How a Blue Wave midterm might reshape the AI industry

Democrats’ historic victories in this week’s U. S. midterm elections could also transform the tech industry. The public voted on 41 data center-related ballot measures on Tuesday — in all but one, the majority voted to impose more restrictions on data center development. And even when data centers weren’t on the ballot directly, they were a major talking point, with newly-elected Democratic governors and congressmembers likely to support additional regulation. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and Anthony Ha discuss what the election will mean for the tech industry moving forward — not just when it comes to data centers (which OpenAI is already trying to rebrand), but also increased government scrutiny of Big Tech. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Whether Google first satellite data center is ushering our orbital data center future If major layoffs at design software company Canva and website builder Squarespace can be blamed on AI Marvell’s $115 billion acquisition of Lumentum, in one of the largest deals in history Why CrowdStrike just acquired of two AI security startups What NBCUniversal’s investment in Indian microdrama startup Elo Elo means for the media landscape Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 0:47 Founder Summit recap and an Equity team update 2:23 Midterm results and the data center backlash 7:49 OpenAI rebrands data centers as “compute campuses” 10:57 Wall Street cools on the data center buildout 13:30 Regulatory certainty and building outside the U. S. 15:45 Canva and Squarespace layoffs 20:37 Can AI chatbots replace products like Squarespace? 23:22 Marvell’s $115B Lumentum acquisition 26:51 CrowdStrike buys Fiddler AI and Dreadnode 30:20 Micro drama startup raises $80M 30:59 Outro 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:27Anthony Ha?

  Midterm results are in, and the AI industry could be facing a new wave of resistance to its data center build out or its compute campuses as OpenAI is planning to rebrand them. Also this week, Squarespace and Canva are trimming their teams amid slowing growth, and we're tracking some big deals, including Marvell's $115 billion, and that's billion with a B, acquisition of Lumentum. Stick around.

• 0:57Anthony Ha?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Anthony Ha, and I'm joined by TechCrunch's Transportation Editor Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane, our Senior Reporter, Special Projects. Kirsten, you are not where we normally see you. What's going on?

• 1:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I'm in Boston. We just had our last event of the year, the Founder Summit. Totally different kind of event than Disrupt, very focused on early-stage entrepreneurs, people who just even have ideas. We had a very cool pitch showcase. I interviewed the co-founder of Toast. Great one-day event, all about giving advice to, you know, future founders, which was cool. And in just a day, I'm going to be heading off to Web Summit, so I will not be here on the recording next week, so I'm sorry you're going to miss me. But I have another way bigger announcement, which is this is Sean O'Kane's last show.

• 1:54Sean O'Kane?

  Boo. I'm glad that someone's sad.

• 1:59Kirsten Korosec?

  We're all sad. We're all sad.

• 2:01Sean O'Kane?

  No, I'm going to miss you guys. This is a big bummer. My last day at TechCrunch and my last recording, and it's been, it's been a lot of fun being able to sit back with you guys and think about the news in a way that I don't normally. Sometimes I feel like, I feel like we, we get to process everything here, and so I'm going to miss that a lot.

• 2:23Kirsten Korosec?

  So basically what you're saying is you're going to miss your weekly therapy session to digest all the tech news? Is that what you're saying? Okay, good.

• 2:30Sean O'Kane?

  Exactly. It's a therapy session slash news digest in front of, you know, many people who, whom are faceless to me. This is the best kind of therapy.

• 2:40Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, you are headed off to Wall Street Journal, so congrats. We can't wait to compete with you and see what you're going to be writing. But we should talk about the news this week and get that therapy session going.

• 2:51Sean O'Kane?

  Nothing to process this week.

• 2:54Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, there was this thing called Election Day, and wow, it is rippling through the tech industry, and I say that broadly because it is broad. And, you know, Sean, I want to kick it off to you since it's your last show, but also because I think you have a lot to say about, you know, really what we're seeing in just the day or two after Election Day as it affects the AI industry and specifically data centers.

• 3:22Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, I think this was a narrative that really started to take root on Election Eve and then also in the days since. There are a number of, I mean, well, first off, let's talk about the fact that one of the biggest, you know, data center builders was also the largest donor to the Republican Party, Elon Musk, and, you know, seems to have gotten basically nothing out of donating half a billion dollars, maybe even more by the time we see the final count. And in fact, is now sitting there with all of his businesses in a state that has remarkably turned about as blue as it could possibly turn for the first time in a very long time.

• 4:06Sean O'Kane?

  So that I think is like the biggest thing hanging above a lot of this discussion. But, you know, there were also a bunch of ballot measures up around the country for, you know, that would have paved the way for data centers to get built faster. Almost all of them got shot down or voted against. And, and so there's just this question now of when you have new leadership, democratic leadership, who has tended to say it wants to pump the brakes on, and we can talk about like sort of the spectrum of what that's going to mean, right? Like, some people really don't want any of this. Some people just want a bit more caution and a bit more information before things get built.

• 4:46Sean O'Kane?

  With them in power, you know, there is a consensus view that, at least in the tech world, that this is going to mean we have a lot of roadblocks ahead for data centers, especially in places like Texas where, you know, folks like the, the governor-elect Iniosa is, you know, has spoken pretty openly about this being a campaign promise and something that she wants to focus on. So yeah, it's, it's the thing that I think the tech world is maybe a little too focused on. I'm curious what you guys think about that, but is certainly focused on coming off of Tuesday.

• 5:21Anthony Ha?

  I don't necessarily think that they're too focused on it, but I understand maybe why it would feel a little bit disproportionate because the amount, you know, the, the data center ballot measures, certainly there were a number of them, but, you know, it wasn't something that was on the ballot everywhere. And in different races, the, the dynamics might have been a bit different, but there was this sort of undercurrent and sense that it was, it seems to be an issue that reaches across the country that is bipartisan in a lot of ways, but that the Democrats seem to have been more effective at harnessing, you know, that energy. And of course, there's probably all kinds of reasons why the Democrats did so well on

• 6:06Anthony Ha?

  Tuesday, but it does seem like sort of anti-AI and especially anti-data center sentiment was a big part of it. And, and that seems like a pretty potent political force that is much as, you know, I suspect, yeah, like the next two years, potentially beyond that, are going to be more difficult for tech companies in general and kind of hyperscalers, data center companies in particular. I also imagine that they have to be a little bit worried about, well, also like, is this going to continue to be an issue, not just with the people who got elected this year, but potentially in 2028 and beyond?

• 6:40Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, absolutely. I don't think that the data center issue is what brought everyone to the polls and led to the quote-unquote "blue wave." However, I will say that data centers have been an increasingly grassroots issue that, depending on localities, in part because how hyperscalers and companies have gone about getting these data centers, very secretive, oftentimes requiring NDAs of elected officials or appointed officials, not sharing information about, you know, the scale of a project in, in very environmentally sensitive areas, including in the Southwest where there's very much a water scarcity issue.

• 7:18Kirsten Korosec?

  So I think that a lot of folks, Republican independents and Democrats, all saw this as wrong, and so they were motivated by it, but I don't think it was a singular issue. But now, here's the interesting thing. There was a lot of like waving of hands about how we can possibly operate under any other circumstances, and we're already seeing companies like OpenAI all of a sudden go, oh, actually we can change our policies. They just released what they call a compute campus policy blueprint, and guess what? They're not going to require NDAs anymore. They're going to share, you know, their plans and, you know, supposedly operate in less secrecy.

• 8:00Kirsten Korosec?

  And so I think what this shows is that when you put up either a regulatory certainty in the marketplace or at least signals of going in that direction, then corporations will respond. If you don't do that, they will not necessarily do the thing that we hope that they will do.

• 8:17Anthony Ha?

  Right. One thing I want to emphasize from what you were just talking about is that part of what that's doing beyond laying out these policy changes is also an attempt to rebrand data centers because they have become such a toxic phrase. And so they're not data centers anymore. They are compute campuses, and, and I'm curious, you know, whether either of you think that'll take. I will also mention that one of the other very small effects of the election that I think is going to vindicate a prediction I made on Equity a couple of weeks ago is this whole like superintelligence term. I think that's going away because I don't think any AI executive is going to be particularly inclined to follow Donald Trump's executive orders like right now.

• 9:00Anthony Ha?

  So I feel like my prediction is going to be vindicated very shortly on that front.

• 9:04Kirsten Korosec?

  I think you just got an endorsement from, you know, one of Sean's pups there.

• 9:09Anthony Ha?

  From my dog.

• 9:11Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, like, no, listen, compute campuses are where the superintelligence is made, Anthony. Don't you see how this all comes together? This is just the way it works now. Yeah, I mean, this is ridiculous. Like, come on, like, it's not gonna change anything. It's gonna cause them more effort. For a company that likes to say that it's no longer focused on side quests, OpenAI still loves to go in different directions a lot. And this is just like the latest kind of thing where it's just like, why are you spending time on this at all? You know, it doesn't really seem like it's going to move the needle. They have other fish they need to fry. Like, it's just, I felt like such a waste of time to try and like, make people think about this.

• 9:54Kirsten Korosec?

  I have a great idea for OpenAI because in the spirit of making threatening things seem cute, they should 100% create like, uh, compute campuses, like avatar cutesy thing, and then just present that, you know, instead of, you know, a power, energy-sucking, water-sucking, um, data center.

• 10:15Anthony Ha?

  I'm sure that's, that's gonna happen anytime soon now. I mean, they could also like build more of their own offices. And if these are just lovely compute campuses, they should just build their own office, the offices there or work next door. See how that works out for them. I think it's something else that I'm wondering about is it, to what extent the election is also maybe like just this actually kind of the, the second part of like a one-two punch of something that I think we alluded to last week, but, but kind of became a little bit clearer shortly after we recorded, which is also that there's just been this like reshaping of how, or a big shift in how Wall Street is reacting to a lot of these hyperscalers and AI companies. And this sense that they're not excited about the idea that, you know,

• 10:57Anthony Ha?

  they should be spending all this money on building new data centers, spending all this money on compute. And so in a sense, there's now a financial incentive not to build all these data centers. And so I'm very curious how that's gonna play out, that there's regulations, that probably it's gonna be harder to build data centers. Wall Street is probably not gonna reward you for building data centers. But at the same time, to get to the scale that they want to get to, they're probably going to need to build data centers somewhere.

• 11:24Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, uh, look up, you know? Look up in the night sky there, you know? We've talked so much about, you know, setting aside the technical feasibility of, you know, data centers in space, that the attractive qualities of it, especially for someone like Elon Musk, are that there is, you know, there's no NIMBYism in space. There are no, uh, you know, not really kind of an environmental regulator that's gonna chase you down if you've got, uh, you know, something, something coming off, venting off of your, your space data center. There are all these reasons why, uh, you know, companies like SpaceX are looking at this idea,

• 12:07Sean O'Kane?

  or Google, which has launched its first sort of really small-scale test and started it up, Project Suncatcher. And, you know, the thing is, like, my point earlier about data centers maybe taking up too much of the focus of, of tech, the world of tech and tech executives is I think there is, listen, even if data centers on the ground get shut down or slowed, you know, to an unworkable timeline and, you know, the focus shifts to orbital data centers, sure, whatever, that, there's a lot of lag in between now and when that actually means anything. And in the meantime, there's a lot coming, I think, for big tech in general. I think we're gonna see, uh, a whole suite of hearings

• 12:52Sean O'Kane?

  where these executives are gonna have to sit in front of Congress, the democratically controlled Congress. They're gonna have to answer for, you know, money that they paid to the Trump administration and to the inauguration committee. And they're gonna have to answer for what Doge did, uh, you know, which never really has gotten a very good, like, full clinical accounting of, of all the different things that all the different Doge people did. And so like, there's just so much that's gonna happen between now and I think when, when we will actually see the data center stuff. And I think there's, there's, the last point I'll make is like, there's evidence in the market of this too, because CoreWeave and some other companies have been trending downward since Tuesday and their, you know,

• 13:35Sean O'Kane?

  their debt is not looking as great. But also there's, you know, Anthropic just landed like one of the best, or biggest, uh, debt packages ever. SpaceX just loaded up on like $40 billion more debt. So there's hedging going on in the market for sure when it comes to the more AI and data center focused people and, or companies. And, you know, from there, I think there's just gonna be a lot more for these tech executives to worry about in the near term.

• 13:57Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, speaking of the near term, and just yesterday, Meta's head of platforms, Dina Powell McCormick, she was at the Wall Street Journal Tech Conference and, and was saying a lot of the points that Anthony was mentioning about it's gonna be harder to get data centers. And she said something that I thought was really interesting. And she said, I can tell you that every hyperscaler is now thinking about, do we need to build outside of the United States? Which I thought was pretty spicy comment, really, because when you think about it, a lot of this push for compute campuses, AI data centers, whatever you wanna call them, is wrapped around the idea of the United States winning the race in AI and how important it is for us to have the infrastructure here in the United States.

• 14:40Kirsten Korosec?

  So, you know, back to that transition about talking about space, is that's what, is that what she's referring to? Or is she referring to literally putting these in Canada or in other areas? This really reminds me of another life of mine when I covered the energy industry, specifically oil and gas. And what I learned during those times is there was a lot of lobbying and gnashing of teeth about this idea of being regulated. But once the industry was regulated, what they really wanted was certainty in the marketplace. And then they responded and they adhered to that for the most part. And I say for most part in light quotes. Regulatory certainty actually matters in the marketplace. And so I think that that is what has been missing. It's been a bit of a free-for-all.

• 15:23Kirsten Korosec?

  And putting local standards and forcing these companies to adhere to those, as long as they don't continue to change and, and swing the different, a different way within a year or two, I think that they can adjust just fine. And I don't think they need to go outside the United States or in space. That's my prediction. But that's my rant. We'll see how it turns out and you can call me on it next year if I'm completely wrong. But there's other things that are happening within the industry. And that is, seems to be like some workforce corrections happening. And I wanna kick it off by mentioning that Canva is laying off over 1,200 people amid slowing growth. And I'm wondering, is this just the results of what we've been seeing

• 16:08Kirsten Korosec?

  building up to this moment for the last, you know, year or something else going on?

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• 16:42Anthony Ha?

  I was wondering about that myself in that, you know, on some level, it feels very, just like of a piece of the fact that like every tech company has been laying off, you know, some significant portion of its workforce in the last few years. Um, you know, usually sort of connecting that in some way to AI. And, you know, then there's also sort of debates about sort of like AI washing. And is this actually also, they just had to sort of correct for maybe overhiring during the pandemic? But it also seems like Canva and, and another company that had layoffs recently, Squarespace, and both of them laid off about 20% of their workforce. They do seem connected also in this sort of broader sense of,

• 17:24Anthony Ha?

  these are tools that made, in one case, sort of creating like, you know, images, graphics, art, um, and in the other case, websites, simpler. And so, of course, when you are kind of the, the next step in that kind of, you know, democratization, that simplification, whatever, you know, whatever you wanna call it, there's always the risk that somebody can kind of come up from below and make it even simpler and more accessible. And so it makes sense to me that, um, as much as I don't necessarily think the, the AI versions, the vibe-coded versions of, say, a personal website are necessarily better, um, that that would be a very major threat to both of these companies.

• 17:59Sean O'Kane?

  I know in Canva's case, the cuts were kind of across the board. And so I think to your point about like a lot of the larger tech layoffs.

• 18:09Sean O'Kane?

  I think we are still seeing some of like some tail end of what happened sort of mid and post pandemic where like all these companies went on hiring sprees.

• 18:21Sean O'Kane?

  Coming out of the Zerp era, like people just started to get a little bit more sober about what they actually needed. You know, I think one thing that's interesting to think about too is like for a minute there, it really looked like a lot of other companies were quote unquote, following Musk's playbook at Twitter as he turned it into X and like cut to the bone. And it was tempting to think that, oh, he's setting an example that a lot of these other companies and executives are going to follow of of cutting so hard and and really just laying off of tons and tons of people. And I think there is probably a couple of situations where that was true, but I think more broadly, it's this other theme that we've seen of maybe they just over hired to begin with. And, you know,

• 19:05Sean O'Kane?

  there was always going to be a correction coming. Like, it was surprising to me that Canva had this many people to cut to begin with, right? Like, that's a lot of employees.

• 19:14Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I like your point about the sort of sobering moment. It doesn't have to be doomy to just not be like full hype, completely, you know, blowing through budgets. Everyone use all the tokens all the time. Everyone build, build, build. And I do think that that we're going to see an adjustment. This is a pretty big adjustment for these two companies, to be sure. And and I think it's notable that they both have launched their own AI products. But even here in Boston, when I was at the Founder Summit, I was talking to folks who are like founders and people running businesses who are using AI tools. And and they all kind of were saying the same thing, which is they're excited about it. But now they're sort of level setting. There isn't this big push for everyone to

• 19:57Kirsten Korosec?

  use tokens all the time. And it's more about the smarter use of AI tools and what really works. And there was this very experimental, very quick phase in which we just saw this extreme buildup. And I think now a lot of companies, Canva and others are kind of taking stock in seeing what can we really accomplish? And do we really need all these people to accomplish that? What I'm curious to see is is if other companies follow through the end of the year. This is a period of time, particularly either right now, or usually right after the holidays, when we see big cuts happen and those adjustments to that 2027 budget. That is, to me, what we watch for in the future and to really get a sense

• 20:41Kirsten Korosec?

  of whether these are just a couple of one offs or a larger trend.

• 20:46Anthony Ha?

  One other thing to mention as far as Canva goes is, and this is not to contradict anything that Sean said, because I do believe that probably there's some, you know, just broader, you know, correction in terms of hiring that these companies are making, is also that Canva did say that its revenue growth slowed this year, and then it's kind of the first time that that's happened. You know, I don't know to what extent that is specifically driven by AI. And we should say both of these companies have, you know, AI products as well. But you can imagine that, in theory, you know, you could use a more general purpose chatbot instead of or just AI tool instead of a kind of something that's that's purpose built for either websites or art. So I don't know for sure how much

• 21:28Anthony Ha?

  of that, we should say, is specifically due to the rise of these competing tools. But I wouldn't be surprised if that played a significant role.

• 21:35Sean O'Kane?

  You can contradict me. I'm on my way out. I think there is an element of, and I don't want to downplay the fact that like, the the more popular AI tools made by OpenAI or Anthropic and others are competing here in some way. I think that that's clearly happening. And I think that's clearly going to be a pressure on companies like this moving forward. There are two things that I want to say kind of about that, though. One is that there, there is, I think, an element, and I think this will be a really interesting thing. I'm eager to watch you guys cover this as as it continues to go in this direction. There's going to be an element of like, okay, if Claude can do XYZ, what do I need,

• 22:17Sean O'Kane?

  you know, Squarespace for? I think the answer to that question is going to be like, there are people who work at Squarespace. There are like things that they're offering. You know, they're packaging a product for you. And with Claude or with with ChatGPT, like, you're always sort of operating on this like, yes, you can, you can make custom stuff for yourself. And it's all great. And it's like getting more capable. But there's no like, person to go to with concerns or questions or guidance or, you know, and like, you can get some of that from the chatbot, but you can't get all of it from it. And so like, these companies are just going to have to figure out how to make themselves, you know, how to make a product that covers all those bases and how to make a service, which is

• 23:00Sean O'Kane?

  really kind of also what they're doing, that is there for you when you have questions or you need need things for, you know, what it is that you're building. And, you know, on that point, like, one of the things that the sort of the Canva CEO said in her note that went out to all the employees is that they're going to try to reduce, quote, subspecialization, which means the employees might be asked to be doing more with less, probably leaning on AI tools like the ones made by Anthropic and OpenAI. And we're seeing that kind of across enterprise businesses everywhere and across the corporate world. And there is certainly an element of, you know, there of how much can you push that? It's certainly

• 23:45Sean O'Kane?

  there. I can totally see where there's a value in using those tools to be able to do more than you were able to do before, especially in coding. But now that we're talking in more like softer skills, you know, in the corporate world, but there's going to be burnout from that. There's going to be limits to that when it comes to the humans who are using the tools. And so like, what kind of balance are they able to strike? How much are they going to be able to sort of like, put on the shoulders of these employees before they break is a really interesting question for the next few years.

• 24:19Kirsten Korosec?

  And it's an interesting point in terms of like, what it means for companies like Squarespace. And you can see a future in which some companies will double down on like, human facing customer contact in order to stand out unlike others. And I'll be very interested to see how that plays out. But I really want to talk about an incredible tech deal that the number raised both of my eyebrows. And I'm talking about the custom chip designer Marvel. They signed a deal to acquire Lumentum and an all stock deal. And it is, drumroll please, $115 billion. That's a lot of money. Thoughts?

• 25:00Anthony Ha?

  I mean, I had the same thought, which is that, yeah, that is a lot of money. And I guess, I mean, it's, to me, my reaction to it maybe speaks to this kind of transitional moment that we seem to be in right now, where like, I don't know, maybe a year ago, this would have seemed like kind of normal. That just like, there's so many, the giant rounds being raised, like major M and A. I mean, I think maybe at any time, this would have seemed like a very large deal. But it feels like things have also kind of gotten quieter, particularly for the deals of this scale that, I mean, obviously, there's some degree of consolidation as people are kind of figuring things out and realizing that that maybe, you know, not all these AI companies are going to be successful. But to see Marvel

• 25:43Anthony Ha?

  spending this much money, albeit not in cash form, but still like, that is a major, major commitment and and just impressive, just for the size of the number.

• 25:51Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I want to put it into perspective here. So this is one of the biggest acquisitions in tech history, even though it is an all stock deal, we'll count it as such. No asterix. Microsoft bought Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion just four years ago in 2022. Dell bought EMC for $67 billion in 2016. That was a pretty big number back in 2016, by the way. That's like, quite a long time ago. But it gives you a sense of the scale of what this size deal is.

• 26:22Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the most interesting things to me about this deal is, it's like, it seems pretty emblematic of something that, a conversation that I kept having at Disrupt last month, in particular with Carl Almar from M13, who was sort of lamenting both onstage and backstage about how the inflated valuations of basically any company working in AI, whether that's on the software side or here on the hardware side, is just absolutely tilting the playing field when it comes to startup investing and acquisitions and the tension between those two things. And, you know, his position as

• 27:04Sean O'Kane?

  an investor was basically like, they're losing a bunch of opportunities to stick with companies that they think should continue to go through sort of the early to mid to late stage funding process, because there's just so much of this kind of like funny money stock that companies like Marvel can throw around to just say, hey, we don't, you know, we see value in just acquiring this company, and we have the ability to do it now on paper. So let's just do it. And so there are all these kinds of distortions happening in the broader space that I feel like we're going to have probably some kind of reckoning with over the next few years. And I don't know what that's going to look like. But I, I do not think we're done seeing this, this kind of stuff happen.

• 27:49Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, so this isn't the only acquisition that we wanted to talk about this week. We're about to talk about some other deals that I think on a normal week would seem like pretty sizable deals, but they are kind of dwarfed by the Marvel deal. But CrowdStrike paid $400 million for a cybersecurity company called Fiddler AI, and then 95 million for another company called Dreadnode. It seemed like these, you know, deals kind of got packaged together in an announcement of, you know, CrowdStrike kind of making a big investment to kind of expand on the AI security side of things, which seems very well timed.

• 28:20Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, cybersecurity is so hot right now. I wonder why.

• 28:24Sean O'Kane?

  Yeah, I mean, this is like one of those things where I wonder what the backroom process was like. Like, is this the kind of thing where it was, these conversations were happening, and then the last, you know, and then, you know, quote unquote, Black October happened, and they accelerated? Or I would love to know more about what kind of pressure CrowdStrike felt it was under to go after acquisitions like this. And with so much up in the air about cybersecurity in general, I think we're going to see a lot of, a lot more stuff like this, where it's like a hardening around the biggest names in the sector, because trust is such a big deal when it comes to.

• 29:03Sean O'Kane?

  Cybersecurity in general, which sounds like a dumb statement, but like it knowing, knowing the companies like CrowdStrike and knowing the players, having a reputation, like all that stuff is just going to have so much more of a premium as we move into more uncertain worlds.

• 29:18Anthony Ha?

  This actually gives me a chance to correct something I said when we did our discussion about the the PHP vulnerability a few weeks ago, which I did, when I did my post about it, I already posted the correction, but I'll just mention because I think that when people have talked about that vulnerability, they've talked about it as something that was discovered by AI, which, as our colleague Zach Whitaker pointed out, like, that's not true. It was discovered by human researchers and they were participating in an open AI program. They used AI tools to actually explore some like, you know, some of the like ways that this vulnerability could be exploited, but it wasn't that giant vulnerability was not a case of AI is just going out and finding that thing. It sounds like that is a future that we are moving into. But I think all those forces that the two of you are talking

• 30:01Anthony Ha?

  about, I think, are still in place, though, that there's going to be a lot of pressure on cybersecurity companies to have like technology and plans for how they might deal with such similar situations in the future. And it does seem like a market where, yeah, the incumbents are going to have a big advantage because trust and the desire to kind of have a single, you know, provider rather than like 10 different point solutions seems like it's going to be pretty compelling.

• 30:27Kirsten Korosec?

  Totally. And thank you for making that correction. We forgive you. But it'll be interesting to see what happens.

• 30:34Anthony Ha?

  Oh, also, if anyone wants more detail about what actually happened, we had the CTO of Wiz on Equity last week, so go check that out.

• 30:41Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. You know what is another big trend is micro dramas. And that leads us to our last deal. And I actually had no idea the numbers were this big. So it's another one of those where I was like, oh, wow. Okay, I need to adjust my thinking here. Apparently more than 118 million users watch micro dramas every month as a serialized format. Elo Elo Story TV just raised $80 million in a series C from Hornbill Capital and NBC Universal. And who knew that so much money could be made on micro dramas?

• 31:17Anthony Ha?

  I'm mostly just excited because, you know, one of my, the millions of different roles I had at TechCrunch was as a media and entertainment reporter. And it just felt like for so long, you know, every VC and NBC Universal is in a VC, but that like the idea of investing in a media startup was so laughable that obviously, who would do this? There are so many more lucrative and promising areas to invest in. And so it's exciting to see that that media companies can can raise money again, albeit from other media companies rather than from VCs.

• 31:48Sean O'Kane?

  Quibi redeemed.

• 31:51Sean O'Kane?

  Jeffrey Katzenberg wasn't wrong. He was just too early.

• 31:55Anthony Ha?

  So true.

• 31:57Sean O'Kane?

  Well, you know what? That feels like as good a place as ever to end my final episode of the Equity Podcast. We, it's been a pleasure doing this with you guys. But, you know, the, the show will go on and Equity Pod will be back next week. Follow along at Equity Pod on X and Threads. And it's been a real one. Thanks, y'all.

• 32:16Kirsten Korosec?

  Thank you.

• 32:17Anthony Ha?

  All right, Sean, we're gonna miss you.

• 32:21Rebecca Bellan?

  Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.