S2E17 — The Two World Cups: Inside the AI fueled IPO Boom

Click here to watch a video of this episode.
On Friday 12 June 2026, a SpaceX rocket climbed out of Cape Canaveral as the opening bell rang in New York on the largest stock market debut in history. By the close, the company was worth more than $2 trillion and Elon Musk was the first trillionaire, and the traders still called the 19% pop disappointing.

This summer America is hosting two World Cups at once. One is on the pitch: 48 nations, 104 matches, the final in New Jersey. The other is on Wall Street, where more than $2 trillion of company value is queuing for an IPO in the most concentrated listing run the public markets have ever seen. SpaceX has priced, Anthropic and OpenAI have filed within days of each other, and the question underneath all of it is why the smartest companies spent a decade refusing to go public at all.

Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala break down the 2026 IPO boom: the five eras of the Silicon Valley listing, why a 1934 securities rule and the 2012 JOBS Act let trillion-dollar private companies exist, why Stripe still says no, the SPAC disaster and the discipline it left behind, the Goldman versus JP Morgan fee war, and the homecoming pulling Indian champions like Razorpay back to list at home.

Key takeaways:
1. SpaceX's ~$75B raise and >$2T close is the largest IPO ever, yet the modest 19% pop may make it the most honestly priced debut in years.
2. The 2012 JOBS Act switched off the legal clock, Section 12(g), that once forced companies public. That is why Stripe and SpaceX could stay private for two decades.
3. The AI super-cycle has taken the market back to the 1980s: the money rewards asset-heavy steel and silicon, not asset-light software.
4. Stripe handles roughly 1.5% of global output and still refuses to list, because a payments IPO can be a relegation battle fought every 90 days. Adyen lost 39% in a single afternoon.
5. The 4,400 new millionaires from the SpaceX IPO are the seed capital for the next decade. The PayPal Mafia became Tesla and LinkedIn. The AI Mafia is being born now.

Topics covered:
- The five eras of the Silicon Valley IPO, and why 2026 rhymes with 1980
- Hyperscaler capex heading toward $650-700B in 2026, bigger than the GDP of Belgium
- Section 12(g), the JOBS Act, and double-trigger RSUs explained
- The June fortnight: Anthropic, OpenAI and the largest IPO in history days apart
- Why Stripe ticks every box an IPO is meant to tick, without ringing the bell
- The two doors out of payments: single-platform compounders versus PE roll-ups
- The SPAC collapse and the January 2025 rules that killed the arbitrage
- Goldman versus JP Morgan, and Bill Gurley's case that the IPO is rigged
- China's Ant Group halt, Hong Kong's revival, and India's ghar wapsi homecoming

Chapters:
Referenced in this episode: SpaceX IPO and the $60B Cursor buyout; Anthropic and OpenAI June filings; CoreWeave, Figma, Klarna, Cerebras; Stripe's $159B tender and John Collison; Section 12(g) and the 2012 JOBS Act; Nuvei, Payoneer, Worldpay, Global Payments, Worldline; Adyen and Fiserv one-day falls; the SEC's 2025 SPAC rules; Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Bill Gurley; Databricks, Canva, Revolut, Kraken; Alibaba, Ant Group, Hong Kong; PhonePe and Razorpay; Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Uber and the PayPal Mafia.

Related episodes: S2E16 (The People Who Knew First, the betting markets that priced the pop); S2E14 (Machines with Wallets) and S2E13 (The Google of Money) on Stripe.

Hosted by:
Aman Narain writes at amanwhoblogs.substack.com. Zubin Vandrevala is your payments provocateur, reporting this week from dry land at last.

Enjoying A2Z Fintech? Leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. It is the single biggest signal to the Apple algorithm and how new listeners in our world find us.

For information and entertainment only. Not financial advice.

Transcript:

Creators and Guests

Host

Aman Narain

Boomerang Banker, Ex-Googler. Platforms, Ecosystems & Transformation junkie. Startup Investor & Advisor.

Host

Zubin Vandrevala

A2Z Fintech by Night. Spearheading revenue growth at Gr4vy by Day.

What is A2Z Fintech?

Aman Narain and Zubin Vandrevala have spent over 25 years in fintech across Banks, BigTech, and Startups. This is a podcast of them riffing on payments, fintech and everything in between.

Zubin, picture this.

Thursday, the 11th of June, 2026, Mexico
City, the roar of a packed Azteca,

a sound you can feel in your chest as the
World Cup kicks off,

the host Mexico against South Africa.

And hold on to that detail because South
Africa is the birthplace of the man whose

company, before this story is done, will
stage the greatest opener of all.

The football plays out, night falls.

And while half the planet sleeps it off,

the next morning is already breaking over
Florida.

Friday, first light at Cape Canaveral.

A SpaceX rocket lifts off the pad and
climbs into a pale morning sky.

That, when the opening bell sounds in New
York,

it rings on the largest stock market debut
in the history of money.

Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX president,

the woman who has quietly run the place
for nearly a quarter of a century.

And and and, Aman, fun fact, she isn't
ringing a bell,

and she isn't even standing on a trading
floor, right?

The Nasdaq has never had either.

It's all electronic.

She presses a button in a glass TV studio
in Times Square and a digital bell lights

up a screen seven storeys high.

The most digital market on earth.

And the big moment is a button and a light
show.

And the founder, the man who started it
all 24 years ago, Elon Musk,

isn't in New York.

He isn't even in the state.

He's back at Starbase in South Texas with
hundreds of engineers who actually built

the rockets, the two celebrations bridged
by a live video link.

On the biggest financial day of his life,

he chose the launch site over Wall Street
because Musk is a dreamer.

The showman, the Steve Jobs of this story.

Shotwell is the one who makes it real.

She's the Tim Cook.

And by the closing bell,

the company they built together is worth
more than $2 trillion.

More than Saudi Aramco.

More than all but five companies on the
face of this earth.

And Elon Musk the first trillionaire who
ever lived.

And by the way, besides Shotwell, one more
face.

Maye Musk, Elon's mother.

He wouldn't leave the engineers, she
wouldn't miss her son's cotillion.

Yeah. And and of course she did.

And you and I know the mums always show
up.

Then the part nobody expected.

The stock closed up 19% and the chorus of
traders, they called it disappointing.

A two trillion dollar disappointment, I
would say.

This summer,

America is hosting the two great
spectacles on the planet at the same time.

One of them you can watch in the stadium,
the other one press the button.

Welcome back to A2Z, the show where we
break down finance,

tech and payments one letter at a time.
I'm Aman.

And I'm the Z, not the Z in this.

I'm Zubin, reporting from dry land at
last.

Aman, my body is in London,

but my inner ear is somewhere off the
coast of Puerto Vallarta.

I actually spent last week on a cruise
beach hopping in Mexico with the family,

doing what I'm told is called relaxing.

Turns out I'm not really good at that.

I think on day three I found myself
explaining interchange fees at the swim-up bar

to a man who.

Course you did.

I just one of piña coladas.

He came for rum and he left with a working
knowledge of a card scheme network.

Well, well, well.

He he he tipped me, actually,

in cocktails and you y I think you got
about to disappear as well.

This is true. I have 48 hours and
counting.

Just checked in actually.

As we record this, we're off to Greece.

A dear friend of mine is turning 50, so
it's a big fat Greek birthday party.

And then sailing in the Med.

I intend to be unreachable in a way that
will deeply upset our producer.

Our producer. So let's get this straight.

I just got off a boat and you're about to
get onto one.

So we're not so much as podcasters as a
real team really passing a single life

jacket between us.

We've said this before with the Harlem
Globetrotters of fintechs looping,

which fittingly brings today's theme
because right now as we speak,

the United States, Mexico and Canada are
co-hosting the FIFA World Cup.

48 nations, 104 matches, the greatest
sporting event humanity has ever staged,

football.

Mm-hmm. You mean soccer?

Football.

Come on, this is the same argument as we
have with the letter Z, you say Z, I say Z,

you call it football, I call it soccer.

One of us is right and one of us learned
English from a colonial textbook.

One of us learned English from the people
who invented the game and the word.

Fair, fair, fair.

And look, on the football front or soccer
front,

I'll give you this because I stand by it.

I said in the last season and I mean it, I
guess, every word I say, Aman,

you are the Beckham of banking.

Stylish, global, makes the hard stuff look
effortless,

a little Bend It Like Beckham,

and somehow dials in from a different time
zone in better clothes than I do.

Thank you, Zubin.

That remains the single nicest thing
you've ever said to me on this show.

And yes, I have the clip saved on my
phone.

Don't don't don't let it get to your head,
Becks.

So why is this World Cup the right lens
for today, Aman?

Because this summer America is hosting two
World Cups at once.

One is on the pitch, the other is on Wall
Street.

Because at the same moment the planet's
greatest sporting event kicked off,

the planet's greatest capital raising
event kicked off right alongside it.

The biggest companies on earth are all
going public in a few weeks.

Same country, same summer, two tournaments
for the same title.

The best on this planet.

Yeah, and and and both have their group
stages, the minnows, the demolitions,

a couple of shock results, and at least
one penalty shootout that ends in tears.

Yeah, so here's the plan.

In the next 40 minutes or so, we're going
to do not one, not two,

but six things for you.

Number one, the boom and bust history of
the Silicon Valley era,

because the pattern matters. Two,

why companies go public at all and why the
smartest ones spent a decade refusing.

Three, this cycle.

Who's listing when and why now?

Four, the one club that keeps saying no,
Stripe,

and what that tells us about payments
rather than Stripe.

Five, the SPAC disaster and the lessons
baked into this boom.

And then six, the agents, Goldman, not the
agentic ones, Goldman's versus JP Morgan,

dueling crowns for billions of dollars.

I'll put seven in there as well.

Seven.

Yeah, yeah, you forget the best bit,
right?

Where where in the world all this is
happening and why for all the noise out of

China and India,

there's still only one country that gets
to host the finals. That's seven.

7 it is.

Which for football fans is roughly
Germany's goal difference if you caught it the

other day in their World Cup opening
against some poor side already checking the

price of their return flight.

Yeah. Ouch, ouch, ouch.

And and I I I heard there might be a mic
drop here as well.

Yeah,

stick with us because the most surprising
thing this boom is not who's going public.

It's a deeply counterintuitive reasoning.

It might be the best news for jobs in a
decade.

I'll prove it at the end, but first the
rules, Zubin.

Of course, of course, of course.

Right. The word from our friends at Legal
who are not on a boat This podcast is for

information and entertainment purposes
only.

We've said this before.

Our views are our own, not for any
organisations that we're linked with,

and certainly not those for any companies
whose tickers we're about to butcher.

We're not your financial advisers if you
remortgage that house to chase the first

day IPO pop because two jet-lagged men.

Compared a rocket company to a football
tournament, you have wandered offside,

and there's no VAR to save you.

So stay smart and don't buy

Beautifully done. Okay, kick off.

Let me set the scene with a bit of history
because Silicon Valley has run through

five distinct IPO eras and each one tells
you what the market valued at the time.

Think of them as eras of the game where
transfer fee tells you what football was

rewarding that decade.

And Zubin, let's split these because
you've lived half of them on the payment side.

Let's do that.

So era one, Zubin, the hardware years,
roughly 1980 to 1994, Apple, Oracle, Cisco,

in this era, you went public early,

often within three or five years of
founding because you had to.

You were building physical things, chips,
machines, inventory,

and that takes capital.

You can't just conjure from your bedroom.

The IPO wasn't a victory lap, it was a
fuel stop.

Yeah, and the tell is the timing, right?

These companies listed as toddlers
three-year-olds, right?

Because the factory needed funding before
the brand even existed.

It's almost the comparison is the lower
league club selling its best academy kid in

January, not for glory, but to fix the
roof before the winter.

Now, right, let's let's move on to era
two, which I'm gonna take this one,

which is the dot-com bubble, right?

I would say about what, 95 to 2000.

And here's the structural shift.

The metric of success quickly changed from
profits to eyeballs.

We stopped asking, does it make money?

And started asking how many people
clicked.

Yeah, and you know,

this is what a lot of people say is the
precise moment where the discipline left the

building.

Completely. Companies with no business
model went public to delirious applause.

And then the whole thing collapsed on a
heap. Trillions gone.

You know, it, it was paying 40 million for
a striker because he had great hair,

looked like Aman that's some good
highlight reels,

and then he gets to the big stage and
can't trap a bag of cement.

Yeah, I'll take the great hair.

That'll be a hallucination.

Look, Eric, please.

Thank you. I'm a little thrown off by this
niceness for you this morning.

I I must be still sleeping.

Yeah. Well you got the good highlight you
got the good highlight reels.

Well it's it's it's afternoon, it's not a
night recording.

I know, we should do this more often.

You're nicer at whatever, 4pm, your time.

Look, Zubin, Era 3 is about Web 2.0 and
mobile, to 2012.

That opens with Google's famous Dutch
auction IPO in 2004,

Facebook's messy debut in 2012.

Digital advertising, the cloud platforms.

But the quiet revolution here isn't the
products,

it's the companies that started staying
private for longer because a new kind of

investor had arrived.

The venture mega fund.

A nine-figure cheque without blinking.

And and, Aman, that's the hinge of the
whole story, right?

Once private money got that deep,

the clubs realised they didn't have to
sell at all.

I guess the agents got richer, keeping the
players off the market,

which I think really sets up for era four.

And I'm gonna take this one because it's
the payments graveyard I walked through

personally. The ZIRP boom, the 2019 to
2021, zero interest rates, free money,

an explosion of unprofitable software and
consumer tech going public,

and the rise of SPAC, letting hundreds of
companies skip the queue entirely.

Kind of the era of financial doping.

Exactly that, right?

Like 'cause everyone's spending money that
isn't theirs.

The wage bill is insane.

And you just know the regulator's coming
with a point deduction.

So we do a post-mortem later because it's
a horror story with real lessons.

Yeah, and that brings us to era five, the
one we're living in, the AI super cycle,

if you might, 2025 to today, 2026.

And here's the non-obvious inside Zubin.

We have come full circle.

We are back in the 1980s.

Go on.

Okay,

so training a frontier AI model requires
tens of billions of dollars in data centres

and chips. It is brutally, physically and
capital intensive.

So the companies going live right now, the
Cerebras, the CoreWeave, even SpaceX,

they're not asset-light software dreams.

These are asset-heavy, hardware-backed
infrastructure plays,

tied to sovereign money and big tech
partnerships.

The market's appetite for unprofitable
software has vanished.

The appetite for profitable steel and
silicon is bottomless.

So the wheel has turned a full circle,
right?

Show me the machines in the 80s, show me
the eyeballs in the 90s, show me the users,

show me the free money, and now we're back
to show me the machines.

Same demand, 40 years apart.

Okay. And the data centres are the new
factories, hyperscalers, capital expenditure,

the spending by Amazon, Microsoft,
Alphabet, Meta,

Oracle is heading towards $650 to about
$700 billion in 2026 alone.

That's up roughly 60% on the year before
that.

To put it in human terms,

the one year of spending is bigger than
the entire GDP of Belgium or Argentina.

Or Norway, on warehouses full of chips.

I mean that's not CapEx, that's a national
budget with better air conditioning.

Yeah, exactly. Well said.

And if you want to see what kind of
post-IPO firepower looks like in action,

look at what SpaceX literally did after
hitting the Nasdaq.

They didn't even let the ink dry,
proverbially,

on the opening bell before triggering a
$60 billion all-stock buyout of Cursor.

The AI coding platform.

Talk about statement signing, right?

Real Madrid splashing the cash on
Galáctico the morning after winning the Champions

League.

Look, it's exactly that, and they are
taking Cursor's software layer,

locking in the MIT wunderkinds who built
it,

and plugging it straight into xAI's
Colossus supercomputer.

SpaceX isn't just a rocket or a satellite
company.

They are building and buying the actual
tools that will write the code for the next

decade.

And, Aman,

the timing is brutal because it
essentially means that Cursor stops relying on

OpenAI or Anthropic models and just moves
into Elon's ecosystem.

It's almost like you're buying your
rival's star striker just to make sure that he

stops scoring against you.

Exactly. Just as OpenAI and Anthropic will
come to IPO themselves.

So, a $60 billion flex, if you'd like,

just to kick off their life as a public
company. Okay.

That's right. That's right. Love it.

This brings us to the real question, the
one underneath this whole episode,

why does a company go public after all,
Zubin?

And why did the best ones spend a decade
refusing to?

Let me let me take the classic reasonings.

Because they used to be obvious, right?

One, capital, you sell shares, you raise
money to grow. Two, liquidity.

Your early investors, your employees
finally get to turn paper into, I don't know,

a house deposit.

Three, currency.

Public shares are a currency you can use
to buy other companies or do other

investments. And four, which is I would
say the soft stuff, prestige, credibility.

The bell ringing photo.

Sarah Friar, the CFO of OpenAI,

called it the credentialising moment of
being public, right?

Standing in front of your bell and ringing
that.

Suddenly the regulator is checking your
homework and the world takes you seriously.

Yeah, all true. But here's the thing
people forgot, and for most of history,

going public wasn't really a choice.

There was a clock, a biological clock
written into American securities law.

And this deserves a proper explainer.

So the first time, we're doing it
together.

Welcome to Prof A and Prof Z's Corner.

The strategist and the technologist and
one whiteboard.

This could go badly.

Alright, give it a shot.

The clock is a rule called Section 12(g)
of the 1934 Act.

And the old version was simple and
ruthless.

If a private company crossed 500
shareholders of record and $10 million in assets,

the law forced it to register and
effectively go public.

Whether it wanted to or not.

That one rule is why both Google and
Facebook listed when they did.

They hit the ceiling and the referee blew
the whistle.

Time's up, lads. Out you come.

And I'll take the chalk from here because
here's the mechanisms that changed it.

This is the Prof Z half.

2012, the JOBS Act.

Two moves. Move one, they lifted that
ceiling from 500 holders to 2000 and move two.

And this is the subtle one that
essentially rewrote Silicon Valley.

They said any shares held by employees
under a compensation plan simply doesn't

count towards that limit at all.

And that second move is the most
underappreciated cause of the entire modern era.

Decode it for everyone,

because it sounds like plumbing and it's
actually the whole game.

I mean it it is the whole game, right?

Like once employees equity stops counting,

you can basically hand stock to tens of
thousands of staff,

raise billions in private rounds,

and never trip the wire that forced a
listing in the first place.

They didn't just move the goalposts,

they essentially switched the clock off
that used to end the game.

Yeah, and so the academy graduate, Stripe,
Databricks, SpaceX,

for two decades can stay at his boyhood
club forever.

Fully paid, never sold.

That, in one masterclass, is why trillion
dollar private companies exist.

They aren't dodging the public markets out
of fear.

The law simply stopped frog marching them
out of the door.

I I say we should have a jingle for that
prof A and Z corner and we should start

charging for this.

Yeah, there's an idea.

We barely charge for this whole podcast.

All right, all right.

But but staying at that boyhood club
forever has a hidden cost that it lands on the

players, which in this case are the
employees.

Yeah, it does. And this is the part that
everybody should bother about.

And if you stay private for 10 or 15
years,

you can't hand out normal stock the old
way because your staff would owe enormous

amounts of tax on shares they can't sell.

Everybody uses what they call double
trigger RSUs.

They only vest on two conditions,

time served and a liquidity event like an
IPO or a sale.

Which sounds clever until the IPO actually
happens.

Yeah, that's true.

And then it's brutal.

The moment you list, years of stock vest
all at once, a colossal tax bill lands.

Ordinary income, the worst kind.

And you're usually locked up for 180 days,
you cannot sell a single share to pay it.

If the price falls during that lockup,
people can be genuinely ruined,

owing tax on a paper fortune that's
evaporating right in front of them.

Yeah. You know,

it's the the loyalty one club player who
finally gets his testimonial and the tax

man takes the shirt off his back at the
ceremony.

The reward and the punishment arrives in
the same envelope.

So that's the trade off, right?

So stay private, keep control,

dodge the quarterly circus and trap your
people in an illiquid cage.

Go public, free everybody, but submit to
the markets mood swings every 90 days.

For 20 years, the smart money chose the
cage.

The question is, why are they all suddenly
sprinting for the exit at the same time?

Because the window's open, Aman, right?

And after a three year freeze, an open
window is I just best word is intoxicating.

Okay,

so let me lay out the squad because this
is genuinely the most concentrated run of

value the public markets has ever seen.

Estimates put north of $2 trillion of
company value queuing up for a liquidity

event. Let's just walk the fixtures.

It thawed slowly, March 2025, CoreWeave
lists,

the GPU cloud company and they posted
revenue growth of 420% year on year.

July 2025, Figma, the design company,

prices at $33 and closes its first day at
over $115.

A 250% pop. Remember that number.

It matters later.

September 2025, Klarna finally lists, the
buy-now-pay-later business,

at around $15 billion.

Worth noting that that's a third of its
2021 private peak of 45 billion.

The freeze had a price.

Yeah,

and and this is like the striker who was
worth what eighty million dollars in twenty

twenty one, sold for fifteen in twenty
twenty five, same player, different market.

Yeah, and then 2026 opens the floodgates,
know, May Cerebras, the AI chip company,

prices at $180, oversubscribed roughly 20
times and pops to over 200.

And critically, it was profitable, real
net income.

The market rewarded it.

And then comes the extraordinary fortnight
in June,

where the three biggest names on earth
file within days of each other.

June the 1st, Anthropic, the maker of
Claude, files confidentially.

Days earlier, it had just raised $65
billion at a valuation of $965 billion,

which for the first time pushed it past
its old rival.

June the 8th, that old rival, OpenAI,
files too, last valued around 850 billion.

These are huge numbers.

And the bankers whispering about a
trillion.

And June the 11th and 12th,

SpaceX prices and lists $75 billion raised
the largest IPO ever closing day one

above two trillion as we talked about.

And and Aman, the timing of all of this is
not an accident, right?

Like the bankers, as we've sort of
researched this,

had apparently told both Anthropic and
OpenAI and potentially SpaceX the same

things.

Whoever lists first sets the template of
how the whole market values an AI company.

They get first pull on the ocean of
capital looking for a way in.

Yeah, it's the two best young players in
the world,

both refusing to announce until the other
one does,

because whoever signs first sets the wage
benchmark for the other.

Yeah, and the personalities could not be
more different, right?

OpenAI is the household name,

the one who arrived first and put the
whole sport on the front page.

Anthropic, who wasn't supposed to be the
best yet, the Lamine Yamal of the story,

a teenager by company standards,

founded only in twenty twenty one and has
just leapfrogged the established star to

the top of the table.

The seventeen year old outshone the icon.

And like the real Lamine Yamal, the
audacity is the point.

Anthropic beat everybody to the filing.

Very deliberate, very safety first, and
quietly went top on valuation.

Meanwhile, OpenAI, the icon, the one who
made the sport global in the first place,

did something so perfectly in character
that you have to kind of admire it.

Yeah, and and and they put this statement
out there, and I have to read this.

I'm gonna read this out because it is so
them.

And they said, and I'm paraphrasing
closely here, we submitted a confidential S1,

which expected it to leak, so we just
announced it.

Which is the most OpenAI sentence ever
written.

'We've decided to be private about this,
publicly, immediately.' And behind those...

Yeah. Yeah.

Three, a whole substitute bench, Canva,
the design platform I love,

expected later this year to around $42
billion.

Revolut mooted at $150 to $200 billion.

So that's a 2028 story.

Kraken, the crypto exchange, filed and
then paused because the markets got choppy.

And then the holdouts who are saying no.

Databricks at 134 billion, and the big
one, Stripe, at 159 billion.

And and Aman,

I would say Stripe deserves its own
segment because the reason it keeps saying no is

the most interesting question in fintech.

Yeah, I covered a little bit of this
earlier in a quick one.

But first, let me anchor SpaceX because
the debut itself was full of lessons.

They priced at $135, opened at 150, closed
at 161, up 19%,

peaked intraday at over 176.

Yeah, and yet you opened the show saying
people were disappointed. Why is that?

Because the betting markets, which we've
covered in a previous episode,

had priced in a bigger pop.

A 19% rise sounds wonderful, but the
chatter beforehand was more.

And here's the counterintuitive bit that
we'll unpack with the bankers later.

A smaller pop is arguably a sign that the
deal was priced well.

The disappointment may actually be the
most honest IPO in years.

Yeah, and and and the human number, the
one that actually matters, by one estimate,

the listing created more than I think four
thousand four hundred employee

millionaires and nearly four hundred
people worth over a hundred million each.

Now, let's go back to Brownsville, Texas,
one of the poorest cities in America,

where thousands work at the Starbase site.

Launch engineers who took stock instead of
salary woke up genuinely wealthy.

Yeah, and hold that thought, because 4,400
new millionaires, parking that number,

is the key to my entire mic drop.

All right, all right.

So Stripe, $159 billion, coming back to
your point, in 2025,

it processed $1.9 trillion with a T in
payments.

That is roughly 1.5% of the entire
planet's economic output flowing through one

company's pipes.

It's profitable.

It's growing at 30 plus percent a year,
and it will not go public.

Yeah. And and the founders, the Collison
brothers, we've talked a lot about them,

have almost been rude about it.

John Collison, the president, was asked
about an IPO and said,

and this is close to verbatim: for us,

an IPO would be 'a solution in search of a
problem.'

Which is a beautifully arrogant thing to
say and almost completely correct.

Think about why companies list.

Capital? Stripe is profitable and can
raise capital privately whenever it likes.

Liquidity for staff, they run periodic
tender offers that, you know,

February tender is what set the 159
billion mark.

So employees can sell without an IPO.

Currency for acquisitions, they've got it.

Prestige, that's right.

That's just

They have ticked every box, Zubin, an IPO
is supposed to tick,

without ringing the bell.

That's right, that's right.

And the deeper reason is one nobody says
out loud, right?

Like the Collison brothers aren't trying
to build a great payments company.

They're trying to build the financial
infrastructure of the internet.

A genuinely generational transformational
business.

And you can't build, I don't know, a 50,

100-year-old company while answering to
traders who want better numbers in 90 days.

Yeah, it's my favourite Alex Ferguson's
argument, Zubin.

You don't build a dynasty by selling your
best academy graduates every summer to

please the board.

You hold the squad together.

You absorb the bad seasons.

You think in decades.

Stripe is choosing the dynasty over the
transfer fee.

And and, Aman, here's the thing, right?

To understand why Stripe is so allergic to
the public markets,

you have to look at what's happened to
payment companies that do go public or I

guess get taken private,

right? Because payments has split into, I
would argue, and we did this research,

two completely different camps.

Sounds like Prof Z is back in the
building.

Take us through the two doors.

Right, all right.

So picture two doors out of the payment
industry, right?

Door one, the single platform compounders.

These are companies built from the ground
up on one clean piece of technology.

Think Stripe, think Adyen, think
checkout.com, one platform, global, high margin,

growing twenty, thirty percent a year.

The markets love these stories when it
loves them.

Yeah, and and door two, let's kind of flip
to the other side.

And door two?

We kind of loosely call them the roll-ups.

These are the older players,

the legacy processors that grew by bolting
dozens of acquisitions together.

Their technology is essentially a
patchwork quilt.

They didn't grow much.

So instead of chasing growth, they just
get taken private by private equity,

which strips them of the costs, merges
them with rivals, runs them on cash,

not for glory, but for yield.

You know, give us, Zubin,

give us some evidence for Door 2 because I
think the deals this year are just

extraordinary.

Yeah, yeah, three of them. Aman,

I think you covered this separately on one
of your minisodes you did while I was on

my boat. Nuvei, right?

Once a public darling taken private by
Advent International for about,

I would say what, six point three billion.

And at the moment it was off the market,
away from this quarterly scrutiny,

it went shopping. And you know,

I think last week announced it's buying
Payoneer for two point seven five billion.

Combine them and you're roughly four point

Yeah.

Something billion in revenue and about 500
billion plus in payment volume across

what almost 200 countries.

That's not a growth story.

That's a cost story.

And two.

Yeah, two, two is, I don't know, one of my
favourites. Worldpay.

FIS bought them and I would say before FIS
was a darling in payments, right?

Like FIS bought them in twenty nineteen
for I want to say about forty-three billion.

It got written down so so so badly.

FIS sold a majority stake to PE firm GTCR,

and now Global Payments is hoovering up
the whole thing for about what,

24 billion in a giant three-way
consolidation.

Forty-three billion, with a B, asset
changed hands at twenty four billion.

The air comes out of the balloon, right?

Like this is this is crazy. Yeah.

Amazing. And what about three?

Yeah, so talk about three, the cautionary
tale.

Yeah, yeah, I mean the three I would say
Worldline, right?

Like the French processor, and and this is
the ghost that haunts Stripe's boardroom.

Worldline became and stayed public,
watched its organic growth collapse from what,

about eleven percent to about six to about
a half percent,

actually shrinking by over four percent in
the first half of twenty twenty-five.

We saw that.

And on top of that, regulators and
journalists, some street journalists,

in several countries started raising
questions about the quality of some of their

merchant revenue.

The share tanked and really destroyed much
of their equity and value that they had

in the market.

It is the patron saint of this is what the
public markets do to payment companies

when the growth stops.

And here's my follow-up, Prof Z, the one
that ties it to Stripe.

Adyen is the great example of door one, a
clean single platform,

but being public hasn't exactly been a
picnic for them either, has it?

Yeah, you're you're absolutely right.

This is the lesson Stripe learned for
free.

Adyen a wonderful company.

But back in August 2023,

it reported one set of results that shows
its growth in North America was kind of

slowing, partially because I guess
companies like Stripe was undercutting on price,

and the stock fell by 39%.

I felt it in my portfolio. 39

Yeah yeah.

% in a day. On one quarter's data.

One quarter's data.

And and that's the whole argument in one
number.

Adyen didn't get worse as a company on
that day.

The product didn't break, one data point
disappointed the away end,

and the third of the value evaporated
before lunch.

Now imagine if you're John Collison
watching this,

why would you ever sign up for that
volatility, that short-termism,

when you can stay private, run your tender
offers,

and build your next 20 years in peace?

Even the great Processor, American
processor Fiserv,

who I actually was gonna shine my little
pen for, Fiserv, out here,

lost 40% in a day last year in a slowing
growth.

Even with its new boss.

But I I'm I'm bullish about that.

Take that feedback.

You know, Da Vinci said that genius is
making the complicated simple. Prof Z,

you just explained the entire structure of
an industry through two doors in a single

bad afternoon in Amsterdam. Masterclass.

Yeah, yeah. My trophy cabinet continues to
grow on mine.

So the Stripe lesson is this, going public
isn't a graduation.

For a payments company,

it can be the relegation battle you fight
every quarter in public against the

opponent who only needs you to stumble
once.

But before we get to the agents getting
rich,

we have to talk about the last time the
window flew open and everyone rushed through

a side door. The SPAC.

Yeah, great call out.

The blank cheque company.

2020 to 2021. And for everyone who missed
it, here's the mechanic.

Instead of going and doing a proper IPO
with all the scrutiny,

you merged your company into an already
public shell, a SPAC,

a special purpose acquisition company,

a back door to the public markets that
skipped the queue and most of the questions.

Yeah, and here's the loophole that made it
work and potentially made it dangerous,

right? In a normal IPO, you can't make
wild promises about the future.

You're legally on the hook if you do.

But the SPAC route relied on an old legal
safe harbour that let companies publish

fantastical forward-looking projections,

'we'll have a billion in revenue by 2025,'
with very little liability if it turned

out to be fiction.

Yeah, and some of those were paired with
beautiful podcasts.

Look, and it was very often fiction.

No, clearly not us.

Ones that were bigger.

And it was very, very often fiction.

Because pre-revenue electric vehicle
companies, flying taxi dreams,

space ventures with a slide deck and a
prayer.

Retail investors, ordinary people anchored
to those hockey stick projections

Ha ha ha. Hopefully none of us.

Hopefully none of us.

That got destroyed when the reality showed
up.

A staggering amount of household wealth
was incinerated.

Yeah, and and I'm gonna bring this back to
sort of the football analogy, right?

It was the January transfer window run by
this dodgy agent.

Trust me, the seventeen year old is the
new Messi.

You pay the fee of the promise,

turns out to be the Sunday League player
with a good showreel.

And then January, 2025, the referee
finally upgraded to VAR.

The regulator brought in sweeping new
rules.

They killed safe harbour for these
projections in SPAC deals.

And they made the target company and its
directors co-responsible,

strictly liable for anything misleading
they put in front of investors.

No more hiding behind the shell.

Yeah, which, which in practice killed the
SPAC as a get-rich-quick machine.

It's effectively dead as an arbitrage,

and that matters because the lessons of
that disaster were baked into this boom.

Yeah, this is the genuinely encouraging
part of 2026 and it gets lost in all of the

trillion dollar noise.

Look at how disciplined the cycle is
compared to the SPAC madness.

One, profitability is back in fashion.

Cerebras went public with real net income,
and the market rewarded it. Two,

confidential filings where the company
refines its disclosures with the regulator

before anything goes public,

which is exactly the good hygiene OpenAI's
CFO talked about.

And three, look at SpaceX pricing.

They set a fixed price of $135 and barely
let it pop.

That's a company saying,

we're not here to leave billions on the
table for a one-day headline.

Yeah, it's the financial doping era is
over, right?

We're in the financial fair play era now.

Less glamorous, sorry, less glamorous,
more healthy.

Yeah, and it's a nice segue to our next
section,

which brings us at last to the people who
always, always get paid. The agents,

because no transfer happens without them
and they get their cut whether the player

thrives or flops.

Yes, the investment banks.

And in twenty twenty six, two of them are
duelling for the crown of IPO king.

I guess the way Messi and Ronaldo spent
fifteen years duelling for the Ballon d'Or,

Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

The two GOATs and the endless arguments
about which is actually the best.

They win it completely different ways,

which is exactly the Messi-Ronaldo kind of
thing.

JP Morgan is, in my opinion, Ronaldo, the
machine, the physical colossus,

the biggest balance sheet, the broadest
reach,

number one in overall investment banking
fees,

roughly eight and a half billion dollars
on its way to a record year for a bank as a

whole. It extended over three trillion
dollars in credit.

That's with a T.

And capital. In a single year.

Relentless everywhere, scores in every
league.

You cannot outwork it.

So I guess that makes Goldman the Messi,
the artist,

the genius who makes the impossible deals
look like a gentle pass into an empty net.

You know,

when it comes to equity capital markets
taking companies public and to the high-end

sort of M&A advice,

Goldman is the one to call.

Its boss, David Solomon, has been calling
2026 incredibly constructive for deals.

Goldman doesn't chase the volume crown, it
collects the Ballon d'Or.

And here's the tell, the thing that shows
who's lifting the IPO trophy specifically.

Look at who's lead banker on the three
biggest deals this year.

SpaceX, lead is Goldman.

OpenAI, Goldman, and Morgan Stanley.

Anthropic, Goldman again, is in the frame.

D-Sol is the Ballon d'Or.

When the trillion dollar names line up,
they keep passing to Messi, it seems.

Yeah, and and and here's the uncomfortable
bit, Aman, right?

Which is the agent's cut.

Yeah.

And here's where it gets spicy and where
we connect to the SpaceX disappointment.

There is a long running argument led most
loudly by venture capitalist Bill Gurley

that traditional IPO is rigged against the
company.

Here's the claim.

The banks run a process where they hand
pick which big clients get shares and they

deliberately price the deal too low to
guarantee a big first day pop,

which makes their favourite clients
instantly profitable.

It sounds like a nice problem to have, a
stock that jumps,

but think about who pays for that jump.

Yeah, go back to Figma.

Priced at 33, closed its first day at over
115, a 250% pop.

The headlines loved it,

but Gurley pointed out that the pop meant
the company and its early backers

effectively sold their shares far too
cheaply.

By his estimate, Figma left $2.5 billion
on the table.

Money that went straight to the pockets of
the bank's favourite customers,

not the company that built the thing.

Yeah, it's it's the agents who undersell
your striker to a club he happens to also

represent. Everyone applauds the transfer.

Quietly, you're getting robbed.

And this is why SpaceX's fixed-price,
barely-a-pop debut is so interesting.

It looks like a direct response to exactly
this critique.

Elon Musk's company essentially said,
we'll set the price ourselves, thanks.

And we'll not be donating two billion to
your hedge fund clients for the pleasure of

a headline.

The disappointing 19% pop is in this
reading, the company keeping its own money.

Yeah,

this is like the sellers club finally
reading the agent's contract before signing

it.

And let's be fair to the agents because
there's another side.

The banks could argue that the pop isn't
theft, it's marketing.

A stock that rises on day one builds
momentum,

attracts long-term holders and makes the
next raise easier.

A controlled pop is the cost of a healthy
aftermarket.

Both things can be true.

The company leaves money on the table and
it buys something real in return.

Reasonable people disagree on the price of
that.

Now let's widen the lens because this is
not just an American story and A to Z is

not just a Silicon Valley podcast.

The wealth creation flywheel exists
everywhere,

but there's a reason the World Cup final
isn't in Lagos or Lyon.

Yeah, let's start with China because I
think China has run this playbook before.

Alibaba 2014 listing in New York was at
the time the biggest IPO in the world.

It minted a whole generation of wealth,

and that wealth went on to seed the next
wave.

ByteDance, the Hangzhou tech cluster, the
firms behind today's Chinese AI labs,

and the flywheel works in Mandarin too.

But China also taught the world the other
lesson, the risk.

When Ant Group, Jack Ma's payment giant,

lined up what would have been the largest
IPO in history in 2020,

Beijing halted it at the last moment.

A reminder that in some markets, the state
is the ultimate referee,

and it can wave the game off before
kickoff. And today,

Hong Kong has quietly become one of the
world's busiest listing hubs again,

pulling in sovereign money from Middle
East to Europe.

Yeah, and and then there's our home,
India, yeah,

which is the story closest to us and
genuinely thrilling.

You know, there's this phenomen a
phenomenon called ghar wapsi,

which is the homecoming. For years,

Indian founders incorporated in Singapore
or Delaware to tap Western capital.

Now they're reversing it,

flipping their companies back home to list
in India because Indian retail investors

would pay a premium for homegrown growth
stories.

And they're paying real money to come
home.

PhonePe reportedly paid around a billion
dollars in taxes to move its domicile back

to India. Later, literally this week, the
same week as SpaceX, Razorpay,

the Bengaluru payment company, filed
confidentially to go public in India.

Yeah,

Razorpay is a great one to land on because
it's the perfect mirror image of the

American deals, right?

It's completely, it's it completed its own
homecoming last year, it's desh wapsi,

and paid about what, $150 million in tax
for the privilege.

Revenue up, I don't know, 65%.

It processes about $180 billion a year,
founded by two IIT Roorkee, right?

Engineers, Harshil Mathur and Shashank
Kumar.

And here's the number that says everything
about the global game.

Razorpay is targeting a valuation of
around five to $6 billion, which is,

by the way, a markdown from its 2021
private peak of $7.5 billion.

So the Indian champion is going public
proudly at home for $6 billion at a discount.

Yeah, six billion in India, definitely a
landmark.

Six billion in in America is really the
rounding error for the SpaceX lunch.

And that's the honest, slightly
uncomfortable truth, Zubin.

And it's exactly like the tournament
playing out on the pitch right now.

48 nations qualify.

Everyone plays the group stage at home in
their own stadiums to their own crowds.

Look at where the business end is held.

The United States is hosting 78 of the 104
matches and every single knockout game

from the quarterfinals onwards.

The final is in New Jersey.

London is losing its best players to New
York.

Wise, Flutter, Arm, all decamping for
deeper pools and richer valuations.

Everyone qualifies, everyone plays, but
the trillion dollar final is always,

always played in America.

Well, well said, well said. All right.

You told us, at kick-off, there was a
surprise, the counterintuitive thing,

the best news for jobs in decades.

I've been waiting this whole episode, all
of somewhat close to 40 minutes.

Bring it home, Aman.

I can feel this mic drop.

Okay, Zubin, here's where I've landed.

There are two ways to read this whole
moment, two scenarios.

And I want to give you both honestly,

because anyone who tells you they know
which one is right is selling you something.

So scenario one, the balloon.

In this version, June 2026 is the top.

The smartest money is already quietly
stepping back.

There are reports of legendary investors
trimming their chip holdings,

the people who built fortunes by leaving
the party 10 minutes before the lights come

on. And underneath the euphoria sits
something genuinely uneasy.

The circular financing.

We've talked about that before.

Nvidia invests 100 billion in OpenAI.

OpenAI spends it buying Nvidia chips.

Microsoft owns a chunk of OpenAI and sells
it on the cloud.

Everyone is buying it.

Everyone is funding everyone and the money
goes round and round in a circle.

Reminiscent of the circular financing of
the internet bubble.

Even Sam Altman has said out loud that
someone is going to lose a phenomenal amount

of money. In this scenario, SpaceX's
disappointing debut wasn't a quirk.

It was the cold draught through the window
that is about to slam shut.

And I don't dismiss that.

It's real. It might be right.

But I lean towards scenario two.

And here it is. This is not the end.

It's not even the beginning of the end.

To borrow from Churchill, perhaps the end
of the beginning.

Think about what every big,

traditional company has done with AI for
the last three years.

They've used it for one thing, cost
takeout.

How many people can we let go?

That's the boring defensive use of a once
in a century technology.

It's using a rocket engine to mow a lawn.

But that's not where the value is.

The real generational value, Zubin, is in
a new breed of company.

AI-first companies that don't use
technology to shrink,

but to build things that were never
possible before.

To open revenue lines that didn't exist.

And, yes, here's the genuine
counterintuitive part: to create jobs.

Jeff Bezos, I don't know if you caught it,

just talked about this as we went to
record.

Whole categories of work that didn't exist
today.

Because we've seen this before.

When Amazon was a risky little IPO, the
worry was that it would destroy retail jobs.

Amazon now employs around one and a half
million people.

When Uber's listed, the fear was death of
work.

Now Uber puts money in the pockets of
millions of drivers around this planet.

The great technology platforms did not
just automate,

they created entirely new worlds of work
that the spreadsheet couldn't have

predicted.

Yeah, and and Aman, what's the engine for
that next wave of those companies?

It's sitting in the audience at the Nasdaq
this morning.

Remember that number I asked you to park?

4,400? You said it.

The SpaceX listing created over 4,400 new
millionaires in a single day.

This is not new.

Microsoft's IPO in 1986 created an
estimated 12,000 millionaires, secretaries,

marketing assistants, people who took that
stock instead of a raise.

Google's IPO in 2004 made around 1,000,
including the company's masseuse.

Did you make money on that one?

No, no, wasn't part of Google back then.

There wasn't a masseuse back then.

Yeah, I thought so.

How things have changed.

Every single one of these waves of wealth
did the same thing.

It didn't sit in a vault.

It went into the ground and grew the next
forest.

The PayPal Mafia, we've talked about them,

with the money from one acquisition went
on to fund Tesla, SpaceX, LinkedIn,

YouTube, Palantir.

I mean, the list goes on.

Right now in 2026, the AI Mafia, Zubin, is
being born.

Engineers leaving the big labs.

The capital that this boom creates is not
the end of the story.

It's the seed money for a decade we
haven't even imagined yet. So,

when I look at the rocket lifting in
Florida and the bell ringing in New York on the

same morning the World Cup kicked off,

I don't see a balloon at its limits.

I see a launch. We're not at the final,
Zubin.

We've barely come out of the group stage.

The question was never whether the window
would open, it's open.

The only question is what we build while
the light is good.

I think we're about to find out the most
human thing this very inhuman technology

will do is make a great many people in a
great many places rich enough to go and

build the future.

That's not the end.

That's the end of the beginning.

Damn, make the lawnmower a rocket again.

Aman would have framed that right next to
the Beckham line.

Free kick into the top corner, Aman. Told
you.

And on that note,

I have a boat to catch and a 50th birthday
to ruin with payments analogies.

From Zubin.

Yeah, I have to go back to pretending I've
recovered from mine.

To everyone listening in London, New York,
Singapore, Bengaluru, São Paulo,

and on whatever boat you happen to be on,
the window is open.

Watch who moves, watch who stays, and
watch what they build.

If this one made you think, do the things
that keep the lights on.

Subscribe, share it with somebody,

a friend who keeps asking you why they
should buy SpaceX stocks and leave us a

review. It genuinely helps.

And no Aman,

we're still not telling you or we're not
telling them whether to buy the stock.

This is correct, we are not. Stay curious!

Stay purposeful and stay onside.

Alright, football.

Just for this once,

because you're going to Greece and I can't
be bothered to fight you on a boat.

Football.