The Week: An IPO False Start, an Agent That Goes Shopping, and a War We Keep Paying For

George Hahn connects the dots across the week's biggest stories: why Oura pulled its IPO and what the odds are it ever goes public, how AI agents are clawing back the money we lose to forgotten subscriptions and hidden fees, and why America's war with Iran is costing you money, and Ukraine a chance to win. Plus, Scott discusses what separates a good manager from a bad one. We’d love your feedback as we build this show! Let us know what you think: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:58George Hahn?

  Welcome to the week from PropG Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Han, and it's Friday, October 2. Today, Aura postpones its IPO and what investors should watch for when companies go public. Then, can AI agents save you money by taking on chores you hate? And finally, how America's war with Iran is hurting Ukraine and hitting Americans' wallets?

• 2:33George Hahn?

  Let's get into it.

• 2:35George Hahn?

  To start, Aura, the company behind the health-tracking SmartRing, has postponed its IPO, citing market uncertainty. On PropG Markets, Ed Elson asked IPO expert Jay Ritter what companies are looking for when they go public and what might give investors pause.

• 2:54Speaker 03

  What exactly is a company looking for when they go public?

• 2:58Speaker 04

  They're looking for liquidity and raising capital and possibly a currency for making acquisitions. As a public company, you can do a stock-for-stock deal to acquire another company. Now, here, the company is not burning cash, unlike Anthropic, where they have a huge cash burn rate. The company does have the luxury of not going public because it's not needing the cash.

• 3:34Speaker 04

  I think with a lot of companies, they get lofty expectations about what their value should be. Institutional investors who are looking at it are worried, could this be the next GoPro? Or a company like Peloton? Or a company that never did go public 11 years ago? SoulCycle was also a rapidly growing company that was about to go public and postponed going public. They never have gone public. But all of these can be viewed as kind of one-trick ponies, where they were growing rapidly

• 4:19Speaker 04

  but are going to be hitting a wall in terms of growth, like with GoPro. A lot of people who wanted the GoPro camera bought it already, and they don't wear out immediately, they don't need to be replaced, and the market was not exploding with continued growth. And I think some investors have the concern here that with the Aura Ring, well, they've got a great product, but it's not as if there aren't any competing products for personal health measurement and just how big is the market? How profitable is it going to be?

• 5:03Speaker 04

  It doesn't have the upside of a company like Anthropic.

• 5:07George Hahn?

  But does postponing mean waiting for a better moment? Or missing the window altogether? Jay pointed to the history of companies that have put their IPOs on hold.

• 5:17Speaker 04

  Historically, the majority of companies that have paused their IPOs have never gone public. Some, like SoulCycle, get acquired, sometimes at a good price, sometimes at more of a fire-sale price or conservative valuation. What's difficult for companies is to execute the business model. Stuff happens. A company can be firing on all cylinders, but competition comes along or the demand evaporates, sometimes for things outside of its control.

• 5:59Speaker 04

  And nobody can foresee the future with certainty. But given the track record of companies that have postponed their IPO, where most of the time, they never do go public, that's the most likely outcome here. If they continue to execute, this might be a good decision. They might wind up being able to go public at an even higher valuation a year or two from now. But who knows? It could be like the autumn of 2007, where if you waited a little longer, you might have had to wait for many years.

• 6:40George Hahn?

  Meanwhile, a draft of Anthropic's IPO filing leaked. According to Reuters, the company brought in $4.6 billion in revenue last year, with an operating loss of $8 billion and a net loss of $42 billion. Anthropic is expected to go public in November at a valuation of around $2 trillion, which would make it the most highly-valued IPO of all time. Ed asked Paul Kedrowski, managing partner at SK Ventures, whether that price makes sense.

• 7:18Speaker 05

  It's a ridiculous price. And it's, as friends of mine were saying this morning, some of the largest hedge funds in the world looking at this, and it's like, anyone who thinks that being the buyer at these kinds of prices in a very late-stage IPO of what amounts to a relatively mature company, when you look around the poker table and wonder who the sucker is, it's you. Not because it's a bad business, just because what's happening is this is not a financing event anymore. They're not raising money for anything. What's really going on is people are unloading shares. They're unloading shares on retail investors and on quick-flop institutions who are able to back in and out. So you have to look at it accordingly and realize that this is really what they're saying, is this seems like a good time to get out, and I'm an insider and I want out.

• 7:58George Hahn?

  Anthropic's IPO was supposed to be the biggest AI story of the coming months. Instead, last week belonged to Meta and its new AI agent, Muse, which is built for everyday consumers. This week on the PropG Pod, writer and investor Jack Rains spoke with his friend and fellow VC, J.C. Bar di Stefano. They discussed why some companies are welcoming AI agents and others are resisting them.

• 8:26Speaker 06

  But it is funny seeing who's leaning into agents and who is saying, no, we don't want this. There's a real bifurcation in the market of like...

• 8:34Speaker 07

  Just consumer interfaces right now.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, my like my observation so far is is it it totally depends on the business model, right? And like, I think it was it was last week when Muse was just like banging out like announcements about new integrations, right? They had they had Shopify, they had PayPal, they had Expedia, and they had Instacart all all in the span of a couple of days when Amazon also came out and said, no, you can't do this. But like, if you think about those business models, right, like Expedia and Instacart in particular, like, they don't want to be disintermediated by agents that can go do all of these things without them being there, right? So I mean, their incentive surely is like, if we don't do this, then the agents can either bypass us or go to booking.com or Kayak or DoorDash instead.

• 9:19Speaker 06

  And so we have to do this for fear of existential risk on our business model. And then PayPal and Shopify, they don't care. Like, they make money as long as money flows. So if an agent does it, or a human does it, it doesn't matter. Like, the pie is just going to grow for them. And so they just need to make sure that they're in the transaction flow and the payment flow, regardless of who who the end user ends up being.

• 9:39George Hahn?

  For consumers, the promise is simple. Let an agent deal with the tedious tasks that cost us time and money. Think cancelling subscriptions, chasing refunds, or sitting on hold with customer service. For companies that profit when we give up, that could be a problem. Here's Jack on what's known as the annoyance economy.

• 10:01Speaker 07

  In a period of about two weeks, we've gone from AI agents are used for software engineering and AI is going to kill everybody to, hey, my mom can find coupons and discount codes in her inbox by asking the little sloth to like, save her some money. I think the most interesting second order and just longer term effect of Muse and these AI agents in general is how they impact the annoyance economy. This is everything from being stuck on hold, to spending time clicking through endless series of pages to cancel subscription, to screening spam calls, or trying to change a flight. Agents are really going to do all this stuff, and they don't care about getting bored. So it's a really interesting thought experiment to think about how agents will begin to upend this annoyance economy, both

• 10:42Speaker 07

  saving people money by reducing by reducing the cost of going after the money we leave on the table to zero, and potentially eating away at the profit margins of companies that have largely monetized like friction and inertia. A few data points on how Muse has been helping people save money so far. Muse helped the user find about $730 in Amazon store credit from more than three years ago that was given to the state to hold. It also found a $272 refund from when this user switched from Sprint to another phone carrier and unused gift cards lying in his Yahoo mailbox. Another search by the same user identified $800 in closed bank account balances, health insurance claims, and a potential payout

• 11:23Speaker 07

  from a class action settlement. If you have your Muse or Grok bot or personal Claude code thing you built, constantly looking at different interest rates in different bank accounts, where you can then just move from one account to another with Plaid, you might as well do that, which means that that could massively impact net interest margin for some of these companies.

• 11:43George Hahn?

  The question is, how much of that promise becomes an everyday reality? Can an agent reliably recover your money? And can you trust it with the access it needs to do so? We'll be right back.

• 12:01Speaker 00

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• 12:42Speaker 00

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• 12:56Speaker 00

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• 14:02Speaker 00

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• 15:11George Hahn?

  Welcome back. America's war with Iran has consequences far beyond the Middle East. On the Prop G Pod, historian Timothy Snyder explained how America's decisions, from cutting aid to Ukraine to spending munitions in Iran, have affected Ukraine's fight against Russia.

• 15:28Speaker 06

  But on balance, cutting off the financial aid, cutting off the military aid, and putting our diplomacy in the hands of a couple of people who are not professional diplomats, and who are not really, I think, acting the interests of any of the states involved, except possibly Russia. And then finally, as you say, starting this war with Iran, all of those things have drastically hurt the Ukrainians over the last year and a half. And the Iran war, I mean, in the Iran war, in the first 10 or 12 days, we spent munitions, I'm sad to say it, but utterly pointlessly, which would have won the war for Ukraine. And that's not something that Americans see or would like to see, but it's something that Ukrainians definitely see. We just like, we shoot, you know, munitions all over the

• 16:11Speaker 06

  place, essentially to kind of make ourselves feel good with no measurable strategic outcome, at least not anyone, which is positive. Whereas if we just allowed the Ukrainians to use that stuff, they probably could have won the war. So Iran has been tremendously negative for Ukraine. And meanwhile, this is also worth noting, you've got like coal miners from the Donbass in Ukraine, who've learned to be drone operators, who are out there in the world, helping to defend Americans and others in the Near East from Iranian drones, which is something that no one thinks about or talks about, but which is part of this kind of mismatch of how we think about things, that we, the Americans, are this big power, we win wars, we help other people. We've been beaten by a middle power, Iran.

• 16:55Speaker 06

  And meanwhile, the Ukrainians are holding back a much bigger power, Russia. And you got to think those things through to their logical conclusion to see just how wrong our approach has been in the last year and a half.

• 17:06George Hahn?

  And in Iran, economic pressure hasn't brought a clear end to the conflict. On Raging Moderates, Jessica Tarlov questioned Trump's promise of a deal after the midterm elections, and whether Iranians have any reason to trust his assurances.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  But there is no reason for them to think that they're going to be getting any US support. And they see the writing on the wall, the fact that, you know, there is a big election coming up that is pivotal for them, and Trump has been teasing, you know, a deal is coming after the election. It's like the $5,000, right? Like, if you stick with me, like, things are going to get good. I'm going to put money in your pocket, and I'm going to have the most beautiful deal with Iran. And, you know, no one is buying any of this.

• 17:47George Hahn?

  At home, Americans are paying for this war at the pump and in the bond market. Brent crude is back above $100 a barrel, and the 10 year Treasury yield is at a two decade high. On Tuesday's Raging Moderates episode, Scott laid out how a prolonged war can become a recurring bill for American households.

• 18:09Speaker 00

  Terms of the oil math, Brent went from $72 to over $100, up 40% since the war started. Rule of thumb, it's about 2 and 1/2 cents a gallon for every dollar. So gas is up sort of, call it 60 cents to a buck, depending on where you are. And that's kind of the Iran war tax that every American pays every week, and they get reminded of it. Oil shocks preceded the recessions of '73, '79, '90, and 2008. So oil spikes aren't a leading indicator of a recession, they're a leading cause of it. The 10 year being at a two decade high is a pretty big deal. It's the market saying it doesn't trust the plan. Higher yields means 7% mortgages, price of your car loans, more interest on the debt. At the end of the day, the bond market is the adult in the room that just isn't impressed

• 18:53Speaker 00

  with Trump. And it's kind of, it's kind of the only voter that Trump can't primary, if you will. Wars that don't end become taxes that don't end. And it's clear they are playing defense right now.

• 19:06George Hahn?

  Finally, a little closer to home. On Office Hours this week, Scott answered a question about what makes a good manager, and shared a lesson he learned the hard way.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  What is the key to being a good manager? One, you have to demonstrate excellence. And that is not only do you have to be really good at something, you have to be willing to do anything you would ask of anybody else. And that is demonstrate excellence. I call it player coach pulling up a chair, showing them how to do something. You have to demonstrate Straight excellence, people want to follow success. Two, accountability, a willingness to fire people. Everyone talks about strategic hiring and all this bullshit, hippie dippy Brooklyn sandal bullshit of, oh, they're in the wrong role. No, fire them. In a small company, if they're not working, get rid of them. And that may sound Darwinian and horrible. Fine. You're not doing anyone any favors by letting someone's career go sideways. Be generous once you decide to shed them. But everybody in the organization doesn't need to like each other, but they need to

• 20:01Speaker 00

  look left and look right and say, okay, I get why they're here. They're good at what they do. And when you don't hold the underperformers accountable, the upper performers, the top performers stop working as hard and go somewhere else where they can be rewarded for their outperformance. And then finally, and this is where I fucked up, empathy. What is it you want out of this job? I know you're, like me, concerned with your own success and your own economic security. Here is how you're going to get there. Here's how the company is doing. Here's maybe your share of the profits or your equity. But giving, always giving them a sense that they're appreciated and that they're part of something. Creating environment also, something I learned, where young people can be social and enjoy themselves.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  It's a little bit harder with remote work, but I think we're a social animal and giving kids an excuse to gather or do fun or social stuff together. All of our team is going to the US Open. I think that's a, that investment has a huge ROI because I think especially if you have a younger pop, I just want to go home. I don't, but what you realize is young people want to meet, they want to hang out, they want to make friends. I think that's also kind of a hack if you have a young organization. I would describe myself as a B minus manager. I think I got to B plus, but I was smart enough to know what I didn't know. And I've always hired and held on to people who were, who were good managers.

• 21:17George Hahn?

  That's the week. I'm George Hahn. We'll see you next Friday.

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