IPOs, messaging and the illusion of control – the lessons for founders

From SpaceX to Firmus and Anthropic, the IPO market is offering a rather uncomfortable lesson: you can control your message, but not what the world chooses to believe.

In June, Elon Musk’s SpaceX staged the largest IPO in history, initially pricing a US$75 billion share offering at a valuation of US$1.77 trillion.

Shares jumped on debut, briefly pushing the company beyond US$2 trillion and making Musk the world’s first trillionaire. A staggering demonstration of how much investors will pay for an extraordinarily uncertain future if they believe in the person selling it.

Four months later, Firmus Technologies offered a rather different spectacle.

Backed by Nvidia and Blackstone, the Australian AI infrastructure business attempted to float at an enterprise value of almost $44 billion, having been valued at around $2 billion just a year earlier. Investors baulked, the proposed share price was cut and the float was eventually abandoned.

A potential triumph of Australian ambition became a public examination of financial projections, founder reputation and the distance between a good story and a believable one. Or another example of Australia’s enthusiasm for tearing down winners, depending on your preferred narrative.

Waiting in the wings is Anthropic, the company behind Claude. Its anticipated listing could value it at US$1.5 trillion to US$2 trillion.

With so much money, debt and economic expectation riding on AI, its reception could influence sentiment towards an entire industry. Three IPOs. Three reputational challenges. And three questions:

Who actually controls the story of a business? What do we need to understand about the new communications landscape? And what the hell can leaders do about it?

Welcome to the infinite content factory

For most of modern business history, big companies enjoyed enormous storytelling advantages. They purchased advertising, managed communications, staged investor presentations and enjoyed privileged access to the media. No wonder we developed a vocabulary of ‘message discipline’, ‘owning the narrative’ and ‘controlling the conversation’.

The internet started dismantling that arrangement decades ago. Broadcast audiences fragmented, newspapers lost ground to free online content, and social media gave customers, employees, activists and everyone else a microphone.

But generative AI has taken us somewhere different again. We now inhabit an infinite content factory, where the marginal cost of making persuasive-looking content is racing towards zero. Everybody can publish everything, all the time, and make it look slick, plausible and professional while they’re at it.

The contest isn’t simply for attention. It’s over what is true, what matters and what earns the right to be believed.

And here’s the irony. Just as businesses have become better equipped than ever to manufacture their stories, those stories may have become less influential.

Everyone can produce a beautiful manifesto, a spectacular pitch deck and a convincing portrait of their start-up’s visionary inevitability. But while everyone has access to a stage, a microphone and an AI-powered production team on demand, who exactly is left in the audience?

Brand is a jigsaw, assembled by others

Forget the illusion of carefully composed brand-story masterpieces. A brand today is more like a jigsaw without a box: assembled by other people from the loose pieces we leave lying around.

Customers, employees, partners and investors encounter fragments of your brand from countless sources, filter them through their experiences and biases, and construct pictures that may barely resemble the one you intended.

An IPO makes this painfully visible. Bankers can write the prospectus, executives can rehearse the roadshow and advisers can choreograph every announcement. But investors will still bring their own viewpoints and add their own pieces: financial scrutiny, industry comparisons, customer relationships, media coverage and whatever they already believe about the people in charge.

Consider Firmus. It promised technological advantage, enormous ambition and the endorsement of heavyweight investors. But an A$44 billion valuation alongside approximately A$50 million in annual revenue, vast unbuilt infrastructure and reports of a data-centre partnership falling through made for an awkward jigsaw. The market appeared less interested in the future Firmus described than in the evidence available in the present.

Then there was co-founder Oliver Curtis, whose 2016 insider-trading conviction resurfaced in the coverage. Curtis has spoken about redemption and allowing his achievements to define his legacy. Instead, the float brought his past back into the foreground.

That doesn’t imply fresh wrongdoing, or suggest a complex financial failure was down to one man’s reputation. Valuation, financing and wider market conditions were substantial problems in their own right. It does demonstrate that businesses don’t get to choose which fragments the market considers relevant.

Compare the optics of SpaceX. Rockets had landed. Satellites had worked. Astronauts had taken off and returned. Broadband customers had renewed. Like Musk or not (and, for the record, I don’t), he had achieved things previously thought implausible.

That record helped investors believe in another improbable future, even as his politics and personality divided the audience. For some, buying SpaceX was a financial bet. For others, it was a declaration of the kind of future they wanted to belong to and the flavour of identity politics they wanted to vote for with their wallets.

You can’t spin your way to credibility

Talking of politics, there is a useful lesson here from an unlikely source: Tony Blair’s New Labour. To overcome an electorate’s distrust of Labour on the economy in 1997, it offered rules and commitments, not just reassuring speeches. Firmus might have benefited from similarly tangible reassurances, such as lengthy lock-ups for existing investors. Belief is easier to earn when you change the evidence, not merely the pitch.

The bottom line is that the market doesn’t buy the story you tell about your business. It buys the story it has constructed about you. That’s not something you get to control, but you have to work to influence it with intention.

You can manage your message, but not sentiment

When British music retailer HMV collapsed in 2013, employees began reporting their redundancies on Twitter in real time. One claimed to have overheard the marketing director asking how to ‘shut down Twitter’. Few moments better capture a communications department discovering that the audience has taken control of the microphone.

That was thirteen years ago. Today, the idea of containing a story by shutting down a communications channel looks like a quaint telegram from the deck of the pre-iceberg Titanic. Stories escape, mutate and multiply at extraordinary speed, helped by platforms that reward the sensational and divisive over the considered and contextual. And sentiment has become both more visible and more volatile.

Markets have always oscillated between greed and fear. Now those emotions move through social media, financial commentary, algorithms and automated trading. Information that once travelled over days can change expectations in minutes. The market’s response to a story becomes part of the story, reinforcing the original mood.

Which brings us to Anthropic. There is a credible argument that AI will transform society as profoundly as electricity. There is also a credible argument that the investment boom has raced ahead of demonstrated commercial returns. Both can be true. Investors aren’t just asking whether AI matters; they’re asking who will make money, how much and when.

Anthropic’s IPO could therefore become more than a referendum on Anthropic. A successful listing might renew confidence across a nervous sector. A disappointing one could sharpen scrutiny of valuations, infrastructure commitments and debt throughout the AI economy.

One float won’t necessarily cause a financial crisis. But when so many businesses, lenders and investment decisions depend on the same assumptions about AI’s future returns, a shift in that belief has consequences today, far beyond one company’s share price. Sentiment can create extraordinary value. It can also withdraw it with frightening speed.

The founder must be storyteller-in-chief

But they can’t be the only story.

So here lies the paradox:

Just as corporate messaging is becoming less powerful, the personal reputations of founders and CEOs may matter more than ever.

Musk is the extreme example. He doesn’t merely run companies; he embodies a vision of technological progress, cultural disruption and human destiny. His reputation connects businesses and possibilities that a conventional communications department could never stitch together. The founder becomes a media channel, a narrative device and a mechanism for trust.

But personalisation cuts both ways. Charisma can amplify confidence or suspicion. Credibility can travel from one venture to another; reputational damage can make the same journey. A founder’s personal brand is an amplifier, not necessarily an asset.

Proof beats promises

I explored a related problem with Phil Morle, co-founder of deep-tech investment firm Main Sequence, on my StoryWork podcast. He described the second ‘valley of death’ confronting deep-tech companies: the science works, but commercialising it demands hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure. Investors must believe in a future customers haven’t yet fully validated.

Morle’s answer isn’t simply to make founders better storytellers. It’s to get credible customers to help tell the story. Take Samsara Eco, whose recycling technology is backed by a commercial partnership with Lululemon. The retailer’s commitment gives investors something a pitch deck alone cannot: an independent business with skin in the game.

A customer putting its own commercial interests behind a technology is not a guarantee of success. It is, however, a much more interesting piece of evidence than a founder insisting that success is inevitable.

And that, I think, is the useful lesson for anyone trying to build a business. In a world where everyone can make extraordinary claims, the most valuable stories are the ones other people have reason to believe, share and participate in.

The founder’s task isn’t simply to become a more compelling spokesperson. It’s to make choices, build relationships, create experiences and deliver evidence that gives the story substance. The personal brand can provide the spark. The business has to supply the fuel.

IPOs put an unusually explicit price on collective expectations. But every purchase, hire, partnership and investment is a smaller version of the same dynamic: a vote of confidence in a future outcome. Perhaps it’s time to stop thinking of storytelling as controlling what people hear and start treating it as the work of shaping what they have good reason to believe.

You can control what you say. You have considerable influence over what you do. But what the world decides to make of it is ultimately someone else’s business.

And when that world is being asked to put A$44 billion, US$2 trillion or simply its next customer order behind your promises, the distinction matters enormously.

• Matt is a keynote speaker and brand growth adviser at Think Story Experience.