OpenAI, Thinking Machines Lab, and the built-in chaos of a $2B seed round

OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, Mira Murati, just raised one of the largest seed rounds in history. Murati secured $2 billion in that seed round for Thinking Machines Lab — a startup so early, it hasn’t even revealed what it’s working on yet. The move is raising eyebrows across Silicon Valley, and it’s only the latest in a wave of top researchers splintering off from OpenAI to chase their own AI moonshots. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Rebecca Bellan and Anthony Ha break down what’s fueling the OpenAI talent shuffle, investor enthusiasm, and a former employee’s behind-the-scenes peek inside the company. Either way, the team agrees: seed rounds really have changed. Listen to the full episode to hear more news from the week, including: The drama around xAI's safety practices keeps coming, with researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic publicly criticizing Musk's AI startup over Grok's latest scandals and what they reveal about broader AI safety gaps Uber investing hundreds of millions into premium robotaxis with Lucid and Nuro. Kirsten and Rebecca have some thoughts on whether this is a smart move or more AV déjà vu The AI coding assistant sector is heating up with major acquisitions. Devin-maker Cognition acquired Windsurf just days after Google poached the latter’s leadership in what's becoming a pattern of reverse acquihires Jack Dorsey's latest string of vibe-coding projects and nonprofit hacker collective, all pointing back to his long-standing push for decentralized tech. Equity will be back for you next week, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Ha?

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:16Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, July 18. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor at TechCrunch, and I'm joined today by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha, and Senior Reporter Rebecca Boulon, who listeners know from our interview show. Max is on the road today, but he did recently catch up with Hugging Face's co-founder and Chief Scientist, Thomas Wolfe, so please check out that episode, which was just released. Anthony, what are we talking about today?

• 0:50Anthony Ha?

  I'm glad you asked. On the show today, we're going to have Deals of the Week from Cognition/Windsurf and Uber's big robo-taxi play. And then we're going to be talking about the AI talent shuffle and what the heck Jack Dorsey's been up to. First, just a little check-in. Have you guys been following? I know last week, we talked about some drama around XAI. That drama has not ended. There's been criticism. There have been these new sort of avatars from XAI. What have you all made of it?

• 1:20Kirsten Korosec?

  So I want to preface this whole conversation that it's like, every week, the drama just increases. Also, it's really easy to dunk on Elon Musk right now. So I'm not going to go totally there. But what you're referring to is sort of this pretty negative criticism from OpenAI and Anthropic researchers around the reckless safety culture at XAI. And we've seen that kind of play out a little bit. But it's one thing when criticism is usually coming from like the armchair quarterbacks on social media. But this is actually coming from people who are AI researchers working in this space. So to me, that resonated and felt, I don't know, more important, I guess.

• 2:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, yeah, I would say that a lot of what we're seeing is from engineers who are saying that it's irresponsible that XAI hasn't published safety reports, which is a huge red flag because Musk has, you know, previously warned about AI risks. That was his whole reason for starting OpenAI in the beginning. And you can see also when you're interacting with Grok as well. I mean, obviously, there's, we don't need to go into the details of how, you know, misbehavior prone it has been. But even with the new updates and with the new AI companions, for example, you're definitely seeing that it's pretty easy to jailbreak the system and get it to say things. And it does, right?

• 2:39Anthony Ha?

  Right. It's not just about our feelings about Elon, which I think you could probably listen to past episodes and get a sense. But also that it is about this larger debate about the direction that AI goes in in the future. How much say, you know, we as consumers, we as a society have? And particularly, there is this sort of camp, I think Max has done some really good writing about this, about there's like a camp of sort of libertarian, right wing Silicon Valley folks who are very much like, free speech AI, there should be no censorship of AI. And now we're actually seeing what that looks like. And not to speak for anyone else, but that's certainly not the AI future that I want.

• 3:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, you can't call it an ultimate truth seeker if what it ends up producing is mostly misinformation and conspiracy theories, which is not to say that's what Grok is doing now. They have made some updates and, you know, when we were playing around with the companions, we asked about conspiracy theories, it wouldn't really go there. But that doesn't mean that it's not still capable of kind of spewing dangerous information just for the shock factor and the wow factor and the, you know, stick it to the man factor of it all.

• 3:40Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, Grok is absolutely like built to be spicy. And so I think that we can easily predict a future in which this will come up again. Right? But that's not the only AI news that has been happening this week. Obviously, TechCrunch is filled with AI coverage. And one of the ones I want to talk about is this deal regarding cognition acquiring Windsurf. Anthony, tell us about that deal.

• 4:04Anthony Ha?

  Right. Well, so this is actually sort of like, like two part news. Cause the first thing that happened was something that I think we have been seeing more of in recent years. Although I think There'd been a little bit of a lull, which was what is called a reverse acquihire, where essentially usually a fan company takes a bunch of people from a company, but doesn't do the sort of full acquisition. And we can talk a bit more about why that's the case. And that's what Google seemed to do to Windsurf. It poached the CEO, the co-founder, the research lead. And this was, you know, a $2.4 billion deal. So this was like itself a huge deal. One of the questions in these situations like, well, what happens to the startup? When all this stuff has gone away? And in this case, it does seem like Windsurf has found a home with cognition.

• 4:49Anthony Ha?

  Rebecca, before we even started recording, I know you had plenty of thoughts about this.

• 4:52Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, speaking about this like reverse acquihire, I think that a lot of these big tech companies are finding ways to try to get around the fear of an antitrust trial or investigation by not acquiring the company, but by just like acquiring its talent or its technology. But that's just an acquisition by another name. And so like ultimately, I'm not really sure how this is good for the startup world when they are not being, they're not able to grow into competitors when Google or Amazon or whatever is just right around the corner with a big chunk of money saying, hey, we'll, we'll buy you, right? And like OpenAI too, I would put into the big tech category at this point.

• 5:33Rebecca Bellan?

  So I would say that FTC and the DOJ are not doing their jobs if they're not looking into this. Like you don't have to wait for an actual acquisition to trigger an investigation. This is, this is clearly anti-competitive behavior designed to create monopolies.

• 5:48Anthony Ha?

  And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, right? Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting question because I do think that a lot of the ways this was talked about, say in 2024 was like, oh, the FTC has gone too far in aggressively policing acquisitions. Acquisitions are impossible. And so this is just how the big tech companies have adapted to it. You know, obviously we're under a different administration now.

• 6:10Rebecca Bellan?

  And yet they've still found a way to try to blame Lina Khan for this. I'm seeing people talk about this is, you know, this is Lina Khan's fault, who was the former director of the FTC for being so anti-big tech and for really policing these big tech mergers so that she forced this into happening. I'm like, come on, like, that's not.

• 6:29Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, Lina Khan has definitely been sort of a boogeyman for certain corners of Silicon Valley for the last few years, and they can't let her go. But I do think that whoever is running the FTC, I agree that it does seem like we've kind of gotten the worst of both worlds in that if you want just sort of like a million acquisitions bloom, that's great. Like, well, no, I don't know if that's great, but like, that is certainly, I think arguably a better situation, certainly a better situation for startups. But now we're in this situation where the big tech companies, if anything, they face less competition because they, you know, like you said, they can sort of pick off and essentially destroy, not in all cases, but in many cases, sort of really hobble startups that could become

• 7:13Anthony Ha?

  competitors in a few years. And instead, they just are like, well, we just get what we want from it. But then the startup sort of dies on the vine.

• 7:21Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm glad you brought up some of the dies on the vine part because the one group of people that we haven't really talked too much about yet is the 250 people or so that were left at Windsurf after the CEO, co-founder, and like research leads left and got this $2.4 billion deal. Granted, they have now been bought by Cognition. But, you know, Rebecca, we were talking about this offline before, which is like, what happened to the value of that equity? And I'm sure that they are getting great, you know, employment deals with Cognition. And I've seen a couple of posts on like LinkedIn and people seem happy about it. But, you know, a lot of these startups, it's not just salary, but it's the equity. And when you're not part of that aquahire, what is the value then

• 8:06Kirsten Korosec?

  of Windsurf? And what are they getting? And I don't personally know the terms of the deal, but I think it's a it's worthy question, not just for Windsurf and those folks who are now part of Cognition, but for all of these startups that end up in these kind of pseudo aquahire deals where you see founders, CEO get peeled off for a billion dollars or more, and then everyone else is kind of staying and floating around. And what happens to those folks?

• 8:31Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard to know. I'm really curious to talk to some Windsor folks about how it's going for them. From what I'm hearing on online chatter, they're not super pleased because it feels like they've just been left behind with a shell company and their equity has hit the floor. So, you know, obviously startups, if you work at a startup, a lot of the time you're accepting a lower salary for a chunk of equity that you're hoping will grow. So they had this kind of whiplash of like, OpenAI is going to buy us. Like, wow. I mean, we can talk about that from the antitrust perspective, but for these people, they would have been really stoked about it. But then now their equity under cognition is probably not going to be as high. Like, you know, they're saying that their that their business is doing really well. They're saying that they're back in with Anthropic. I did want to share one quote from another founder of Amplitude Analytics,

• 9:14Rebecca Bellan?

  Spencer Skates, and he emailed me about this when I asked what he thought about the deal. And he said, imagine being captain of a ship in a stormy ocean and then piecing out for a bigger ship and leaving hundreds of your crew members behind. As the captain, you're supposed to be the last one off the ship, not leave your passengers behind. So.

• 9:30Kirsten Korosec?

  That's kind of brutal.

• 9:31Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it's pretty spicy. Great leaders take care of their people, he said, not leave them behind. So, I mean, yeah, there is that whole mentality of going down with the ship.

• 9:40Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, well, I think on all of this, it's fair to say that there will be more of these acquisitions, like the race for AI coding assistance continues. I want to jump into a different deal, one that's close to my heart. And I just feel, again, I keep going into this like nostalgic era with autonomous vehicles. And I'm talking about the mega deal that Uber announced this week. The company has been putting, since they sold their own self-driving unit, Uber ATG, back in 2020, there was a lull. And then really, the last two years, they've been making partnerships with just about every, every autonomous vehicle technology company out there.

• 10:19Kirsten Korosec?

  Delivery, mobility, you name it, at various stages of deployment, Waymo being the like most mature and actually active. But this deal is a $300 million investment in Lucid, the EV maker. A multi-hundred million dollar deal or investment into Neuro, which is the AV supplier. And Neuro's tech is going to go into Lucid's new luxury all-electric SUV, the Gravity. And Uber and its third-party operator is going to operate this robotaxi program in a major US city starting sometime in 2026. Totally insane to me and illustrates.

• 11:00Kirsten Korosec?

  Honestly, how thirsty Uber is and I think kind of afraid of losing any ground at all to autonomous vehicles.

• 11:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, Neuro is an existing partner for Uber, so it's not that surprising. So Neuro did, you know, some, some food delivery stuff. They had an existing partnership.

• 11:16Kirsten Korosec?

  But a very, very different business because back like a year ago, you wrote about this, like Neuro was building these low speed delivery, autonomous delivery. And you're right, they have a relationship with Uber, but this, I don't know if for you feels very different and kind of a lifeline to Neuro. What do you think?

• 11:33Rebecca Bellan?

  It feels like I was expecting this because when I wrote about, I covered their pivot last year. And so, as you said, they, they previously had these low speed delivery vehicles. That just wasn't working. They realized they were sinking money by trying to, you know, manufacture these vehicles. So they moved on to trying to license the tech and doing what, you know, other AB companies are doing, just focus on the tech and getting to level four. So they've been like really signaling that they want to be partnering with ride hail companies and delivery companies like Uber or Lyft. Uber seemed like a natural fit. Like this doesn't surprise me at all that they'd be working with them because they are already a partner. And Uber is just snatching up like literally everyone that says they can, that says they can do autonomy.

• 12:13Rebecca Bellan?

  So that didn't surprise me. The Lucid one also didn't surprise me because when I've spoken to Lucid before, I mean, they are, they're, these are expensive cars. They're beautiful. I've driven them, but they're expensive cars and it's hard to, you know, it's hard to sell them. So I, it didn't surprise me to see them move into the autonomy space and to try to get a deal like this. So that they can have the money to manufacture their vehicles and get, you know, get them seen. And also they weren't going to build their own self-driving stack. Like that's not, I've tried their, whatever their ADAS was, it wasn't amazing.

• 12:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Dream Drive.

• 12:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. Yeah, it was, it was okay. It was all right.

• 12:50Anthony Ha?

  So Kirsten, you, you said that you felt like this was insane. Was it like just the amount of money invested or just how many partners Uber has in this space at this point?

• 12:58Kirsten Korosec?

  I just think that deals like this with companies that are complicated are difficult and take a long time. So there's just the complexity of the deal, although I shouldn't be surprised because Uber has done these incredibly complex deals before. Yes, the amount of money, they have been investing in a variety of companies. They invested 100 million into We Ride, you know, a couple of months ago. But 300 million specifically into Lucid, that's not counting the at least 20,000 modified vehicles that they're going to have committed to buying over the next six years. These are the ones that will have the Neurotech. And then putting in a multi hundred dollar investment in Neuro, which

• 13:40Kirsten Korosec?

  at least one source of mine has said is more, couldn't get in that exact figure, but said more than the 300 million into Lucid. That's a lot of money. So it's at least 600 million. And it's not just the only deal that Uber is doing. I think that's what, to me, feels important, is that it's not like this is the one investment they're making. They're clearly spending a lot of money in autonomous vehicles.

• 14:04Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, they could, they could have just built it themselves, couldn't they? The amount they've spent on this. I mean,

• 14:08Kirsten Korosec?

  Different time, Rebecca, different, different complicated time in the Uber ATG era.

• 14:14Rebecca Bellan?

  But do they not have, just like a quick touch on this before we move on, don't Uber and Lucid have similar backers? Like, they're both backed by Saudi PIF, right? Aren't they part of Uber's board?

• 14:22Kirsten Korosec?

  Neuro is like some of,

• 14:23Rebecca Bellan?

  Not Neuro, but Lucid. Lucid is backed by,

• 14:26Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, Lucid is, yes, absolutely backed by Saudi's Sovereign Fund.

• 14:31Rebecca Bellan?

  And so Uber is as well. I mean, maybe, maybe that was just a long time ago. I don't know if they're still a backer, but they definitely in 2016 invested in Uber.

• 14:38Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, there's, I think there's a small space and Saudi Arabia's Sovereign Fund has clearly had a lot of interest in companies like Uber that are pushing into international markets. And for Lucid, it was a massive lifeline back when they received that funding. This, I think, from Uber helps diversify them a little bit, which is good and does give them another customer for that gravity SUV, which so far is just, you know, just ramping up production and really hasn't had big sales. Deals numbers yet. So that is going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I do want to mention that like, production isn't even going to start on these modified vehicles until late 2026.

• 15:21Kirsten Korosec?

  So Lucid still has work to do on the consumer end, like, forget about the robotaxis. And I did want to mention, of course, I had my phone blowing up in the last day because of this deal and some folks who are insiders, and a number of them are like, there's going to be more deals. There's going to be more deals with Uber, and you're going to see even more either consolidation or investment coming from Uber and elsewhere in the autonomous vehicle space. And we're already seeing that. You know, a startup by Anthony Levandowski, pronto, just acquired its rival, not robotaxis, applied to construction equipment, but we're seeing these deals ramp up again. And I think we're going to see a lot more with Uber. Enough of my Uber talk, though. We have to go to break.

• 16:06Kirsten Korosec?

  And when we come back, we're going to talk about the AI power shuffle and do a deep dive into what the heck Jack Dorsey is up to.

• 16:18Anthony Ha?

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• 16:56Anthony Ha?

  So the first theme we're going to be talking about is the AI talent shuffle, power shuffle. I mean, I guess in some ways, they're kind of equivalent. And we're kind of grouping a few different stories under this. A big one is this funding round for Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Labs. And this is a $2 billion seed round, which-

• 17:17Kirsten Korosec?

  A seed round.

• 17:18Anthony Ha?

  Seed round, yes. Quote unquote, the scare quotes around, like, pretty much everything that's not a number.

• 17:23Kirsten Korosec?

  Seed rounds have really changed during my time at TechCrunch, I've got to say.

• 17:28Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, and that, and again, that's not the valuation. That's just the amount invested. The valuation is now $12 billion. And this is for a company that has basically said nothing publicly, has no live product, you know, that we know of, has not really said anything publicly about what it's building. Presumably investors have access to more information than we do, but

• 17:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Maybe.

• 17:51Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, but it's hard not to see it as basically, you know, the former OpenAI CTO going into rooms and being like, hello, would you like to write me a check for hundreds of millions of dollars? And then, you know, and Jason Horowitz, Nvidia, a bunch saying yes.

• 18:04Rebecca Bellan?

  I don't, you know, pop off, queen. I mean, I love it.

• 18:07Kirsten Korosec?

  So, so I do think, I know Rebecca has a lot to say about this, but I, I think that we are seeing, what I saw with autonomous vehicles, like seven or eight years ago, we're seeing in the AI space at a magnitude of like a factor of 10 above this, which is a brain trust is created where some of the top minds or pioneers in a space can literally get any amount of money during a particular time. So five years from now, will they still have that same cachet? Who knows? But right now, yes, she can absolutely get this money. And there are others, you know, who have left OpenAI, who have maybe not received quite this much seed money. But it's, I think, reflective of this collective brain trust of people coming from these companies

• 18:52Kirsten Korosec?

  like OpenAI at the C-suite level and peeling off and doing their own thing. And really people being so, investors specifically being so excited about what they think they can do, that they can almost write their own ticket in any way.

• 19:06Rebecca Bellan?

  Should we take bets on like what the product is? Like, I have no, like, the details are so scarce. She, all she says is like, we'll unveil something in the next couple of months that will include a significant open source offering, tools for researchers and startups building custom AI models, like. They're working with Google Cloud for compute, so that's cool to know, but like, what is it? How and how do you have such evaluation based on a not product with a not revenue yet? It's just like the hype is astounding.

• 19:32Kirsten Korosec?

  And what is the business model?

• 19:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Kirsten Korosec?

  Like, I think we know there's a lot of exciting stuff happening in AI and Rebecca, you and Max, if you're on here, would give us a laundry list of everything that's happening. But what we know, even people who are really not watching the space closely, it's hard to make money in it.

• 19:48Rebecca Bellan?

  Right, especially if you're doing open source.

• 19:50Kirsten Korosec?

  Right. So to me, that is not just like what the product is, but how is it that they're going to make money? And I guess with $2 billion seed round, you've got a runway. So maybe you don't have to worry about revenue for a while.

• 20:02Anthony Ha?

  Right. And so this is also happening sort of against the backdrop of, I don't know how much we've talked about on equity, probably a little bit, it, you know, that there's also Meta has also been hiring a bunch from OpenAI with a lot of reporting, including from TechCrunch about just some pretty crazy high offers. And then at the same time, we were also going to talk a little bit about Calvin French Owen, who worked at OpenAI for a year, doing this blog post about kind of what what things are like at OpenAI. And basically, it sounds like very chaotic, I think it's fair to say.

• 20:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I wonder if that's why all those researchers went over to Thinking Machine Labs, was it John Schulman, Barrett Zoff, Luke Metz? I wonder how much that like OpenAI saw of this post before he sent it out, right? Like, he's got to have signed some NDAs and nondisparagement clauses and things like that.

• 20:49Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I found the blog post kind of fascinating and, you know, want to mention that, you know, Calvin French Owen isn't like a slouch on his own regard. Like, he was co-founder of Customer Data Startup Segment, which was bought by Twilio in 2020 for like 3.2 billion and was at OpenAI. So I think it's very much worth listening to what he has to say about his time in OpenAI. And while he was there, it scaled from like 1,000 people to 3,000 people, which, you know, is crazy growth. And he had some really interesting takeaways. Rebecca, I don't know, did you have any that were like particularly stood out to you?

• 21:28Rebecca Bellan?

  Honestly, the one that stood out to me the most. Was one of the last things that, which is why I say I wonder if OpenAI kind of approved some of this before it got sent out because he said like some of the biggest misconception is that we're not concerned about safety, but he seemed to say that OpenAI in fact is really concerned about safety and they're really monitoring for things like hate speech and abuse and, you know, political bias, like manipulating political biases, crafting bioweapons, self harm, stuff like that, which I mean, it is a lot harder to jailbreak OpenAI. So I guess what stood out to me the most, most out of all of it, it was just what it's, OpenAI is like, I would consider big tech, but they're clearly still operating like a startup. They're moving so fast. They're breaking many things. They're just like dumping

• 22:08Rebecca Bellan?

  data into repositories. And I think that that is incredible in a lot of ways. They've been able to achieve so much. I also think it is scary in a lot of ways.

• 22:19Anthony Ha?

  I wonder to what extent like a company like Thinking Machines Labs can be that different from that. I mean, presumably, you know, Mira Murati had experiences that she wasn't as happy with at OpenAI and is maybe trying to build a slightly different company culture, but some degree of chaos, I have to assume is sort of built in when you're growing that quickly. When you're raising a $2 billion seed round, I feel like things are not going to be very systematic and calm.

• 22:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I mean, they built Codex and French Owen's team built Codex in just seven weeks. So yeah, they're just moving very fast. Still running everything on Slack? Is that weird?

• 22:55Rebecca Bellan?

  That was mentioned as like, this is a, this is a weird thing, but I'm like, what's wrong with Slack?

• 22:59Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, maybe, maybe for others who are like more buttoned up legacy companies that are, you know, on like the Microsoft platform or something.

• 23:08Rebecca Bellan?

  Sorry, Microsoft Teams is awful.

• 23:11Anthony Ha?

  Right. No one is, it's hard to imagine people being like, oh, yes, like what a great system Microsoft Teams is.

• 23:16Kirsten Korosec?

  Right. To me, operating mostly on Slack isn't like particularly interesting. I did think that his comments about the cultural secrecy was really interesting. And I'm very curious, and you kind of touched on it just for a moment, Anthony, about what Mira's startup, is it going to be able to move at the same pace, but have a different culture fundamentally? I mean, a lot of it's going to come down to how. How much open source tools, I think that will play a big part into how its culture develops and who she surrounds at the very top level. That I think will play a massive part in what the culture of that company is going to be like.

• 23:56Rebecca Bellan?

  And how flat it will be, I think, like if you're moving that fast, you need to be able to flag things to the top way faster than, you know, a lot of big tech companies like Google or Microsoft. I imagine it's like a lot harder to get to the top if you need to.

• 24:10Kirsten Korosec?

  You know, who else is moving really fast these days? One of my faves in the tech world, Jack Dorsey.

• 24:16Rebecca Bellan?

  The ultimate eccentric billionaire.

• 24:19Kirsten Korosec?

  Aside from his changing hairstyles and beard lengths, other things have been afoot. He's been really busy the past few months or within the past month. He has this new nonprofit, a $10 million nonprofit hacker collective called The Other Stuff. He has this open source app called Sunday and this peer to peer Bluetooth messaging app that works without Wi Fi or cell service called BitChat. And that's all been in the last month. So, and I'm wondering if you have any theories? Like, has he changed his like day to day lifestyle and his health regimen to like?

• 24:58Anthony Ha?

  That was the subtext. I feel like in some ways this feels fairly consistent with my understanding of who Jack Dorsey has been over the last few years, that he is, he's a weirdo. Like, he just, he doesn't sort of align sort of neatly politically. I mean, obviously, he clearly seems to have like a friendship with Elon Musk, created Blue Sky, but then sort of felt like it had sort of gotten too left wing, too woke for his taste. I mean, those are not the words, but that seemed to be the subtext of what he didn't like about it. And so my sense of him is that he has this sense of dissatisfaction with kind of the way a lot of things work right now. And, you know, no longer is active at Twitter to sort of maybe shape kind of social media in that way.

• 25:42Anthony Ha?

  And so he's like trying to sort of push forward a bunch of other experiments. I would also say that as a very childish person, I think that like BitChat is a really unfortunate slash fortunate spelling, because if you spell it, I would also spell something else.

• 25:56Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, BitChat is unfortunate for other reasons, though, I think, because, I mean, the initial claim is that it's a secure app, but then he says himself, "By the way, guys, it's actually not secure. It's not received any external security review, and it could contain vulnerabilities, and it doesn't necessarily meet its stated security goals. Do not use it for production use and do not rely on its security whatsoever until it's been reviewed." So, I mean, it feels a bit weird to market it as being secure when it's like, actually not.

• 26:22Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. It's in beta, though, right? So, you know.

• 26:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 26:26Kirsten Korosec?

  It's all good.

• 26:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, I'm interested in like, what the use cases for this would be as well, for BitChat.

• 26:31Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, my, I'm not a security expert, but my sense is, you know, that in that world, really, kind of, the number one thing is transparency and basically making it possible for others to sort of test things out, find the flaws. And I feel like there are people from, you know, the startup world who sort of move into that and sort of aren't really ready for that level of transparency. And so, they may have like, the best of intentions, but aren't really kind of ready to walk the walk.

• 26:55Rebecca Bellan?

  But he's Jack Dorsey. He has resources. I don't know. I just feel like he could have done that extra step before coming out with it, possibly, but whatever.

• 27:02Anthony Ha?

  I don't think it's a resource thing. I think it's a mindset problem.

• 27:05Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 27:06Anthony Ha?

  Is that, "I know how to fix this," as opposed to, "Well, no one fully knows how to fix this, so I need to like, really stress test this."

• 27:13Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, yeah. I am curious about the Sunday app as well, the open source app to track UV exposure and vitamin D intake.

• 27:20Anthony Ha?

  I found that more fascinating, yeah.

• 27:22Rebecca Bellan?

  It's often with these apps that provide a purpose, like a service, like, "Okay, well, do I want to track my UV exposure and vitamin D?" Yeah, of cour- why not, right? Like, that's important, I think. I don't know. But I'm wondering what, like, how is he gonna use the data? How is someone else, one day, gonna use all that data about how much UV exposure and vitamin D we get? Are they gonna make a pill for vitamin D? I mean, there are already those, but like, are they gonna sell it to hers and him's and...

• 27:47Kirsten Korosec?

  Right, right. I mean, there's a definite downside to collecting all this human health data. I mean, longevity is very in. We've seen, we've talked about on the show a lot. And there's an upside and downside. On the one hand, like, wow, think of all that data and how it could be used for researchers. Or, ooh, downside. Ooh, it could be just sold to advertisers and suddenly, that's all I'm getting in my feed is, you know, A, a bunch of, even if it's anonymized, like, a bunch of data being used to sell me these things. So, I think that there's always a downside to these sort of apps.

• 28:21Anthony Ha?

  Well, I think the other downside, now that I'm in my old man era, is like, I think we sort of over-optimize sometime, you know, like, once you track something, you really start to become focused on optimizing it. And I do wonder if, like, with sun, like, it's basically like, get some sunlight because it's good for your, like, mental and emotional health, wear sunscreen, wear, you know, like, wear hats and things to, like, reduce the risk of cancer and other issues. Do you need to, like, have that much more data than that? I'm no expert.

• 28:49Rebecca Bellan?

  It's just another form of outsourcing, like, your self-care. And it's just funny, like, humans, like, we need sunlight, and we need to, like, talk to people, and we need to exercise, and whatever. And so we have to, we have to get an app to make us get more sunshine, and we get, like, walking pads to put at our standing desks, so we get our steps in. I'm like, oh, God, the modern life.

• 29:07Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, okay, speaking of, it's time for me to go touch a little bit of grass. So that means, we are out of time, but Equity will be back next week. Rebecca, thanks for coming on this week. You were missed. Until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and Threads.

• 29:27Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. We'd also like to thank TechCrunch's audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.