Hey, 2026 could be an all-time record for IPOs.
The AI IPO of the year so far. That company is Cerebras.
Cerebras Systems founder and CEO Andrew Feldman. We are participating in something extraordinary on everything we do. We are the fastest bar none.
Well, 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 Gersner is here, founder and CEO of Altimeter Capital, a leading tech investment firm.
I believe that the wave is the biggest wave in the history of technology, 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 Gersner, Will Marshall, and Andrew Feldman.
On the couch, we switch on the couch.
Nice to see you, my friend.
Hey, big boy.
Nice to see you.
Last last time I saw you, we were in Davos.
Yes, we were in Davos causing another drop. Another JL. Do you hear that little Davos?
We were just, you know, it was pre-IPO. We're chopping it up with 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.
Tucker. Anyway, so I cancel on Tucker. I cancel because Sax calls me. He says, 'Listen, POTUS needs you, the world's greatest moderator in Davos.' I said, 'No problem.'
I said, 'Sax, POTUS, and Davos.' So I said, 'When?' He says, 'In 3 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.
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 the founder and CEO of Cerebras. 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. How's it been? It's been 3 weeks or so for you. It's been about a year and a half or two years for you.
It's more fresh.
Was it was it everything that you thought it would be? Like what's clear so far is I need to upgrade my name drop game. I mean that that was a tour de force.
But by the way, you were you were in Davos with J.
I was I was there but that 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 value added. You 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 still 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, and you put your head back down, you high five, and you go back to work.
Can I can I just give a little context and then I want to hear from Will. You know, if I can, Andrew, you know, we were investors in Cerebras. I was on the board a year earlier where we were trying to go public. 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 Cerebras was a particularly challenging one. One of their investors was the UAE. So there was questions about CFIUS, you know, in the prior 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 you know of really easy where everybody wanted to get in.
They priced the IPO at 185 which was up the range was taken up two times. Okay. The stock opened at $320 a share I think. Today it's at 230 bucks a share, 50-60 billion dollars in market cap for a business like you know and Andrew is just one of these people. Let's let's get back to work and build. But my just add-on question to that is from an employee morale perspective like distraction perspective etc. has the last 3 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.
And I think the answer is by getting it wrong for a decade. I mean that's really the right way to get timing right. I think first we've been at this for more than a decade and 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 owned 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 were 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 kinara or something.
And then you had these sort of the children of immigrants, one of our leaders, her father, Chinese immigrants said, 'I thought it would have happened faster.'
And but I think we are sort of by nature sort of in the trenches people. And so we love solving hard problems. And so when we had this excitement, everybody went and they were so excited and we had a party 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. So 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? And but you know, I have similar opinions. I mean, in the end, you've just got to get on with executing the business. The 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 and 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.
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, right? It's legitimizing.'
And you know, you know where the stock is at 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 there's a
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 Andrew's success like you probably would have been bucketed into Andrew as a military tech company. So is that framing what's driving a lot of
I think it's a bit more nuance 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. They image the entire earth every day. So think of it like the Google satellite layer on Google maps that you can look at except it's today's date rather than 3 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, 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? And you know, there's a lot more to say on that, but AI is only as good as the data it's trained upon.
What percentage is military? I'm curious. Sorry.
What percentage of revenue customer base?
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.
And then you know give them weeks or months advanced warning of things and then that enables them to more likely do things that stop conflict. So we believe this is you know really better for the world.
Are you reticent to be perceived as a military company?
Not really. I but I wouldn't say we're limited to being perceived like that, right? We are helping farmers, we are helping you know energy companies, civil governments, we work with NASA, we work with what have you and so it's a bigger 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 four 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 cost a few kg or a few tens or hundreds of kg
and can do just as much stuff if not more. It's the same as the sort of mainframe computer to desktop 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
Let's build 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? etc. And then Andrew, this is the rebirth of silicon. 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's taken a very different approach you took a big pizza shaped die and said 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 so 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 market just on Earth observation. This 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. This 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. On the current trajectory with Starship in particular, I would expect it the launch cost come down there in 2 to 3 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. Then in addition and the intuition there that is that helps people understand that is you would naturally use solar panels for doing 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 you then you have to have gas or then you have to have nuclear and then it gets really expensive. In 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 compute in 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 going to be cheaper to launch all those solar panels and chips into space than putting on the ground. And it turns out that's going to be in a few years. So we're partnering with Google to launch some of their TPUs into space. We've already launched Nvidia's 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 an early 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. Comes Earth imaging. This is why we're getting into this.
Do you believe this? Do you believe sending data centers to space makes more sense or is it just the regular
Can you have him explain the business first and then
Oh, yeah, of course. Yeah. So, I think they're, you know, 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
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 in a slightly different time frame, but one that certainly will occur. And the hard part is is it one of those problems where the last 10% is 80% of the time.
