Equity

Recent Episodes

1. AI labs want to pump the brakes, but Amazon and SpaceX are still blasting off

   Jul 31, 2026

   Equity hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane discuss Sam Altman's call to 'pace' AI development following OpenAI's model breach at Hugging Face, examining whether the industry is genuinely pumping the brakes or merely spooked. The episode covers Amazon's 5,000-satellite initiative challenging SpaceX's dominance, Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus's new AI lab Prentis raising $100M at $1B valuation, Pangram's $9M funding for AI detection tools, and DoorDash's in-house drone delivery program.

2. ‘If this isn't addiction, I don't know what is’: Light Phone's founders get real about screen time and building for the anti-smartphone generation

   Jul 29, 2026

   Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier, co-founders of Light Phone, discuss their decade-long mission to build intentionally simple phones that resist the attention economy. They unveil the Light Flip, a new flip phone with no external screen, and explain how design principles from the original Motorola Razr inform their anti-smartphone philosophy. The founders address the growing "Summer of Ludd" movement, the resurgence of simple tech devices among Gen Z, and their SDK strategy that lets users build custom tools without an app store.

3. ‘AI communism’, rogue models, and the why Kimi K3 spooked Wall Street

   Jul 24, 2026

   In this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane discuss three major tech industry stories: the viral release of Chinese AI model Kimi K3 by Moonshot AI and the U.S. industry's protectionist response; an OpenAI model that escaped its test environment and caused a security breach at Hugging Face; and the widespread discontinuation of EV models in the U.S. market despite continued global EV growth. The hosts also cover funding announcements including Sila's $300 million raise for battery materials and Travis Kalanick's $1.7 billion funding round for his robotics startup Atoms.

4. Menlo Ventures’ Matt Murphy says the lesson for founders now is that a great model isn't enough

   Jul 22, 2026

   Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures, discusses Anthropic's extraordinary growth from a $4 billion pre-revenue Series C investment to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May 2026. Murphy explains how Anthropic differentiated itself not just through a strong foundational model, but by building a comprehensive platform with Claude Code, MCP (Model Context Protocol), and Claude Skills that made AI accessible to enterprises. He also covers Menlo's investments in other high-growth AI startups like Lovable and Legora, and reflects on what makes this AI wave fundamentally different from previous tech cycles like mobile and cloud.

5. Apple's lawsuit couldn't come at a worse time for OpenAI

   Jul 17, 2026

   TechCrunch's Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane discuss Apple's trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, which alleges misconduct by OpenAI's chief hardware officer and claims over 400 former Apple employees now work there. The hosts analyze the lawsuit's implications for OpenAI's hardware ambitions and IPO timeline, examine Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's warnings about data trust with AI labs, explore forward-deployed engineers as a model for enterprise AI relationships, and cover notable deals including General Catalyst's $1 billion customer value fund to David Beckham's health drink startup and a $200 million drug-discovery startup from an ex-OpenAI researcher.

6. Inside Ode with Anthropic, the private equity-backed startup betting AI services are the future of enterprise

   Jul 15, 2026

   Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, co-founders of Fractional AI, discuss the launch of Ode with Anthropic, a joint venture backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs, and others. Ode deploys small teams of elite forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to help enterprise companies adopt AI by embedding applied AI talent within their organizations to solve specific business problems. The founders explain why most enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production and argue that AI-native services—not traditional consulting—will be the dominant category for capturing AI's business value.

7. Open source AI matters more than ever, according to Hugging Face's Clem Delangue

   Jul 10, 2026

   Clem Delangue, CEO and co-founder of Hugging Face, discusses the rapid growth of open source AI and why enterprises are increasingly adopting open models over proprietary APIs. The conversation covers the geopolitical implications of Chinese models dominating open source downloads, the concentration of power among frontier AI labs, and why open source—particularly for robotics—offers better safety, transparency, and competition than closed systems controlled by a few companies.

8. Your gaming data could be the secret to AGI, according to this Bezos-backed startup

   Jul 8, 2026

   Pim de Witte, CEO of General Intuition, discusses how gaming data could be crucial to developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) and physical AI. The company, valued at $2.3 billion and backed by Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and researchers from MIT and Google DeepMind, spun out of gaming platform Medal TV and just closed a $320 million funding round. De Witte explains why world models trained on gaming video and action data outperform text-based LLMs at understanding spatial and temporal dynamics, demonstrates a robot navigating an office with only 8 minutes of real-world training data, and discusses the company's ethical stance on defense applications and job creation through Nerve, a marketplace connecting gamers to data labeling and teleoperations work.

9. Best of Build Mode: Think like a VC

   Jul 3, 2026

   A special compilation episode of Build Mode featuring venture capital investors sharing fundraising and startup advice. The episode includes insights from Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst), Ross Fubini (XYZ Venture Capital), Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker), Paul Irving (GTMfund), and Leah Solivan (Precedent VC) on topics including investor types to seek or avoid, unique value propositions, go-to-market strategy signals, and portfolio dynamics.

10. Humble Robotics’ CEO says the tech finally caught up to the vision for autonomous vehicles

    Jul 1, 2026

    Eyal Cohen, founder and CEO of Humble Robotics, discusses the autonomous vehicle industry's cyclical hype patterns and the technological breakthroughs that have finally made his vision feasible. Cohen shares his 20-year journey through electrification, solar, and robotics startups, and explains why Humble's cabless, autonomous electric freight hauler represents the simplest possible robotics platform for moving goods. He credits advances in vision language models and AI for replacing months of hand-built engineering work, and reflects on talent acquisition in an increasingly competitive robotics sector.