 years i mean you know what where do i look then the secondary market i mean how else do investors get their money back there's really no other way i mean the secondary market really only exists in a functioning format for really hot companies these days.

7:41The top 10 most sought after private companies are really the only company like their Stripe or Databricks or SpaceX. That's where there is a secondary market. There's not really one for Discord. So you just have to have a short memory if you're an investor in Discord and forget that Your company turned down a sale to Microsoft several years ago and hope the IPO goes well and hope you can have a good story to tell about future business dreams and stuff like that. And the other thing, Akash, is that the early investors probably bought in at a very cheap price and they may be able to get out and recover the money.

8:23The point I'm making is that public market investors should not be buying in because they will be the ones who won't do well. Right. Martin, there was a good question from a reader that I want to ask you and then, Corey, I'll come to you. The reader asked on the article today, is the data center market a winner-take-all market, or can all of these IPOs coexist? What do you think the answer to that question is? I definitely do not think it is a winner-take-all market. There are many companies operating in that arena. I really think you have to look at the individual companies, how they've financed themselves, and just what their relationships are like.

9:08But, you know, I'm not an expert on that, but I cannot imagine that there's going to be one company that does really well out of that. Corey, what do you think? Yeah, I think it's going, investors are going to have to get more sophisticated on assessing sort of contract structures that a lot of these neoclabs have with some of their big customers. That was what a lot of the discussion was when CoreWeave went public last March was, okay, regardless of how you feel about the AI boom and whether it's going to go bust and whether that's going to leave you holding the bag with CoreWeave, hey, they do have these three to five-year contracts with Microsoft or OpenAI or whomever.

9:51And that's going to at least assure some certainty around their future revenue. So I think investors with Lambda and Crusoe are going to be assessing that. They're going to be assessing access to power. I don't think it's a winner-take-all market. But these are certainly the companies where there's going to be some of the heaviest debate because they have debt. They're such a derivative of the broader AI market overall. Great. Well, we like debate. And so if those names do head out, I look forward to having both of you back on to talk about whether or not they should or should have not taken to the public markets.

10:30I want to thank you both for coming on. That is Corey Weinberg, our deputy bureau chief of finance and Martin Pierce, our co-executive editor here on TITV. Okay, if Vibe Coding was 2025, 2026 is all about the cracked engineer. That is the new archetype that Silicon Valley is after, and it is the focus of our weekend big read. I want to bring on Rocket Drew, our cracked AI and robotics reporter, to tell us more about what he's found. Rocket, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here. Thanks, Akash. It's great to be here. That's quite an honor. You're a cracked TV host, if I may say.

11:08Well, thank you. I appreciate it. I was only hoping that I was complimenting you because, you know, calling someone a cracked anything, I don't know. It's guaranteed that you're complimenting them. But according to your story today, Silicon Valley is after these cracked engineers. So these engineers are what? Just superstars? What does it mean? Yeah, I think that's right. They're just really good. We can talk about what the word itself means. I think the more interesting thing is that the word's popularity right now exposes some of what's going on in the labor market and what AI is doing to the labor market in this current moment.

11:41But the word, like you said, just means superstar. I think, you know, to first order means really, really good. And if you hear it and gloss it as really, really good, that gets you like 90 % of the way there. Of course, startups want really good people. They've always wanted really good people. But in the current AI moment, that's more true than ever. And we can get into a little bit of that. But yeah, so I mean, go there. Is it is this an AI thing or, you know, is this? The word itself has been around for a little while. I started hearing the word maybe five years ago. I think other computer science kids at college, they really wanted to be cracked.

12:15They would hype each other up by calling each other cracked. Similar to how you would call someone like, you know, they're really talented, they're dialed. Or, you know, maybe if someone goes to the gym enough, they're shredded. It's just one of these kind of Gen Z-isms. So, cracked really just meant good, but these days it's taken on a deeper kind of connotation of someone who's really focused on their productivity. They work long hours. They're obsessed with their craft. They want to turn out more output than ever before. They care about learning and mastering their craft, sometimes to the exclusion of other things like hobbies or even a social life.

12:50For better or worse, the term has come to mean somewhat antisocial. I think kind of the platonic example is maybe you have someone posting on Twitter, my CTO is so cracked, they're coding through the party and they post a picture of someone who's on their laptop in the middle of a party. I mean, that is also kind of associated with cracked these days. So the broader question I want to ask you here is, I think in the talent wars and the story of AI right now, we've heard about the big pay packages going for single researchers and these, I don't know, three-year contracts. And so I do – I certainly see the argument here for going after cracked researchers because it feels like a researcher can make all the difference in the world in some cases in the AI story.

13:36is that true of a single engineer like can can one person have that much of an impact and and by the way where i'm going with this is does ai change the story with vibe coding or is it still that i mean you know an engineer's an engineer at the end of the day yeah yeah let me see so a lot of different types of roles can be cracked like surely you can have cracked researchers as well but really the central example is about engineers right now and maybe i can try to get at why that is. I think the first thing to know is that people who are cracked are often very young. They're often in their 20s.

14:11Maybe by the time they're 25, they already have 10 years of experience because they've been coding since high school. And hiring people who are young has a real advantage right now. One is that you don't have to pay them as much, which is often nice. I mean, maybe you're still paying them extraordinary amounts, like you mentioned. But they're younger. They work long hours. They're very familiar with the technology, like the frontier of the technology and what AI is capable of right now. That is more true for engineering than for research, right? Like in engineering these days, to take your vibe-coded AI agent startup to$100 million in revenue in a year, you don't need to have a deep knowledge of all of this machine learning literature that came before you.

14:54You don't need to know what was going on in machine learning 10 years ago. You can just focus on what's happening now and you can try to be really good at it, that's a little different from what's happening in research where it still serves you to have an understanding. Research, you need education. You need to really have gone through the motions of looking at this stuff for extended periods of time. It certainly helps. But in engineering, we're seeing the same dynamic. As AI gets better, there's just more kinds of jobs that AI can do where you don't need to hire a person for them anymore. So the bar is higher.

15:25Instead of hiring average engineers, you have to hire cracked engineers because otherwise you would just have AI do it. The second effect is that the people you do hire are more productive than ever. And I think this is answering your question about vibe coding is if you are, you know, cracked, so to speak, you should be able to harness all of the latest AI tools. You should be able to run seven instances of clawed code at once and effectively supervise them, right? If they write something that has bugs in it, has errors, someone who is truly skilled will be able to catch those errors and they'll have the grand vision in mind from the beginning.

15:58They'll know what sort of solution they're working towards. You talked to a recruiter who said to you, and this is in the story, that sometimes companies could look to these cracked engineers as a band-aid of sorts for deeper problems that could exist at the company. What did they mean by that? Yeah, I think it's something similar. There's sort of a dark side, so to speak, of cracked engineers. Part of it is the sort of antisocial nature of it that I spoke to earlier. But there's also a sense of the people who get the accolades for being cracked are maybe the ones who take credit. They get the spotlight for progress that's happened in the past.

16:39But there's also a lot of less glamorous work that goes into making code work behind the scenes. They write glue code. They write little tools that make a whole team more productive. And sometimes those people don't get the glamour and don't get the accolades of being cracked, but are also essential for making a team function. So I think there's a sense of you shouldn't focus on the people who have been stars in the past when there could be people who are sort of diamonds in the rough who are contributing behind the scenes. Well, and I'm also thinking about this whole notion of move fast and break things, right?

17:10This is sort of how problems come up sometimes, not necessarily on a technical scale, which I'm sure they are, again, you know, putting things together in not the most comprehensive ways, but then also like not thinking about the product that you're building and, you know, the implications of it down the road and business models and stuff like that. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, at the end of the day, you got to move fast, but there are certainly risks too, I'm sure. I think that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, you want someone in your technical leadership who's going to be a good communicator, who's likable, who can earn the respect of their team.

17:43and then on a technical level like you say if you move fast and break things maybe you ship something new really fast and you get the glory of being cracked so to speak but you leave a trail of bugs in your wake that all your teammates have to spend weeks cleaning up after you yeah well and this and then this is this is how you get all the personalities clashing with each other too is that i mean we see this now is that the most cracked researchers and engineers are all fighting with each other because they all, I mean, they're all so talented. They all get paid so much money and, but they can't stay at a company for more than a year.

18:17And then I don't know, maybe that's a result of all this is what I'm saying. Right, right. Especially when people have conflicting visions, like when people have sort of real established and developed taste about what good software looks like and what good research ought to be. You can imagine that if people aren't totally aligned, then there can be tension there. Right. Well, it's a fascinating word, a fascinating choice of words, I should say. I want to thank you for coming on and explaining it all to us. It's a great weekend feature. Again, that is our weekend big read, and that is Rocket Drew, our AI and robotics reporter here at The Information.

18:54Okay. JP Morgan's big healthcare conference happened this week in San Francisco. It is a big event that attracts a who's who of healthcare executives. I want to bring on two friends of the show who were at the event to share with us some of their analysis from the week. Tom Hale is the CEO of wearables company Aura, and Joshua Meyer is the co-founder of AI drug discovery company Chai Discovery. Welcome to you both. It's great to have you here. That's great for having me. So, Tom, this is supposed to be what, like the NHL draft day for healthcare dealmaking? Is that the idea? That's the idea. I mean, in years past, it has been a mammoth dealmaking and announcement venue.

19:33And the streets of San Francisco are alive with people in blue blazers walking around doing deals on corners on cell phones. This week was a little bit different. Certainly, it does feel like health care has turned a corner. There's a lot of, you know, kind of consensus that the health care system is broken. But between government movements, technological disruption of AI, it seems like there's a real opportunity and a sense of potential in the air. hmm uh were there tom were there any big deals announced that really caught your attention you know no there was probably uh less deals this year than in past uh and maybe it's more a feeling of uh we're here to actually make things change and make things different uh maybe the biggest deal that was announced was the lily nvidia deal um and i think that that's that's a that's a mammoth deal and of course that that sort of points you back to the idea that ai is going to be this incredible force in healthcare, certainly in drug discovery.

20:29And I think Josh can talk to you about that. But, you know, maybe in our world, we think a lot about algorithmic care and how, you know, we have this shortage of clinicians in the primary care space to be able to deliver anything looking like preventative care. I think, you know, people are starting to warm to the idea that AI could be a big disruption and a big enabler of something that we call algorithmic care, which is not, hey, we're going to give you, you know, open heart surgery, or we're going to be your specialist clinician although there will be lots of utilization of ai in that space but really in the area of preventative care where a primary care physician traditionally helps you guide your health journey i think ai has a huge role to play there so josh i want to come to you because the discussion around ai and pharmaceuticals is one we've talked a little bit on the show but what surprised you from this week at the conference in terms of that conversation and how the conversation was different compared to one year ago?

21:21Well, first of all, I think if we just go back one year ago and compare just the state of the field, where the research was in AI drug discovery in JPM 2025 or 2026, it was completely night and day. And if we look back a year ago, we had some exciting breakthroughs on the protein folding front, which is a useful tool in drug discovery. But in the past year, we went from being able to design these simple proteins to being able to design simple antibody drugs and now full-length antibody drugs with drug-friendly properties. So the research has really taken a big step change over the past year. And I think many are looking to 2026 as this year of AI deployment in pharma.

21:56I think it was quite striking, actually, to see just the number of high-level pharma execs that were just spending most of their time at this conference in AI. Like Tom said, this is usually a conference where you see a lot of M &A deals, people looking at asset licensing deals or acquiring companies. But the talk of the town was actually the future of how AI is really going to be disrupting the way that we're discovering things this year. So there's tremendous optimism in the air and it was a pretty exciting week. So it's almost like it's maybe for the moment, at least for maybe a year or two in here in the middle, where it used to be a deal-making exercise.

22:29I mean, it was a little more focused on like the seminars and the learning and like people actually trying to figure out how the heck are we gonna use this stuff in our own businesses? Yeah, I think there were a lot of questions about that, right? How are we adopting this? Who are the right people and companies to be working with? Tom mentioned the Lilly deal. We actually also announced a deal with Lilly. we're deploying our models across the portfolio. So you have a lot of this talk about how AI, especially even on the software front, is going to change the way that things are done. So yeah, a lot of education happening.

22:57I think a lot of folks under pressure to figure out how are we going to move quickly here? Because in AI, the early bird can really get the worm when you've got massive phase changes like this. There's a lot of opportunity that that opens up. So lots of discussion around what should we be doing? Tom, how much discussion? Oh, go ahead, go ahead. No, no, I was just going to pile on and say, I think what's interesting about the sort of sense of potential here is everyone can agree that the healthcare system has lots of problems and challenges. That is not up for debate. But the sense of potential is really that like AI has the potential to go beyond like kind of a pilot concept and really understanding how AI gets deployed in practice.

23:35It's already being used in practice. I mean, I'm talking more about maybe care and Josh is talking about drug discovery. And there's all sorts of deployment around, you know, how do we help people with prior authorizations? How do we automate some of the back office stuff? How do we make health care more efficient? I think between care, drug discovery, and efficiency, there's all this opportunity. And when I think about prevention, I think about changing the math of chronic disease. You know, in the U.S., 90 % of all health care spending goes to people with chronic and mental health conditions.

24:06And those costs are driven by complications, hospitalizations, and emergency care. And the thing is, if we can bend the curve on that cost, we spend roughly one out of five dollars in our GDP on health care. And if you can move even one percent of that using AI across all those three dimensions I just discussed, you can free that up for lots more productive purposes. And by the way, the U.S. is the outlier. You know, outside of outside of the United States, countries are spending more like 10 percent or 9 percent of their GDP on health care. We have that opportunity. We can change the behaviors.

24:37And I think things like wearables and AI are going to be part of that change in human behavior that will yield to bend the curve, both on health outcomes, but also on health costs. Tom, how much discussion was there around the new FDA regulations that came out around wearables? Well, a lot, actually. I think, you know, for us, obviously, I'm, you know, the CEO of a wearables company. So we're going to have a lot of conversations when the FDA sort of announces. What was the concern? I mean, you're happy about this? It's, you know, it really unleashes you for more innovation? The FDA basically announced new guidance for wellness devices, drawing on, you know, kind of the guidance between a medical device and a wellness device.

25:17And basically they said, listen, if you are accurate and you are a reliable wearable, we want to give you more leeway to explore innovation. We don't want to burden you with the same kind of constraints that you might sort of say, listen, a wearable like Dior Ring, it's not the same as a pacemaker you put in your body. That pacemaker, if it doesn't work, it's going to kill you or rank probably not going to kill you. And that kind of span, I think, is really, really important for us to recognize that if we can open up wearables, I think we can change behaviors. And behaviors is what will bend the health curve and the cost curve over time.

25:52Our belief is that we can we can do that and do that not just around, you know, kind of helping change people's behaviors, but also around predicting disease outcomes and getting people into treatment sooner. And the sooner you intervene, the lower the cost. That is the key. And I think this guidance that came from the FDA, it actually was announced at CES the week before, but everybody coming into JPM was talking about it, is this idea that we can really push towards allowing wearable devices to innovate. And I think our view on this is that they could become something like a digital health screener.