Every AI company is racing to stay private as long as possible and IPO at the highest number they can justify. Lyle Pratt did the opposite. Jonathan Green talks with the founder and CEO of Vida — an AI agent operating system that listed on NYSE American in May 2026 at a fraction of the usual size — about why the standard advice to stay private is VCs talking their own book, what public-company transparency does to enterprise sales, and why he thinks the money in AI is in outcomes rather than tokens.

Key Takeaways:

• The advice to stay private is not neutral. A VC earning two-and-twenty on a large portfolio position loses that carry at IPO and gets marked to market for the first time, so the incentive is to keep you private, and the "staying public is too complicated" argument is increasingly a view of the past.
• Going public early is also a fairness argument. Most ordinary investors are locked out of the fastest-growing companies because they are not accredited, so the whole agentic boom happens where they cannot participate.
• Transparency became a sales asset. Customers evaluating a long-term partner can read the filings, see the cash position, and check the quarterlies, which removes the doubt that normally sits under an enterprise deal.
• Customers do not want a chatbot, they want an expert who will deploy an AI employee against a specific process end to end and keep it working. Running hundreds or thousands of agents needs the same things as running hundreds of employees: guardrails, observability, compliance, multi-tenancy.
• Tokens are a commodity, outcomes are not. There are roughly 400 million IVRs still waiting to become agents, US call centres run about $1.80 per handled minute, and globally every dollar of software spend sits beside six or seven dollars of services spend. That is the gap agents are moving into.

Notable Quotes:

"There's a lot of fear mongering from VCs about you can't go public — and it's more and more VCs talking their own book." — Lyle Pratt

"People want to pay for outcomes. They don't want to pay for tokens." — Lyle Pratt

Connect with Lyle Pratt:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lylepratt
• Company: Vida — https://vida.io

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