Equity

The Pentagon is playing chicken with Anthropic over who gets to control how the military uses AI while communities across the country are blocking data center construction. As the AI debate has been flattened to “doomers versus boomers,” one state legislator is attempting to walk a middle road. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Alex Bores, New York Assembly member and congressional candidate. Bores sponsored New York's first-of-its-kind AI safety law the RAISE Act — and quickly became the target of a Silicon Valley super PAC with $125 million to spend on attack ads. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

The dueling super PACs now fighting over AI's future, and why Anthropic's $20 million bet on the pro-regulation side matters. 

What the RAISE Act actually requires, why it's being called the blueprint for AI regulation nationwide. 

Whether AI regulation ends up looking like finance and biotech or goes the way of social media — largely unregulated until the damage is done. 

What's coming next from Bores’ office: bills on training data disclosure, content provenance, and a 43-point national AI framework. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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Crypto is creeping back into the startup conversation, but at ETH Denver last week, the buzz was as much about Washington as it was about tokens. Policy shifts are rippling through the market as Tether and stablecoins face scrutiny, players like Stripe re-enter the chat, and startups either find traction or flame out. The hype cycle is over, or at least taking a break. So what comes next? 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Jacquelyn Melinek, CEO of Token Relations and host of the Talking Tokens and Crypto in America podcasts, to make sense of how the market has changed and what in the world of crypto is built to last. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why ETHDenver fell flat despite a strong speaker lineup, and what it signals about crypto’s shifting hubs. 

What White House crypto adviser Patrick Witt and SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce are actually pushing for with The GENIUS Act and Clarity Act. 

What Stripe is quietly building with Bridge, Privy, and Tempo, and whether it's becoming the Visa of stablecoin settlement. 

Tether's shrinking equity cushion and what a de-pegging event could mean for the broader crypto market. 

YC’s surprising move to accept stablecoin investment as Bitcoin prices sit at half their peak. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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TechCrunch's founder-focused podcast, Build Mode, is back. This season we’re breaking down what it really takes to build a world-class founding team starting with your cap table, equity structures, and startup compensation strategy. 

We kick off with Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst and former founder, YC partner, and seed investor at Wayfinder Ventures. Yuri has worked with hundreds of pre-seed and seed-stage startups, and he shares practical advice on how early-stage founders should think about startup equity, cap table design, investor selection, and compensation structures from day one. 

He breaks down: 

The 3 types of investors (and which one to avoid) 

Why your cap table is part of your team 

The 20–25% seed dilution rule 

How to split equity with a co-founder 

How to talk to early employees about risk and compensation 

No matter where you are in your startup journey, this episode will help you get the incentive structure right from the beginning.  

Chapters: 

00:00 - Why your first hires deserve more equity 
00:31 - Meet Yuri Sagalov (YC → General Catalyst) 
02:12 - Your cap table is part of your team 
02:50 - The 3 types of investors (avoid this one) 
05:02 - How to split equity with a co-founder 
07:55 - How much equity to give early employees 
09:37 - How to talk compensation and risk 
12:31 - Red flags in formation docs and vesting 
18:27 - Advisors for equity? Usually a mistake 
20:05 - The 20–25% seed dilution rule 
26:03 - The shift to 10-year stock options 
34:11 - Don’t scale before product-market fit 
39:23 - Final advice: Just start and choose your co-founder carefully 

New episodes of Build Mode drop every Thursday. Hosted by Isabelle Johannessen. Produced and edited by Maggie Nye. Audience development led by Morgan Little. Special thanks to the Foundry and Cheddar video teams. 

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The creator economy is evolving fast, and ad revenue alone isn't cutting it anymore. YouTubers are launching product lines, acquiring startups, and building actual business empires. Even MrBeast's company bought fintech startup Step, and his chocolate business is outearning his media arm. This isn't just one creator's strategy. It's the new playbook. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan unpack how creators are diversifying beyond ads, what happens when influence becomes infrastructure, and whether this model can scale beyond the top 1%. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

How Date Drop raised “a few million” on the idea that one curated match per week can fix college dating burnout 

Ex-Tesla VP Drew Baglino's $140M raise for solid-state transformers powering AI data centers 

The handshake that didn't happen: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei's moment at India's AI summit 

India's $200B AI infrastructure push and why its first AI IPO flopped 

ByteDance's Seadance 2.0 and whether AI video tools democratize creativity or just create an endless flood of content 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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Startup founders are being pushed to move faster than ever, using AI while facing tighter funding, rising infrastructure costs, and more pressure to show real traction early. Cloud credits, access to GPUs, and foundation models have made it easier to get started, but those early infrastructure choices can have unforeseen consequences once startups move beyond free credits and into real cloud bills. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan caught up with Darren Mowry, Google Cloud’s vice president of global startups who is right at the center of those tradeoffs. Together, they discuss what Mowry’s seeing across the startup ecosystem, how Google Cloud is competing for AI startups, and what founders should be thinking about as they scale. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

How Google positions against AWS and Microsoft in the AI startup race. 

TPUs vs GPUs: How much does hardware choice matter for early-stage companies? 

Which AI verticals are seeing real growth, and what’s standing out in biotech, climate tech, developer tools, and world models. 

What red flags will signal that a startup isn’t going to make it.  

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while OpenAI is facing its own shakeups, from the disbanding of its mission alignment team to the firing of a policy exec who opposed its “adult mode” feature. 

On this episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's biggest deals and departures, from billion-dollar bets on fusion and robotics to the tech exodus reshaping AI companies. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why humanoid robot startups are raising nearly $1 billion and partnering with Google DeepMind 

Whether fusion power startup Inertia Enterprises can actually deliver on its 2030 timeline, and why investors keep betting millions 

What the Epstein files reveal about Silicon Valley dealmaking, particularly during the EV boom 

Why AI Super Bowl ads might not be landing outside Silicon Valley 

Chapters

00:00 Intro

02:46 AI Super Bowl ads ⁠aren’t quite landing⁠ outside of Silicon Valley 

04:31 Apptronik raises $935M for humanoid robotics

09:05 Will automakers partner with humanoid robotics startups?

13:05 Inertia Enterprises raises $450M for fusion energy

18:44 What the Epstein files reveal about ⁠Silicon Valley dealmaking⁠

30:56 The exodus at xAI and OpenAI, and what it means for the AI race

37:22 Outro

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Enterprise AI is shifting fast from chatbots that answer questions to systems that actually do the work across an organization. But who will own the AI layer that powers all of it? 

 Glean, which started as an enterprise search product, has evolved into what it calls an “AI work assistant,” aiming to sit underneath other AI experiences, connecting to internal systems, managing permissions, and delivering intelligence wherever employees work.

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Glean’s CEO and founder Arvind Jain at Web Summit Qatar to break down how enterprises are thinking about AI architecture, what's driving consolidation, and what's real versus hype in the agent space. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

The fight between bundled AI from tech titans like Microsoft, Google and platform layers like Glean and its competitors. 

How AI adoption is reshaping leadership and organizational design. 

Why permissions and governance are harder problems than most companies realize. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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AI lab Flapping Airplanes just landed $180 million in seed funding from the likes of Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index to do something most labs have quietly given up on: making models learn like humans instead of vacuuming up the internet. The founding team, made up of brothers Ben and Asher Spector and co-founder Aidan Smith, is betting that radically more data-efficient training could open the door to entirely new AI capabilities. 

Today on Equity, TechCrunch AI editor Russell Brandon sits down with all three founders to discuss why investors wrote such a large check for a lab with no product, what becomes possible with more efficient AI, and why they're prioritizing creativity over credentials. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Why the Flapping Airplanes team is focused on research first, commercialization later 

What the "neolabs" generation means for AI development 

How they plan to make AI models 1,000x more data efficient. A hint? The team thinks the brain is "the floor, not the ceiling" for AI capabilities 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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Elon Musk has merged SpaceX and xAI, creating what might be the blueprint for a new Silicon Valley power structure. With his $800 billion net worth already rivaling historic conglomerate GE's peak market cap, and Musk being vocal about his view that "tech victory is decided by velocity of innovation," the question isn't whether a personal conglomerate can be built, but rather how far Musk himself is going to take it. 

Today on Equity, we're unpacking this new era of the "everything" business, whether we'll see others like Sam Altman follow suit, and more of the week's headlines. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about:  

Waymo's new $16B funding and why Alphabet staying as majority owner matters for an eventual IPO 

Why everyone from Intel to Tesla is trying to break Nvidia's AI chip dominance 

ElevenLabs’ $11B valuation, and why some investors are doubling — and quadrupling — down as it moves beyond voice AI 

Positron's $230M bet on power-efficient chips as the next frontier 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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Andreessen Horowitz just raised a whopping new $15 billion in funding. And a $1.7 billion chunk of that is going to its infrastructure team, the one responsible for some of its biggest, most prominent AI investments including Black Forrest Labs, Cursor, OpenAI, ElevenLabs, Ideogram, Fal and dozens of others.  

A16z general partner with the infra team Jennifer Li (who oversees such investments as ElevenLabs – just valued at $11 billion); Ideagram and Fal, has a clear thesis on where the team is looking to spend it’s latest chunk of cash. 

Today on TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Venture and Startups editor Julie Bort talked with Li about where a16z sees this AI super cycle going next, including the talent crunch hitting AI-native startups, why search infrastructure matters more than people think, and what kinds of companies are actually getting funded right now. 

Listen to the full episode to hear about: 

Where Li thinks the gaps still are when it comes to startups building an AI stack 

What makes the most successful AI portfolio companies different 

How tools like voice AI are rising in importance (yet still a bit uncomfortable to witness) 

The AI startups she's still searching for and is ready to fund 

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

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