Here’s the thing about hot IPOs: they’re designed to make you feel like you’re missing out. A company everyone knows goes public, the stock doubles before lunch, and suddenly you’re watching CNBC anchors breathlessly declare it “the next great technology platform.” Meanwhile, you’re frantically trying to buy in before it’s too late.
Spoiler alert: you’re already too late. And that’s by design.
Let me walk you through what actually happened with Figma. You probably haven’t heard of it, but your design team definitely has. Adobe tried buying them for $20 billion back in 2022, regulators said no, and Figma went public on its own. Classic tech story, right?
Here’s where it gets interesting—and infuriating.
Figma priced at $33 and opened at $115. Everyone lost their minds. But buried deep in the lockup agreement was a clause that almost nobody read. It said insiders didn’t have to wait the standard six months to sell. Instead, if the stock traded 25% above the IPO price for five consecutive days, the lockup would release early.
The stock opened 158% above that threshold. The trigger fired on Day 1.
By day 36, the people who actually understood the structure were selling at $80. Eight months later? Figma was at $22—down 81% from the peak and 33% lower than the IPO price itself. The insiders got out. Retail investors got left holding the bag.
And now they’re running the exact same play again, except the numbers are bigger by an order of magnitude.
Cerebras just went public at $185, opened at $350, and dropped 10% the next day. But that’s just the appetizer. SpaceX is next. Then Anthropic. Then OpenAI. Together, those three represent more than $3 trillion in combined valuation. Every single one is virtually guaranteed to use the same structural setup that took Figma from $115 to $22.
These aren’t bad companies. Some of them will probably be great. That’s not the point. The structure is designed to get the early money out and leave the late money holding the bag. Full stop.
So what do you actually do about it?
First: Don’t buy at the open. That pop? That’s the gift to insiders. By the time you click “buy,” the present has already been unwrapped.
Second—and this is the one most investors miss—buy the family, not the headline. Every AI IPO in this pipeline has publicly traded proxies you can buy today. SpaceX has Alphabet (which owns 6.11% of the company). Anthropic has Amazon and Nvidia. OpenAI has Microsoft. They all have supply chain plays—the picks and shovels that these companies need to function.
These are as easy to buy as a loaf of bread. No lockup risk. No allocation problem. No premium built on a float that was way too small.
Third: Watch the lockup calendar. Once a company goes public, the most important dates aren’t earnings dates. They’re the lockup expirations. That’s when insider selling hits and the stock finally trades at something closer to what it’s actually worth.
Cerebras was the dress rehearsal. SpaceX is the main event. The institutions already know what’s coming and have lined up their allocations. They’ll be the sellers on Day 1.
The real trade isn’t waiting for the bell. It’s already happening.
