The Pitch Has Already Started
OpenAI and Anthropic haven’t filed for an IPO. But the production architecture of their eventual roadshows is already taking shape – in plain view, if you know what to look for.
DevDay 2025 looked like a developer conference. The 45-minute fireside chat between Sam Altman and Jony Ive, Apple’s former Chief Design Officer, looked like something else. To us, it played as a moment built for the institutional investors who would parse it on YouTube the next morning. Hardware ambition. Design pedigree. A three-year collaboration framed as a thesis paragraph for a future S-1.
From a production lens, that fireside reads less like a developer feature – and more like a cap-table signal.
The same pattern is playing out across the AI sector. Anthropic launched Code with Claude in May 2025 and expanded it across San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. The tour read as measured and technically rigorous, less like dev relations and more like the discipline of a public company running its narrative arc.
Audience composition appears to have shifted. The staging looks heavier. And the production decisions; line-of-sight blocking, fireside choreography, demo handoff timing, partner sequencing – increasingly resemble the staged moments a public company runs the year before it files.
We’re not predicting IPO timing. But we are saying the rehearsal is happening in plain view, and the production choices these labs are making now are the same ones every IPO candidate makes when they want institutional money to recognize them on sight.
The class of 2024–2026 – Reddit, CoreWeave, Klaviyo, Rippling – gave us a fresh dataset on which roadshow production decisions land and which don’t. Read that dataset alongside what’s happening at DevDay and Code with Claude, and the playbook for the next mega-IPO begins to write itself.
Here’s what we’re seeing.
The DevDay Decode: Production Choices That Read as IR Signals
Most coverage of DevDay 2025 focused on the announcements: GPT-5 Pro and Sora 2 in the API, ChatGPT Apps with Zillow, Booking.com, Target, Figma, Expedia, Uber, Instacart, OpenTable, DoorDash, and Peloton. AgentKit for autonomous workflows. Codex Slack integration.
The product news is the obvious headline. The interesting questions are about what the staging communicates.
At events of this scale, production choices rarely feel decorative. They tend to be directional. In our experience, every decision (who shares a stage, what experiences attendees walk through, which conversations linger in the memory) functions as a deliberate signal, first to the room, then to the much larger audience that catches clips, photos, and analyst recaps for weeks afterward. The question isn’t whether OpenAI staged DevDay 2025 carefully. It’s what the staging reveals about the story they want to tell.
Three production choices stand out.
When Altman sat down with Jony Ive, the staging seemed to communicate something specific to the financial world: this isn’t just a software company. There’s hardware ambition, design pedigree, and a partner whose work shaped the iPhone, iMac, and Apple Watch. The chat felt unscripted enough to seem intimate, structured enough to land its key points. Ive said his creative team’s purpose “became clear” with the launch of ChatGPT. Altman framed the collaboration as a three-year arc.
For developers, that’s a curiosity. For institutional investors evaluating whether OpenAI commands a hardware-software stack story, that plays as a thesis paragraph. Worth noting: the conversation wasn’t even livestreamed. It went up on YouTube hours later. To us, that distribution choice reads as confidence. The most consequential moment of the day didn’t need to compete for live attention.
A “cozy mini-theater with popcorn” featuring AI-generated short films sounds like a fun side-activation. Look closer. It’s a positioning argument. Sora moved from research preview to API offering at this event – a defining moment of value that extended far beyond a product demo.
The mini-theater turned attendees into an audience, not testers. Watching AI-generated film with popcorn in hand frames Sora as cinema. Watching it on a laptop frames it as a tool. The production choice tells the market which one OpenAI wants Sora to be.
That’s the same staging logic Reddit used in 2024 when it leaned into community as the equity story rather than DAU metrics. The product becomes the experience. The experience becomes the narrative.
The DevDay 2025 lineup looks deliberately chosen. Cursor’s Michael Truell signals startup adoption from the leader in AI-native developer tools. San Francisco mayor Daniel Lurie brings municipal partnerships and civic legitimacy. Andreessen Horowitz partner Kimberly Tan brings continued institutional venture endorsement. Each speaker delivered real content, and each one provided OpenAI with powerful, specific validation.
Stitched together, these three choices read as a single argument: this is a company with consumer scale, hardware ambition, and ecosystem depth. Whenever OpenAI eventually files, the components of the equity story are already on stage and evolving right in front of us.
Code with Claude: A Different Pre-IPO Posture
Anthropic took a notably different production approach. Code with Claude launched in May 2025 as a single-day, hands-on conference at The Midway in San Francisco, then expanded into a multi-city series across San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and Washington, D.C. Where DevDay leans into spectacle, Code with Claude leans into rigor. Three choices stand out.
OpenAI sold $650 in-person tickets to anyone who clicked. Anthropic took applications and curated the room. To us, that’s a meaningful production decision.
Curating the audience signals to the financial world the company controls who sees its developer relationship up close. It also implicitly positions Claude as a premium tool for serious builders rather than a consumer phenomenon.
For institutional investors evaluating where Anthropic sits in the AI stack, the application gate is exactly the kind of credibility signal that filters retail froth out of the room. That’s a strategic choice.
The decision to expand from a single SF event into a four-city tour mirrors how a public-company roadshow actually moves: deliberate geographic coverage, repeat performance discipline, the same narrative delivered to different markets.
To our eye, that’s not a developer marketing choice. That’s the rehearsal of an institutional travel pattern. Anthropic ran the SF, London, Tokyo, and DC sequence in 2025 and is following with additional cities in 2026.
The geography choice is itself a story. London for European enterprise. Tokyo for the kind of legitimacy that only comes from showing up in Asia’s most established tech and finance market. DC for policy and regulatory presence. Each city carries a specific part of the narrative to a specific audience.
AWS hosted official Code with Claude watch parties as satellite events. Most coverage treated this as a technical convenience. To us, it reads differently.
Look at it from a production standpoint: a major cloud hyperscaler is volunteering its physical and digital infrastructure to extend the reach of an Anthropic-branded event. AWS is Anthropic’s largest cloud distributor and a strategic investor with billions committed to the partnership. By hosting watch parties, AWS publicly performs that alliance – turning a developer event into a visible signal of institutional backing.
That’s the kind of credibility and distribution muscle most pre-IPO companies have to pay for. Anthropic has it built in.
Where OpenAI’s staging emphasizes scope and consumer reach, Anthropic’s emphasizes curatorial access, depth, and enterprise readiness. The cap-table signal differs accordingly. OpenAI seems to be telegraphing a story about reach, hardware, and platform breadth. Anthropic seems to be telegraphing a story about discipline, enterprise traction, and infrastructure partnerships. Both are legitimate pre-IPO postures. They simply imply different equity stories – and likely different institutional investor profiles when the filings eventually land.
The Class of 2024–2026: Four Roadshows, Four Production Lessons
To know what the AI labs are rehearsing, look at the recent IPO class. Four roadshows in particular produced distinct production case studies.
Reddit gave away 8% of its IPO to its users. 1.76 million shares allocated to 75,000 of its most active Redditors and moderators. Karma score decided who qualified. No lock-up period.
It was an unusual move and a deliberate one. Reddit’s equity story depended on community. A slide deck couldn’t tell that story; allocating real shares to real users could. Steve Huffman didn’t have to argue that Reddit had a unique relationship with its users. The directed share program was the argument.
The lesson: when your story depends on community, your investor day staging has to make the community visible, not just cite it in the deck. Reddit priced at $34 and opened at $47, a 38% first-day pop. The S-1 flagged real risk in the structure (no lock-up could amplify volatility, and some Redditors actively organized against the IPO), and the narrative architecture worked anyway. Users-as-shareholders is now an established roadshow technique that Uber, Airbnb, and Cava had used in lighter form.
CoreWeave downsized its IPO from $2.7 billion to $1.5 billion the day before launch. Institutional demand had softened. NVIDIA reportedly stepped in with a $250 million anchor purchase to get the deal across the line. CoreWeave priced at $40 on March 28, 2025, and the first day of trading closed flat.
The roadshow ran into a recognizable problem. The pitch was infrastructure-heavy and visually abstract: GPU capacity, liquid cooling, Kubernetes-native architecture, 250,000 GPUs across 32 data centers. All accurate. None of it tangible to a public-market investor who has never set foot in a data center.
The lesson: data center stories need physicality on stage. Slides and spreadsheets make “AI infrastructure” sound like a commodity. The tools that turn an abstract category into an investable thesis (data hall walkthroughs, rack density comparisons, heat-and-power math made visual) only work when the production team builds them in. CoreWeave eventually went on a 250%+ tear post-IPO once the market understood the story. The challenge wasn’t the company. It was the translation of the narrative – both visually and experientially.
Klaviyo was the first SaaS IPO in nearly two years. The market was frozen. Marketing automation isn’t a category that excites public-market investors. CEO Andrew Bialecki later called it an “IPO winter.”
So Klaviyo led with the founder. Bootstrapped origin. MIT-trained engineer. $100M strategic investment from Shopify. 119% net dollar retention. 51% YoY growth. GAAP profitability. Rule of 75 metrics. Bialecki himself became the narrative spine of the roadshow.
The lesson: when the product is unsexy, the founder narrative carries the staging, and that requires founder coaching, not slide design. Bialecki had to learn how to be the equity story in real time, in dozens of one-on-one institutional meetings, with no fireside chat to lean on. That’s a different production discipline than a celebrity CEO event. It’s intimate. It’s repetitive. It requires the founder to deliver the same emotional beats with freshness on the fortieth pitch. Klaviyo priced at $30, raised $576 million at a $9.2 billion valuation, and opened with a 23% first-day pop. The market recognized a credible operator, not just a magnetic personality.
In February 2026, Rippling aired a Super Bowl ad. Not because it was selling HR software to households. Because the company is making itself a household name before it asks public-market investors to recognize it.
Rippling hasn’t filed an S-1. CEO Parker Conrad has said publicly that an IPO isn’t imminent. Yet the production preparation is unmistakable. Rippling raised a $450 million Series G at a $16.8 billion valuation in May 2025. Annual revenue reached $570 million in February 2026, growing over 30% YoY with net revenue retention approaching 200%. The Super Bowl ad slot ran around $7 million.
Layer in the Deel lawsuit subplot. Rippling sued its largest competitor in March 2025 alleging corporate espionage; Deel countersued in April. The result is a roadshow narrative-in-waiting with built-in tension, competitive stakes, and a story arc the market is already following.
The lesson, even before the S-1 lands: the best roadshows aren’t built starting at the prospectus filing. They’re built years earlier, through brand investment, narrative seeding, and earned-media architecture. By the time Conrad walks into his first investor meeting, the story will already be partly told. Watch how the roadshow handles the Deel feud, whether it’s foregrounded as competitive moat or treated as backdrop noise. That choice will tell you everything about how Rippling has rehearsed its public-company identity.
What the AI Labs Are Already Rehearsing
Map the four cases onto OpenAI and Anthropic, and the patterns start to line up.
To us, the interesting observation isn’t that these labs will eventually IPO. It’s that the production preparation for that moment appears to be happening on the stages we’re already watching. DevDay and Code with Claude read as public dress rehearsals. The audience swap-out (developers in 2025, institutional investors in 202?) is mostly a matter of who’s in the room. The staging architecture is portable.
Make the community visible. (Reddit)
OpenAI’s ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users (as Altman announced at DevDay 2025). The pre-IPO question is whether any of those users become shareholders. SpaceX just precedent-set the retail allocation question with its 30% retail target. DevDay’s Apps SDK announcement, which lets users chat directly with apps from Booking.com, Zillow, Target, Figma, and others, is the technical precondition for a community-visibility play at IPO. OpenAI is staging the infrastructure now.
Make infrastructure tangible. (CoreWeave)
Both labs face the data-center-economics problem. Both are spending tens of billions on compute. Both have the same risk: investors hearing “infrastructure” and pricing it as commodity capex. Sora Cinema was a small move in the opposite direction, making AI compute feel like a consumer experience rather than a balance-sheet item. Anthropic’s API-and-MCP focus at Code with Claude is the more enterprise-coded version of the same instinct. Whoever IPOs first will need a tangibility moment in their roadshow that CoreWeave didn’t quite execute.
Coach the founder for intimacy. (Klaviyo)
Sam Altman is on stage all the time, but a roadshow is a different production challenge: dozens of intimate institutional meetings, repeated questions, no audience. Dario Amodei rarely takes that kind of stage. Both will need to develop the discipline of delivering the same narrative architecture, freshly, to room after room, for two weeks straight. That work happens long before the S-1.
Invest in the brand before the filing. (Rippling)
This is where the AI labs appear most clearly to be rehearsing. The Sam Altman / Jony Ive partnership reads as brand seeding. Anthropic’s policy presence in Washington reads as brand seeding. Code with Claude’s multi-city expansion reads as brand seeding. None of it is sales activity. To our eye, much of it functions as roadshow preparation by other names.
The combined effect: the AI labs appear to be running all four production patterns at once, with bigger budgets and longer runway than any of their predecessors. By the time the S-1s eventually land, their production foundations will be deeper and more multi-dimensional than anything Reddit, CoreWeave, or Klaviyo had the runway to build.
The Production Checklist for Any High-Stakes Investor Moment
If you’re a head of IR, head of corporate comms, or growth-stage CFO watching this rehearsal play out, here’s the framework outlined by these events:
- 01
Treat audience composition as a production decision, not an attendance count.
Who’s in the room, and visibly in the room, is itself the equity story. The presence of an a16z partner on a developer stage doesn’t communicate the same thing as a developer relations engineer.
- 02
Identify your fireside-chat moment.
Every roadshow needs a single staged conversation that conveys narrative information no slide can. For OpenAI it’s Altman + Ive. For Reddit it was the moderator share program. For Klaviyo it was the founder’s bootstrapped credibility. Find yours.
- 03
Make the abstract physical.
If your story includes infrastructure, capacity, scale, or technical depth, design at least one production moment that translates the abstraction into an embodied experience. CoreWeave’s roadshow under-indexed on this. Sora Cinema was a low-stakes attempt to learn the lesson early.
- 04
Treat your speaker lineup as a list of validators.
Every speaker on your stage represents a category of validation: customer voices, partner voices, investor voices, civic voices. Choose the mix to match the equity story you’re telling, not just the agenda you’re filling.
- 05
Coach the founder on intimacy, not just keynotes.
Roadshows happen in conference rooms with twenty institutional investors at a time. The founder who’s brilliant on stage isn’t automatically brilliant in that room. Different muscle. Develop it years in advance.
- 06
Start the brand investment before the S-1, not after.
Rippling’s Super Bowl ad. OpenAI’s Apps SDK partner announcements. Anthropic’s policy and developer presence. The roadshow doesn’t begin at the filing date. It begins the moment institutional investors first start hearing your name in unscripted contexts.
- 07
Plan post-event distribution as carefully as the event itself.
DevDay’s keynote streamed live. The Altman + Ive fireside didn’t, but went up on YouTube the same day. That sequencing is deliberate. Live serves urgency; on-demand serves reach. Design both.
- 08
Treat every production decision as precedent.
When the AI labs eventually file, every staging choice they’re making now becomes part of the institutional case file investors use to evaluate them. The rehearsal is the record.
Where Investor Communication Is Heading
The bright line between “developer event” and “investor day” appears to be dissolving.
This isn’t unique to the AI sector. To us, it reads as an ongoing structural shift. Companies with consumer scale, enterprise depth, and platform ambition can’t run their pre-IPO communications through a single channel anymore. The audience for an IPO is now a constellation: institutional investors, retail allocations, developer ecosystems, enterprise buyers, regulators, partners, employee shareholders, and a financial press taking cues from social platforms. Every staged moment a company runs in the years before filing reaches some subset of all of them.
That makes production more strategic, not less. The companies that stage their developer events with the audience composition of an Investor Day in mind, that invest in their brand before the prospectus, and that coach their founders for both the keynote and the conference room, should have an enormous advantage over companies that wait until the S-1 to start thinking about narrative.
The rehearsal is the production. By the time the S-1 hits, the show is already running.
That’s the work worth investing in. It’s also the work Cardboard Spaceship builds for clients navigating the moments that matter.
Planning a high-stakes investor moment?
The next generation of IPO roadshows won’t start at the S-1 filing. They’ll start years earlier, in the staged moments that quietly build institutional recognition. Whether you’re preparing for an Investor Day or the long lead-up to a future filing, the production decisions you’re making now will define how the market responds when the moment arrives. Let’s start a conversation →
- TechCrunch: “What to expect at OpenAI’s DevDay 2025, and how to watch it” (October 6, 2025)
- VentureBeat: “OpenAI Dev Day 2025: ChatGPT becomes the new app store” (October 6, 2025)
- CNBC: “OpenAI DevDay 2025 live updates: Altman, Jony Ive” (October 6, 2025)
- Anthropic: Code with Claude conference page and announcements
- Quartr: “Reddit’s IPO in 2024: A Closer Look”
- Fortune: “Reddit’s ‘unusual’ move to reward loyal users in its IPO could prove lucrative for Redditors” (February 22, 2024)
- CNBC: “Nvidia turned CoreWeave into a major player in AI years before helping to save its IPO” (March 30, 2025)
- Meritech Capital: “Klaviyo IPO | S-1 Breakdown”
- SaaStr: Andrew Bialecki interviews on the Klaviyo IPO process
- TechCrunch: “Rippling raises $450M at a $16.8B valuation”
- ADWEEK: “Watch Rippling’s Super Bowl Debut With a Tim Robinson Meltdown”