Wall Street’s I.P.O. Bubble Watch

**Bill Cohan** (0:02)
Thirty-five times EBITDA, it's like a $25 billion company. The valuation is ridiculous. That of course is the job of the underwriters to hype this thing as much as possible and get as high a price as possible and they succeeded at that. And this is the kind of market we're in. We're in a very frothy IPO market.

**Peter Hamby** (0:25)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, a Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby.
It's Friday, July 10th. Today, I'm joined by Bill Cohan to break down two more signs that the IPO market is as frothy as it gets. No, we aren't talking about AI or SpaceX. We're talking about AOL and Jersey Mikes. Yes, a portfolio of old internet companies just went public and the popular sandwich chain is about to as well. As Bill explains, both are probably way overvalued and indicators that Wall Street banks are willing to sell anything for a quick buck.
We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:21)
At Walmart, we're helping our associates build meaningful careers. One way we're doing that, investing $1 billion in training and education. Last year, more than 100,000 associates earned promotions. Combined with benefits like 401k matching and paid parental leave, we're proving that Walmart isn't just a place to work, it's a place to grow.
Learn more at walmart.com/grow at Walmart.

**Peter Hamby** (1:48)
Happy Friday everybody and welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, Bill Cohan. We're going to talk about the frothy IPO market and not just SpaceX and OpenAI and Anthropic, but two other companies that are juicing the market. Bill, not giving investment advice, will evaluate what this says about Wall Street. One quick note, happy wedding weekend to my sister-in-law, Johanna Warshaw and my soon-to-be brother-in-law, Mike Schmantz. The wedding goes down this weekend in the Santinas Valley. I love you guys very much. I am so honored to be there. Anyway, back to reality.
Bill, I'm glad you're back to reality from Paris, where you didn't melt, you came close to melting, but you made it home. Now you're enjoying a beautiful East Coast summer on the Isle of Nantucket. I hope you got your salmon pink pants on as we discuss these IPOs.
Are you tuning in to the World Cup, by the way? What was the vibe like over in France?

**Bill Cohan** (2:51)
Well, I actually went from Paris to Antwerp in Belgium, where the Belgians had just won 5-0, a match, and this guy who was going crazy couldn't believe it because he thinks, he thought the team stunk and was awful, and yet they had won this match 5-0, and he was very happy about that. Fast forward, of course, to who eliminated the US, of course Belgium, and they made us look awful. And so I think Belgium may be better than this guy thought, and may be better than we suspected.
So maybe Belgium could be a country with what, 12 million inhabitants. The size of like Maryland took it to us big time, made us look really silly.
And of course the French are still in it. Two about to play Morocco. But Peter, I'd be interested in what you think is that the World Cup has sort of taken America by storm and displaced Wimbledon as the topic of interest over the July 4th holiday.

**Peter Hamby** (4:13)
Absolutely. I mean, we talked about this yesterday with John Ornd on the podcast, but it's absolutely dominating the summer here. We missed you. I assume you weren't in Belgium when Donald Trump injected himself into the World Cup news cycle to try to get that red card overturned.

**Bill Cohan** (4:29)
No, it's back here for that.

**Peter Hamby** (4:31)
Okay.
Well, I'm glad you escaped safely. Let's talk, Bill, about some IPOs. Obviously, I mentioned SpaceX. That was a big one. You're a skeptic of some of these companies that go public. You wrote recently about two. One is Jersey Mike's. We'll talk about that after the break. The other is Bending Spoons. This is a huge IPO. And for people who don't know, this is basically, correct me if I'm describing this poorly, but they basically have a portfolio of formerly great companies that they've rolled up into a single company. Places like Evernote, Meetup, WeTransfer, Brightcove, AOL, Vimeo.
A bunch of others are included here. They just went public a few days ago, raised a lot of money. I get the idea of bringing all these companies together, but again, not investment advice. Why would I want to invest in a bunch of formerly great internet companies held together by an Italian conglomerate? It sounds like a money-making scheme.