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

What It Covers

Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman and Planet Labs CEO Will Marshall join Brad Gerstner at an All-In liquidity panel to discuss their IPO experiences, the convergence of AI and space infrastructure, next-generation silicon architecture, and why public market investors may capture more value than private ones in the current tech cycle.

Key Questions Answered

• •IPO Reality Check: Going public changes almost nothing operationally. Cerebras priced at $18.50, opened at $32, reached a $5–6B market cap, yet Feldman notes that vendor relationships, engineering progress, and sales pipelines remain identical the morning after listing. The primary tangible benefits are employee morale, balance sheet cash, and enterprise credibility with risk-averse customers.
• •Space-Based Data Centers Timeline: Planet Labs and Google's analysis shows space-based compute becomes cheaper than terrestrial data centers when launch costs reach $200–300 per kilogram. Current costs sit just above $1,000/kg, down 10x over a decade. Solar panels in sun-synchronous orbit generate five times more energy than ground-based panels with zero battery requirement, making the infrastructure model straightforward once launch economics close.
• •AI Silicon Architecture Principle: Building a chip that resembles a competitor's design yields approximately zero chance of outperforming them. Cerebras solved AI's core bottleneck — moving data between memory and compute — by building a dinner-plate-sized chip with on-chip SRAM directly adjacent to compute, delivering 15–18x speed advantage over GPUs for OpenAI workloads. Domain-specific architecture, not incremental GPU iteration, drives step-change performance gains.
• •Post-IPO Value Capture: Historical data consistently shows more absolute dollar value is created after IPO than before. Planet Labs stock moved from $5 to $50 — a 10x gain — entirely in public markets after a 2021 SPAC listing. LP pressure to distribute shares immediately post-lockup causes funds to forfeit the majority of returns, as demonstrated by Altimeter's MongoDB investment that went from $3–4B at distribution to $50B shortly after.
• •Earth Data as AI's Missing Layer: Current large language models are trained exclusively on internet text and lack real-world physical data. Planet Labs images the entire Earth daily across a 200-satellite fleet, creating a time-series dataset covering agriculture, energy, flooding, and security. Feeding this physical-world data into AI models unlocks what Marshall calls "planetary intelligence" — AI capable of answering real-world operational questions, not just text-based ones.