🕶️ Oura sells sleep for $16B

Good morning legends, mentees, and everyone who's accidentally become both.

Two rings tried going public this week. One borrowed tricks from the oil industry, the other sells subscriptions disguised as sleep tracking, and just caught a lawsuit. Meanwhile, the tips tackle what happens when your security budget can't keep up with your models, and why blaming summer for Q3 miss rates mostly just delays the real diagnostic.

The pattern: validation moments colliding with execution questions, and nobody's quite sure which one investors price first.

"When I think of revenue, I think of Attio." - Shreman Shrestha, Head of Business at Granola

Here's what that adds up to:

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Fervo Energy just did something the clean energy world kept swearing was impossible: it made geothermal cool again, and then took it public.

Yeah, that's the myth. For decades geothermal was a niche party, invite-only, restricted to a handful of volcanic hotspots where the earth conveniently bubbled near the surface. Everyone else got left out. So Fervo did something sneaky: it borrowed the horizontal drilling playbook straight from the oil and gas crowd, the same villains clean energy loves to hate, and used it to reach heat anywhere. In roughly the last 24 months, they went from science project to real deployment.

Because Fervo's IPO just validated always-on clean baseload, and that public capital is funding the first utility-scale enhanced geothermal plant coming online this year. That's the holy grail: 24/7 dispatchable power, no waiting for sunshine or wind.

Meanwhile, on the intermittent layer, solar and wind are still wrestling grid operators and leaning on fossil-fuel peaker plants. And the less obvious ripple lands on the battery crowd. If geothermal proves reliable baseload, storage founders can't just sell intermittency insurance anymore. Pivot toward resilience, arbitrage, or hyper-local independence, fast.

Watch Fervo's plant data. It becomes the benchmark everyone else gets measured against.

Why does some of the most advanced technology we own make us feel terrible?

OLED screens can strain your eyes. 3D movies give people headaches. VR can make you nauseous. Noise-cancelling headphones can create that weird pressure feeling in your head. And now we’re putting augmented reality directly onto car windshields.

In this episode, Caya goes down the rabbit hole of why the closer technology gets to simulating reality, the more our bodies sometimes seem to reject it.

Oura makes a ring that watches you sleep. Now it wants Wall Street to watch it too.

Here is the legend: hardware companies are boring. Thin margins, factory headaches, one-time sales. Two years ago, Oura fit that box. Then it did something rings don't usually do. It filed for a September IPO targeting north of $16 billion and raising up to $3 billion.

Not bad for a device that costs a few hundred bucks.

Here's the trick the movie version misses. Oura isn't selling rings. It's selling subscriptions. Revenue went $500M in 2024, roughly $1B in 2025, and a projected $2B in 2026. That last September Series E closed at $10.9B. So the valuation nearly doubled in twelve months, because investors stopped pricing hardware and started pricing recurring data.

Meanwhile, the rivals smelled it too. Whoop hit a $10B valuation in March, bolting on hormone tracking and blood panels to chase the same mainstream crowd. Everyone's racing from biohacking CEOs to your aunt who wants better sleep.

But there's a catch buried in the fine print. A class action filed last week in San Francisco says Oura fakes clinical precision, claiming exact sleep stages without the scalp electrodes real polysomnography needs.

So watch the S-1. That's where the subscriber math, and the lawsuit, stop being legend and start being fact.

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