Welcome everyone to the information ti. My name is Akash Pasicha. 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 JP Morgan's annual health conference. It's going to be a great show to end the week and 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 Pierce 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.
Hello. 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, you know, 15, 20 years. They're not going to get, you know, sort of sold. They're not going to get bought. And so IPO is, you know, the next best option for them. And so, you know, I think companies like Discord, like Straa, who we've talked about on the show before, you know, they aren't going to be the biggest IPOs, that's for certain, but it's just wetting 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.
Okay. 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. And 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. Straa I doubt will also do well. That is the real issue. It's, you know, the companies obviously they have their own reasons for going public. It's because of the investors want to get out but really investors should not buy into these companies. Warning.
But now you're kind of cherry-picking the consumer companies here Martin.
Well, because they have the worst track record of all, right?
But Martin, you would have missed out on Applovin and Robinhood and, you know,
They're not really consumer names, but you are right. There's obviously these other companies which become meme stocks and do really well. And you can't always 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, but believe me, that will be a disaster.
I'll just let listeners of the show know that Martin dissuaded you from buying Reddit, which is up seven times. Point out that you agreed with me at the time.
Reddit I did get that one wrong. I still think that's a bit overvalued by a huge amount but true I get things wrong occasionally but I'm always happy to admit that.
I don't think I'll be wrong about Discord though. I mean, you don't even have to go,
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 hot tech IPOs have just performed terribly over the past year. I've written about this phenomenon. Companies like Chime, like even Wall Street favorite Figma, even StubHub, even Non. These companies are down 5, 10, 20, 30 or 40% since their IPOs just in the past year. So, not a good.
Corey, what about Kraken? I mean, Circle had a big debut. 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 years and so, you know, that's not great news for them. If they're in the stable coin business then it seems like it'll be a good listing but, you know, just broadly the crypto market is just doing okay and Martin I mean some of these companies I'm looking at, you know, 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, you know, crucial some of these AI companies data center companies they need the capital, right?
They need the capital. I would be very careful about Crusoe, Lambda, all of these companies that are around the AI infrastructure market that, you know, I think the investor 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.
So Corey, what is the alternative then for these companies that you've written, you know, they've been around for 15, 20 years. In some cases, I think you've called them 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. You know the top 10 most sought-after private companies are really the only company like there's Stripe or Databricks or SpaceX. That's where there is a secondary market. There's not really one for Discord. So you know 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 streams and stuff like that.
And the other thing 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. The 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. But, 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 investors are going to have to get more sophisticated on assessing sort of contract structures that a lot of these neo clouds 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 like three to five year contracts with Microsoft or OpenAI or whomever and 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 determinative 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. I 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 TIV.
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, Akos. It's great to be here. That's quite an honor. You're a cracked TV host, if I may say.
Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate it. I can only 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. But 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 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. They 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 Zisms. 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, you know, learning and mastering their craft. Sometimes to the exclusion of other things like hobbies or even a social life. For 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.
