Brad Gerstner, Andrew Feldman, Will Marshall: The IPO Comeback: Why Tech Giants Are Finally Going Public | All-In Liquidity IPO Panel

The panel opens by casting 2026 as a possible record year for IPOs and introducing two recently listed companies: Cerebras, described as "The AI IPO of the year so far," and Planet Labs, whose pitch is that it is "indexing the Earth and making it searchable," in the way Google indexed the Internet. An investor voice in the introduction frames the current technology wave as "the biggest wave in the history of technology" and says they are rooting for all of these companies "because I'm rooting for America."

After some opening banter about Davos, including a story of cancelling a ski trip to moderate an interview there and seeing a monitor list the moderator alongside Donald J. Trump, the moderator sets up the real subject. Andrew Feldman of Cerebras and Will Marshall of Planet Labs are presented as running "two of the most interesting and consequential newly public companies in the stock market," and as a gateway to two trends: AI silicon and space data centers. The first question is simple: having been public for about three weeks in one case and roughly a year and a half to two years in the other, was it everything they expected?

The first answer is deflationary. Going public is described as a heavy administrative burden: Zoom calls with 130 attendees and repeated document reviews where "the commas move and just no values added." After the big event, nothing operational has moved: no more product has been sold and engineering is no further along. The company gains new constituents to communicate with and more money in the bank, but the speaker insists the core of the business is unchanged.

I think it's really difficult to to overestimate the amount of garbage that's involved in in going public.

Supplier relationships illustrate the point: if they were bad before, "they're still bad. If they're good, they're still good." The prescription is to let employees celebrate, high-five, and then put heads back down and return to work.