Podcast · Tech & Science

Equity

by TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo · English · Tech & Science

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 34 min
Latest: 7 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026 · 27 minNew

After selling to P&G and Lululemon, these founders are building for life beyond the screen

Tristan Walker and Brynn Putnam both built and sold major consumer companies. Now, they’re building products designed to bring people together. Today on Equity, we’re bringing you a conversation TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandom had on stage at the latest StrictlyVC event in New York. Russell sat down with Walker, who sold Bevel maker Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble and is now building leathercraft trade school Heirloom, and Putnam, who sold fitness startup Mirror to Lululemon and is now CEO of Board, a touchscreen console that combines board games and video games. The two repeat…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

2 Oct 2026 · 38 min

Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it

This week, the White House got nearly every major tech CEO in one room — Zuckerberg, Bezos, Musk, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei among them — to sign an AI safety pledge that President Donald Trump called “morally binding.” Trump also signed an executive order officially rebranding AI as “super intelligence,” and meanwhile, Meta and OpenAI are putting friendlier faces on their AI products, even as the biggest money in AI still appears to be coming from the enterprise. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into this week’s AI moves, the…
30 Sep 2026 · 32 min

A Neko Health investor on the $700M bet to scan your whole body

Spotify founder Daniel Ek’s Neko Health raised $700 million to build a business around scanning your body, but it’s not the only company centering its roadmap around a new kind of preventative healthcare. Midjourney is building its own body scanner, while Function Health has also raised significant capital to build out its preventative-health platform. Why are investors betting so big on this category? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis talks with Farooq Abbasi, founder and general partner of Preface Ventures and an investor in Neko Health, about how Neko…
25 Sep 2026 · 35 min

Meta’s Muse just stole the spotlight from OpenAI and Anthropic

When AI leaders at OpenAI and Anthropic started talking about “pacing the frontier,” maybe someone should have asked: what pace? It’s turned into model drop week for both companies as Anthropic rolled out Opus 5.5, followed by OpenAI’s GPT-6 model updates just 90 minutes later. But the company that stole the spotlight this week was Meta, whose personal AI agent Muse is reportedly outpacing ChatGPT’s early numbers and is headed for smart glasses and a tiny Tamagotchi-style device next. On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig into Meta’s…
23 Sep 2026 · 33 min

What’s next for cybersecurity, according to Index Ventures’ Shardul Shah

As concern over AI safety and rogue agents continue to make headlines, it’s no surprise that cybersecurity stocks are rising, or that investors are pouring massive amounts of capital into startups trying to build the next generation of security for an AI-native world. We’re even seeing companies like Instinct and Simile bring in nine-figure checks and valuations that wouldn't have made sense a few years ago. With a front row seat to it all is Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who’s spent nearly two decades investing in cybersecurity and enterprise software — including six consecutive…
18 Sep 2026 · 36 min

Automattic's 33-Hour coup, and can AI labs police themselves?

A week after an Anthropic researcher's doomsday warning rattled the AI world, the company's CEO Dario Amodei has outlined his plan to “pace the frontier” of AI development. The proposal leans on independent safety evaluators and coordination between AI labs in democratic countries, and it's already picked up some industry support, along with some pointed pushback from Nvidia's Jensen Huang. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into whether companies can agree on what slowing down means and who gets to police it. Plus, WordPress…
16 Sep 2026 · 27 min

Why Thrive, Founders Fund, and Antonio Gracias are betting on hearing aids

“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do. On…
11 Sep 2026 · 40 min

An ex-Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time

An Anthropic researcher resigned this week, warning in a post on X that the company is “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives”. The company's own alignment lead even co-signed the message rather than walking it back. It's the kind of doomer warning the AI industry has flirted with before, but the timing, with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO, makes it land differently. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the latest AI safety warning and what it says about the industry's…
9 Sep 2026 · 43 min

ControlAI's Connor Leahy on why superintelligence is ‘not a weapon, it's an adversary’

AI companies have been talking about superintelligent AI like it's inevitable, but recent safety incidents like OpenAI's Hugging Face breach are demonstrating the potential dangers of deploying AI systems that are more capable than humans. So what happens when we can't reliably control what these systems do? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by Connor Leahy, an AI researcher, entrepreneur, and now the U.S. Executive Director of nonprofit ControlAI, which is pushing for a far more radical approach to AI safety: stopping companies from developing…
4 Sep 2026 · 39 min

Apple's Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack

It's officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple's next iPhone event on his desk before he's even settled in. Cook isn't going far, though: he's staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give…
2 Sep 2026 · 26 min

We're ‘dangerously close’ to dead internet theory according to Pangram's CEO

The internet has a trust problem, and it’s not just because social media feeds are filling up with AI slop. AI-generated text and images are now making their way into job applications, product reviews, and even insurance claims, leaving platforms and users alike scrambling to figure out what’s real. A handful of startups have cropped up in the past couple of years to become the “trust layer” the internet needs — including Pangram. The startup recently snapped up $9 million for its AI detection system and landed a partnership with Substack, which is now using Pangram’s tech to show readers…
28 Aug 2026 · 34 min

Will TikTok and YouTube follow Meta’s new rules for teens?

Earlier this week, Meta agreed to pay $18 billion and make sweeping changes to how minors access its social networks to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 states. But the eye-popping settlement figure wasn't what caught the attention of the Equity podcast team. Instead, it was what Meta did next. The social media giant sent an open letter to TikTok and YouTube asking the companies to join it in setting industry-wide standards for teens, including daily time limits, blocking access to apps at night, and restricting notifications during school hours. But will these other companies follow? The…
26 Aug 2026 · 31 min

From the Spotify Mafia to the Lovable Mafia: inside Stockholm's founder network

Vibe-coding darling Lovable just raised $400 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, roughly doubling its worth in eight months. But Lovable isn’t the only Stockholm startup putting up huge numbers lately — legal AI company Legora and health tech startup Neko Health are right there with it. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis is joined by Sophia Bendz, a partner at Cherry Ventures and longtime fixture of Europe’s startup scene, to unpack what’s driving startup growth in the Nordic ecosystem, from Sweden’s social safety net to the wave of U.S. capital flowing…
21 Aug 2026 · 41 min

The DOJ is investigating a16z. What does this mean for venture capital?

Andreessen Horowitz has two partners sitting on the boards of companies that now compete with each other: Ben Horowitz at Databricks and Martin Casado at Fivetran. Nothing too scandalous on the surface, except the Department of Justice has reportedly been investigating the arrangement for almost a year, dusting off a 112-year-old antitrust law that's rarely used against VCs. Board conflicts aren't exactly new, and these companies weren't necessarily direct competitors when a16z first invested in them. But as portfolio companies expand into each other's markets, the DOJ's scrutiny raises a…
19 Aug 2026 · 33 min

AI has a GPU pricing problem. Silicon Data wants to fix it.

The AI buildout shows no signs of slowing. And with hundreds of billions of dollars a year going into data centers and GPUs, compute has become the single biggest cost for anyone building AI products. But for all that spending, there still isn’t a straightforward way to put a price on compute — or for firms to hedge their exposure when the price changes. Silicon Data just closed a $30 million Series A to change that. The startup aims to become the reference price for GPU rental and an index that a Wall Street futures contract would settle against. The company plans to launch its compute…
14 Aug 2026 · 35 min

Meta's 'open' AI, data centers' hidden costs, and a $250M deal gone very wrong

Meta released Glimmer this week, an open-weight AI model anyone can download and run on their own hardware — a contrast to Muse Spark, the company’s more powerful model that stays locked behind its own APIs. The release landed alongside a letter from Mark Zuckerberg arguing AI should be “for everyone” rather than controlled by a handful of labs, but as Equity’s hosts point out, the vision comes with some asterisks. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan take a look at Glimmer, Zuckerberg’s 6,500-word manifesto, and more of the week’s…
12 Aug 2026 · 31 min

Why Sandbar thinks it’s voice-enabled ring can avoid the AI hardware graveyard

AI notetaking hardware has taken off over the past couple of years, with credit-card-sized devices, pendants, pins, and even transcribing earbuds all promising to capture your meetings and turn them into summaries and action items. Now, a whole wave of wearables — rings especially — are betting people want to capture stray thoughts and ideas the same way. One of the companies chasing that bet is Sandbar, the startup behind the private voice ring Stream, which has raised $36 million to date, including a $23 million Series A led by Adjacent and Kindred Ventures. On this episode of TechCrunch's…
7 Aug 2026 · 29 min

Jill Lepore on the ‘Artificial State’ and why Silicon Valley's leaders are bad sci-fi readers

Historian Jill Lepore has a theory about why tech companies often use soaring language to describe their products — almost as if they're forming a new government. And whether you're thinking of Twitter's old “town hall in your pocket” or Anthropic's Claude constitution, it's a theory that doesn't paint Silicon Valley in a very flattering light. In Lepore's upcoming book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker writer argues that tech companies are gradually taking on the functions of democratic government — whether that’s Twitter…
5 Aug 2026 · 32 min

Why Lightspeed is going all-in on creator-led venture capital

Venture firms are turning to creators to build trust with the next generation of founders before a check is ever written. It's a trend that's been building with a16z's acquisition of Erik Torenberg’s Turpentine podcast and OpenAI's acquisition of TBPN. Lightspeed Venture Partners just made its own notable hire in that vein, bringing on Claire Zau, a seed investor with a major following on Instagram and TikTok, to source deals and co-host the firm's new show, Lightwork, alongside CMO Josh Machiz. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Dominic-Madori Davis is joined by Zau and Machiz…
31 Jul 2026 · 36 min

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

After years of pushing full speed ahead on AI, Sam Altman says maybe it’s time for the AI industry to “pace” itself. The comments come just days after one of OpenAI's own models broke out of its test environment and got tangled up in a breach at Hugging Face, though as Equity’s hosts point out, sloppy security seems to have been just as much to blame as the model itself. Altman's not alone in this stance: both OpenAI and Anthropic have come out in support of a petition echoing that same message. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig…
29 Jul 2026 · 31 min

‘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

With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have spent over a decade exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson. Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back on big tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Amanda Silberling talks with Tang and Hollier about the company's newly announced flip phone, why they think the anti-smartphone backlash is only just…
24 Jul 2026 · 39 min

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

Chinese AI lab Moonshot's open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder that “China risk” isn't the only kind of AI risk worth worrying about. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into why Kimi K3 set off a fresh round of AI panic, the industry’s response to an OpenAI…
22 Jul 2026 · 34 min

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

Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy says he's never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic's $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never…
17 Jul 2026 · 35 min

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

Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it's not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI's chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI's response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn't be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO as early as later this year. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the lawsuit could mean for OpenAI's own hardware ambitions…
15 Jul 2026 · 31 min

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

Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never…
10 Jul 2026 · 38 min

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

Open source AI is booming, according to Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue. The company has grown into something like a GitHub for AI in recent years, where AI builders can share and download open models and datasets, now used by roughly half the Fortune 500. Delangue has seen the same story play out again and again: companies start out on frontier APIs, but as they scale, the costs push them towards open source models. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talked to Delangue about why the open vs closed source fight matters in the wake of Anthropic’s halted Fable…
8 Jul 2026 · 26 min

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

When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they're less skilled at understanding how things actually move through space and time — an essential skill for producing intelligence that generalizes. That gap, it turns out, might be filled by gaming data. That's the bet behind General Intuition, a Bezos-backed, New York-based startup valued at $2.3 billion that just closed a $320 million round with Coatue, Eric Schmidt, and researchers at MIT and Google DeepMind…
3 Jul 2026 · 16 min

Best of Build Mode: Think like a VC

Instead of our usual news rundown, Equity is sending you off into the 4th of July weekend with a special episode of our sister podcast Build Mode. Season 3 launches July 9th, but before it does, Build Mode is revisiting some of the best fundraising and startup advice from the investors featured in last season. From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully…
1 Jul 2026 · 29 min

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

We've said it before, and we'll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money's flowing back, and it's the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the…
26 Jun 2026 · 36 min

OpenAI's Jalapeño chip is Big Tech's spiciest move away from Nvidia yet

Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending. OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal isn't a clean break so much as a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha,…

About Equity

The intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital touches everything now. That’s why Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast, digs into the business of startups for entrepreneurs and enthusiasts alike. Every Wednesday and Friday, TechCrunch reporters keep you up-to-date on the world of business, technology, and venture capital. Equity is ranked the No.2 podcast in the Top 100 Venture Capital All time leaderboard on Goodpods—As well as No.17 for the Top 100 Finance All time chart and No.32 for the Top 100 Business News All time chart.

Equity is a English tech & science podcast from TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa Loconsolo
Language: English
Category: Tech & Science
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 34 min
Latest episode: 7 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1215439780
Website: techcrunch.com

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