Can Hot Consumer Companies Like Oura and Whoop Make Good IPOs?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Telis Demos** (0:32)
Hi, Miriam. Hi, Telis. So on today's show, we're going to be talking about one hit wonders. Actually, that topic got me thinking. This weekend at a movie theater near us, they were showing the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which is an all-time favorite of mine. But interestingly, and I did not go to see this, so don't ask me if it was good. They had a little mini movie. They had made a little documentary about the band behind that song in the movie Oh Yeah. Remember that? It was ubiquitous at the time.
It's a band called Yellow. Apparently, they had a whole big following. It was a big phenomenon.

**Miriam Gottfried** (1:09)
I was a little too young for the phenomenon.

**Telis Demos** (1:11)
Well, that's the only song everyone knows of. So that's what got me thinking about One Hit Wonders. But we're not talking about that kind of One Hit Wonder on today's show. No, we're talking about a different kind of One Hit Wonder, which are One Hit IPO Wonders.
You might think of a company like Bird.

**Miriam Gottfried** (1:26)
The scooter company.

**Telis Demos** (1:27)
The electric scooters. You might think about Peloton, maker of the fancy exercise bike.

**Miriam Gottfried** (1:33)
That everyone bought during COVID.

**Telis Demos** (1:34)
Everyone bought during COVID and then never again, speaking colloquially.
Fitbit. We can all name companies that had a great hit product and then went public and didn't really make it as a public company. They either fizzled or got acquired at a price lower than where they went public. But despite that long history, people keep trying to do this. And so, of course, as we're looking at the markets today, there is a new generation of companies trying to go public on the success of a hit product and pitching that as a big sustainable business. And the one that's on our minds in particular this week is Oura, the maker of the bioscience health tracking ring. They have put in the filings to potentially do an IPO.

**Miriam Gottfried** (2:19)
And then we've also reported that Whoop, which makes a bracelet type device, maybe kind of similar to a Fitbit, is thinking and planning an IPO itself.

**Telis Demos** (2:30)
All right. So we're going to have a conversation with an analyst about whether or not these one-hit wonders are maybe going to do a little differently or better than past IPOs of hot consumer companies.

**Miriam Gottfried** (2:43)
Yeah. Can they buck the trend, I think is the really big question.

**Telis Demos** (2:46)
Because some do. Some do. Not every company doesn't hit that escape velocity of becoming a big sustainable business.

**Miriam Gottfried** (2:54)
That's going to be really interesting. But first, I think we need to talk about what happened in the market this past week with the big tech stocks.

**Telis Demos** (3:03)
Yeah. The market's been a little all over the place with AI related stuff this week. Early in the week, we saw big price plunges for Samsung and SK Hynix. Those are two of the companies behind South Korea's own AI boom, which by the way, the journal's been doing some great coverage of kind of economies across Asia that have been feeling like this gigantic wealth creation from what's going on in the market and AI. But then later in the week, Micron stock surged after it reported blockbuster earnings, quadruple revenue growth and stuff. That also helped a rebound in SK Hynix's stock as well.
Then on top of that, you had Apple saying that it was going to raise the price of MacBooks to reflect the fact that AI is buying up all the memory, and so memory costs are going up. So I don't know if the worry has been taken out of the market, but I don't think that this was the week that the trade unwound, and this is the end of that trade. I just don't think we're at that point yet.

**Miriam Gottfried** (4:03)
I don't think so either. We're really going back and forth.
Telis, you were so prescient on that episode with Kevin Koharki and John Weil talking about the hidden costs of the AI infrastructure buildout and how it's not showing up in cash flow statements. Because the market seemed to wake up to that this past week.