Stripe's biggest acquisition yet, and what's a16z doing with all of those Nvidia GPUs?

It’s no secret that Stripe has doubled down on its crypto offerings, enabling crypto purchases in the EU back in July and announcing a Pay with Crypto feature earlier this month. This week, the fintech giant made its dedication to crypto even clearer with its largest deal to date: its acquisition of stablecoin platform Bridge for an eye-popping $1.1 billion. Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha and Devin Coldewey kicked off the show with their thoughts on the deal – mainly how surprising it is to see anyone spending over $1 billion on crypto in 2024. But of course, there was so much more startup and venture news for the crew to get into this week. Listen to the full episode for more about: Mobileye founder and CEO Amnon Shashua’s latest startup A 3D metal printing startup’s $14 million round from Boeing’s AE Ventures and Nvidia Andreessen Horowitz’s plans to provide its portfolio companies with Nvidia GPUs And who we’re expecting to see at TechCrunch’s Disrupt 2024. Equity will be live at Disrupt on Tuesday, so we'll see you there! 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. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products. 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.

• 0:11Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, October 25th. I'm Kirsten Korosec and joining me today is Devin Coldewey for our last recording before, drumroll please, Disrupt. Devin, what are you most excited for, besides seeing me, for next week?

• 0:34Speaker 01

  I was gonna say seeing you, but then I'm thinking maybe recording Equity. It's gonna be so fun, so we're gonna do it live.

• 0:42Kirsten Korosec?

  Wow, I could tell. I could tell by the sound of your voice and inflection that you truly are actually excited about recording a live show at Disrupt.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  That's what people tell me, that they love my inflection. I genuinely am most excited about seeing all my colleagues. We don't get to see each other as much as I'd like. You know, I'm sure many of our listeners can sympathize with, you know, virtual environments and remote work and stuff. It's just great to get together with everybody and shoot the breeze.

• 1:08Kirsten Korosec?

  Shoot the breeze, yeah. And actually, I'm really excited because our other co-host today, who I have not seen in person in forever, TechCrunch's Anthony Ha, is not only on today's show, but we get to see him in person for the first time in like, I want to say, three years. So Anthony, welcome.

• 1:27Anthony Ha?

  Thank you. Yeah, I think it's probably more like five years because the last Disrupt I did as a TechCrunch staffer was in 2020. Obviously, that was virtual, so I think the last one where I was there in person with all of you was 2019, which is horrifying to think about.

• 1:43Kirsten Korosec?

  What? That's crazy.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Absolutely horrifying, I know.

• 1:46Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, but I'll be there and I'll be hosting the Startup Battlefield, which I know we're gonna talk about later.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  It'll be just like old times.

• 1:51Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. Just like old times.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Pre pandemic.

• 1:55Kirsten Korosec?

  Pre pandemic, old times. Well, I am stoked to see everyone in real life. And I should actually mention that Margo, who's been joining us on the show regularly, she's actually doing a little pre-disrupt travel, but she will be there on stage with us live Tuesday at 9 a.m. And I hope to see all of your smiling faces there. But we should probably move on to today's show. We're going to talk about Stripe, 1.0, free form. We're also going to talk about what Andreessen Horowitz is doing with Nvidia GPUs. And back to what Anthony was teasing earlier, Disrupt Battlefield 2024. We want to start off with an interesting

• 2:34Kirsten Korosec?

  acquisition. Anthony, tell us about Stripe acquiring Bridge for $1.1 billion. Seems like a lot of money for this.

• 2:44Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a huge deal. Certainly, I mean, you can start with like, it's a great exit. I mean, they'd only raised $58 million previously. I think their previous valuation was $200 million. So this is just a huge step up. Shout out to Margo. She wrote about this deal when it was still in talks, but now it is official. And what Bridge does is it basically helps companies accept stable coins. Stable coins are basically the kinds of crypto that are tied to fiat currencies. So there's like USDC, which is tied to the US dollar. I mean, I was trying to wrap my head around this deal and just this idea of like paying more than a billion dollars for a crypto startup in 2024, I mean, ever. But certainly this year was not necessarily the hottest thing. But Stripe has been investing

• 3:29Anthony Ha?

  in crypto this year. It seems like one of their big focuses. And in fact, Patrick Carlson, who's the CEO of Stripe, he described stable coins as, quote, "the room temperature superconductors of finance." So I think he does see this as something that could potentially really accelerate the company's growth.

• 3:49Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I always wonder if there's things we don't know about in running a giant company like Stripe with all the finance and like regulations and stuff. Is it possible that they're dealing with a lot in like backend fees and like bank stuff and they're like, You know, if every dollar was just a number, you know, the original sort of cryptocurrency promise of like, oh, every dollar is just a number. If they can just move those around the way that we all thought we would, you know, eight years ago, then maybe they can avoid millions of dollars in, you know, the kind of just fees and costs that these companies incur.

• 4:18Anthony Ha?

  That makes sense to me. I mean, that both in terms of like them avoiding fees, but also, I mean, I think Stripe is at a point where it's so ubiquitous that it's really probably you have to kind of be ambitious and far thinking in terms of figuring out where the opportunities for growth are, because a lot of the basic stuff of just adding Stripe to a bunch of websites, that's

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:39Anthony Ha?

  They've done that, right? So they have to figure out what's next. And so obviously trying to maybe become more profitable by shifting things over to crypto maybe, but also just if they're like, well, if we could have more international transactions, if we could make these kinds of international purchases easier through crypto, that I don't know that that's guaranteed to work, but I think that there's maybe a feeling of, well, we have to keep pushing.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, certainly, certainly. Stable coins make the more, if I was investing, I have a couple of, you know, like a fraction of a Bitcoin and a couple of Ether, but like, I feel like if I was actually going to buy and use some kind of cryptocurrency, like it would be some kind of stable coin, because I'm like, well, yeah, because I'm using it as a dollar. It'll just be a virtual dollar. It's that simple.

• 5:20Kirsten Korosec?

  Right. So the interesting thing that you were both talking about a little bit was sort of this idea that like Stripe needs to do something new. And I always kind of go back to the question like, at what cost? And also the timing is so interesting to me for this. Sure, they have to push the boundaries of what their business is and be forward thinking. And the stablecoin idea seems to make sense. But at the end of the day, like, there's also this whole election coming up and like questions around the future of crypto. Have you given that any thought? Or is that like, eh, let's see what happens after November?

• 5:56Anthony Ha?

  Well, when you talk about cost, right, is it like cost to the company or cost to broader society, which this could have a conversation about crypto and society, I would say in terms of cost to the company, you know, I think that right now, obviously, a lot of the big tech companies are chasing this dream of AI. And before that, it was, you know, in some cases crypto, in some cases like the metaverse. And I don't think necessarily any of those bats have really panned out yet. Maybe they will in the future, but they've arguably been a distraction from the things that made them good. And so you could argue that Google, for example, has not done well by its core products because it's been chasing these kind of future things. And so you could imagine a scenario, I, again, I don't use Stripe enough to say with authority, but like you can imagine a scenario where Stripe

• 6:38Anthony Ha?

  is chasing crypto and then just the core payment experience is not necessarily getting the attention it deserves.

• 6:44Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, cool. We'll have to see how that all shakes out. I want to talk about this deal that Ingrid wrote about this company called One Zero. And it's an AI fintech startup, you know, which we never hear about AI fintech startups. What's that? Like, what a weird concept. Never.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Strange.

• 7:00Kirsten Korosec?

  But what made me really pay attention to this article is that the founder or the person behind it is actually the founder and CEO of Mobileye, Dr. Amnon Shashua. He's really interesting because he takes incredibly long views, circling back to like Stripe pushing forward and looking ahead. He takes incredibly long views of what he eventually wants to do. And in the case of Mobileye, has. And for those who aren't familiar, Mobileye, which was acquired by Intel and then spun out to be a publicly traded company, basically, they're in millions, tens of millions of vehicles. They got their start as computer vision, really supporting those advanced driver assistance systems. But now they're doing a lot of self-driving tech. They're kind of everywhere. They really

• 7:44Kirsten Korosec?

  sort of have a monopoly. And Amnon is getting into all these new other startups based in Israel, and One Zero is one of them. So I, I just find that part of it really interesting. I wasn't sure if either one of you were interested in the actual what One Zero is trying to do.

• 8:03Anthony Ha?

  Well, there is one thing that I did find interesting in the description of it where they talk about this idea of the future being one where there's no physical bank and no humans to help at all, which, I mean, I think that's the subtext for a lot of kind of like neo-banks that don't have physical locations is that's what they're pushing towards. But I think to kind of state it that baldly and clearly is kind of eyebrow raising where it makes you think, is that what I want? I'm not sure it is, but maybe that's where things are going.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  But it's, it depends on what they mean. Because like if they mean it's all ATMs and no tellers, well, sure, we're going in that direction. You know, sure, you might need somebody every once in a while to handle some paper check when you're doing a mortgage or something like that, or that kind of thing. But, I mean, companies are run by people. And if you have a big bank with a few million customers, you're gonna have people like, it depends on how far they're trying to automate it. Because if they want to automate the entire customer experience front to back, but also like how it handles its investments, what it's doing with your money, how does it handle regulations? There's a lot of stuff that, I mean, I don't know what promise they made of like zero people in this bank, but it's not going to be a completely autonomous bank, which is a terrifying idea, just like walking around.

• 9:14Kirsten Korosec?

  Just an empty shell. Well, to your point, I mean, maybe they've had a little bit of trouble convincing others because they are in the process of raising 100 million for this. It's not locked in yet. You know, Ingrid has pointed out to me that the last attempt fell through. So maybe there is a little bit of a gap in understanding exactly what they're trying to pull off here. And maybe that is a little terrifying to investors. If there are some humans involved, though, however, I would say AI fintech startups are certainly quite popular these days. And there is an interesting element to what the company is trying to do. We'll see if they are able to raise more money, though. Devin, here is something that I do want you to explain to me, which is a deal, this

• 9:56Kirsten Korosec?

  ex SpaceX engineers were able to raise about $14 million to scale this new method of 3D printing metal. So I want to know about the tech, aside from just the deal. Can you explain exactly what this startup Freeform is doing?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean- I'm sure most of our listeners are familiar with 3D printing in general. You put down material. It's called additive manufacturing more strictly because you add material rather than like cutting it away. You know, like a CNC machine where you start with a block and cut away all the parts that aren't the thing you want. It's the opposite of that. You just add stuff in a stack or pile or it allows for interesting geometries and it makes it easier to manufacture various things. Additive, you know, like 3D printing has been around for a while. Doing it with metal is harder though, because most 3D printing is done with like thermoplastic, which means you just melt plastic and then you put down little drops of it. But if you're doing it with metal, obviously metal has a higher melting temperature.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  It's harder to work with blah, blah, blah. But people have been doing it for a long time. And among them, the SpaceX people and these guys were at SpaceX, the CEO, the one of the co-founders and CEO. He was like the lead guy on the Merlin engine and a bunch of other stuff like this is a serious engineering thing. And they did 3D printing using metal, but he was like, it sucks. It really sucks. It's slow. It's expensive. It's extremely complicated because of the way that you're dealing with this like powdered aluminum being like centered into certain like droplet shapes at, you know, 1100 degrees using multiple lasers. It's very complicated. And he was like, everybody was hitting the same walls.

• 11:38Speaker 01

  And everybody wants to use it because you can do really cool stuff with it. And he was like, I got in a bunch of fights with Elon about this because he was like, oh, this is really useful. Like you do more of this, but make it cost less. And he's like, it doesn't cost less. You have to invent something new. So they left and invented something new. And basically what they added was it's kind of a control mechanism, like an AI thing. I was like, is it really AI? And he was like, we started saying it was AI before everybody started saying everything was AI. But he was like, it's basically a machine learning model that watches very, very, very closely. The little blob of molten metal that they're manipulating or creating with lasers and powder, like metal powder. And it can adjust the process thousands of times a second. So it's like, oh, the laser needs to be like 2% less intense.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Because the, you know, the metal is becoming too liquid, it's going to run. Then like two milliseconds later, you're like, no, no, it's too cold. Like heat it back up again and like, you know, move it a fraction of a centimeter to the left. It's that kind of like real time monitoring that needed to be done. But the technology to do it didn't exist and the technology, not just to monitor it, but to execute it at speed. They needed a model, an AI model that could make those decisions on a millisecond basis. But that didn't exist. So they had to build all this stuff up and then you can't even run that model because you don't have the infrastructure to run the model. So they had to make that up too. So they've been building all this stuff up from scratch and it's been a huge challenge, but they love a challenge.

• 13:05Speaker 01

  They got the money and now they're actually doing it and they're like, yeah, it actually works.

• 13:09Kirsten Korosec?

  It actually works.

• 13:10Speaker 01

  We're building stuff. Yeah. I mean, that was their conclusion. They're like,

• 13:13Kirsten Korosec?

  That's always good.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. After all that, and after that long ass explanation, sorry, but you asked to,

• 13:19Kirsten Korosec?

  I know. Sorry. Okay, audience, when we ask Devin a highly technical question, just get cozy and settle in because you're gonna,

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Our producer can put that at 1.25 so you can just zoom through it. But it really does, it works and it's really cool. And it only works because of all this really high level technical work they've put into it. I'm surprised honestly that they only raised $14 million because this is the kind of thing that is going to be used. They're like, basically if you make metal parts, this is going to be useful to you. And they already have a bunch of clients in space and industry, oil and gas. So I mean, maybe they're just not raising too much because they know they're going to make money.

• 13:56Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, maybe raising $14 million was on purpose so they didn't just give away their entire company and they don't really need that much money. So we'll, we'll wait and see about that, but possible props there.

• 14:06Anthony Ha?

  I do think that also reflects how big the numbers have gotten, particularly when we're talking about AI companies where it's just like, oh, here's a company with some pedigree and it's a new AI startup. So automatically they're going to raise a hundred million dollars. Whereas like 14 million is a big round for an early stage company.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  It totally is. And I know my perspective is skewed, especially covering AI companies where it's like $150 million. They're going to be broke by summer because they just throw it down the hole. But like, and here is a company that is literally, they have to build these machines. They're making this stuff from scratch to like shoot lasers at metal powder and like make rockets. And they're like, oh, 14 million, that'll do me like, Uh, okay.

• 14:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, shooting lasers at powder, I have these really cool images in my head of what is actually going on at that company. The thing to me that is probably the most interesting is the variety of customers they can have. I mean, you mentioned that this was kind of concept, not the invented concept of free form, but the basic concept of 3D printing metal was being used as SpaceX, but there's all these other applications too, beyond what I would think would be aerospace, but like I think of automotive, I think of like energy sectors. So the good news for them is if they can make this efficient enough, they have a wide variety of customers they can pitch to.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's an aspect of wanting to move manufacturing back to the US too. It's not just like a nationalistic thing. It's like, well, if you want to build a factory in the US, you have to go through all the tooling and make only the specific part, and then you have to spend five million bucks in a couple of weeks retooling it to make this part. Or you can invest in a metal 3D printing factory that can do two of this part and then five of this part, and then a thousand of this other part. That could be a better way to invest in the state side manufacturing infrastructure, very forward thinking, very futuristic, supports the space industry. So they're kind of going for that, like, hey, if you're going to build a factory, put us in it, not like some big old stamping machine.

• 16:04Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, the other thing that I thought was interesting, and this is the perfect segue to our themes, which we will get to right after the break, which is that they do real time monitoring by GPU, FPGA, which they call AI on steroids combo that they built from scratch. And to that point, after the break, we're going to talk about Nvidia GPUs and Andreessen Horowitz. We are back, and as I teased before, we want to talk about VCs renting a bunch of Nvidia GPUs. I would love to dig into this, so it sort of starts with Andreessen Horowitz confirming

• 16:49Kirsten Korosec?

  its program called Oxygen, which allows their portfolio companies to train or operate their AI models without negotiating market rates. I know Devin has an opinion on this, so we'll get to you.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I'm waiting.

• 17:03Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm wondering if this is the first that either of you have heard of a VC firm, granted, a well-known, well-capitalized one, even doing anything like this? Or is this the first?

• 17:16Anthony Ha?

  I haven't heard of a VC doing this specific thing, but it feels like kind of on a spectrum with before, I think, a lot of firms, including, you know, the firm that I worked for for a couple of years, where you're helping your portfolio companies negotiate deals with the cloud providers and basically just this idea of like, well, we want to be a platform, which in the VC world is such a nebulous term. Obviously, like Andreessen Horowitz, they're one of the first people to really kind of popularize that, and they do it in a much more serious way than frankly, most VCs do. So in a way, this feels like, oh, yeah, I haven't heard of anyone doing this before, but it makes sense and seems like something that a lot of startups would be appreciative of.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it turns out, actually, this isn't the first time this has happened. Net Friedman and Daniel Gross have a similar thing. They've got a few thousand GPUs. They call their Andromeda cluster, which is actually, that's an astronomical reference or astronomy reference, very nice, thanks, guys. But it's certainly a bigger chunk. And the GPUs that we're talking about specifically are H100s, which are the most, they're sort of the gold standard in AI training and inference. They're very hard to get hold of. So if you can get 100 of them, let alone 20,000, that's a pretty big foot up in the, a foot up? That's a pretty big leg up in the industry.

• 18:28Kirsten Korosec?

  You have all the wrong cliches today, Devin. I know that there was one earlier today that I didn't want to call you out on, but that's strike two. I wanted to mention that YC also offers startups training runs through partnerships. Again, not anything to the scale, I think. But to me, what this is reflective of is that, this is a bit of an old storyline, but everyone is scrambling to get their hands on GPUs, right? And a company or a VC firm that can offer that, it is highly attractive. I can't imagine that, it just, to me, it seems like an amazing recruitment tool or a way of attracting startups to sign on, potentially, to you.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  It's definitely clever. You know, it may not be the first time, but it's timely. And everybody needs, if you're an AI startup, which is practically every startup now, you need to do inference at least because you don't want to be tied to OpenAI's API or whatever. You want to try and run some of your models offline or in some, you know, independent way. So it's good to have that inference capability or to train a little thing and not have to pay market rates. So because it's like, oh, you're who you're going to pay? Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they're all going to charge you same as everybody else. But if your investor is like, hey, come to us and, you know, we'll give you half that rate. It's good for everybody in that little ecosystem. So it's a clever move. And I wonder, I wonder whether Andreessen Horowitz learned this when they were doing

• 19:57Speaker 01

  crypto stuff, because that's another very computation-heavy industry. And I've, it's like, I joked when we were talking about this, we were like, oh, wow, that's a lot of GPUs. I was like, did they put a preorder down in like 2021 for a bunch for crypto stuff? And then crypto just like disappeared. And they're like, what are we going to do with these 20,000 H100s? Which I don't think they actually own them. I think they're like leasing them or something like that. But they ended up with this huge resource. And they're like, oh, thank God, an entire new industry has appeared beneath our feet that desperately needs this resource. But, you know, they're, it's sort of, they're in the right place at the right time, or they made a canny investment, like, it could go either way.

• 20:35Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, we'll just say that they're super clever. And then also perhaps it was serendipitous at the same time. Wondering how many of these companies or VCs that were like betting on things around crypto, which were highly computational, if they were thinking about this at a time? Because if you recall, there was also not just GPU shortage, but like an overall chip shortage because of the pandemic. And I wonder if what we're seeing now is a few companies, which were a little bit shell shocked from what was happening, like even on the industrial side of things, not just like VCs, like Andreessen Horowitz, sort of starting to forecast and say, we don't ever want that to happen again. Let's start making some moves now to protect ourselves. And then

• 21:18Kirsten Korosec?

  In the background, another incredibly highly computational heavy industry AI just took off. So it gets a little bit away what we were talking about, but it is interesting to see how this one company has sort of positioned itself.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  No, no, it makes perfect sense. It is smart to recognize, you know, especially over the last 10 years, you're like, well, look, data centers are just growing and growing and growing. Intel or AWS or whoever is investing like crazy in these things, building them like crazy. They're only getting more powerful, more efficient. Everybody's always using them. Why don't we invest in some of our own? Whether that's a little cluster in the office to do some testing, or if it's a big cluster to resell to your portfolios, or even just on the open market. Like, it's easy to rent these things out. Like, there are services where it's like, hey, do you have 100 GPUs you're not using? Put them on our thing and we'll give them work and we'll take half of the money. You know, it's a resource that has become sort of universally valuable. And crypto was an example of that, but before

• 22:16Speaker 01

  that, it was, you know, just for serving video over the cloud and bandwidth and stuff like that. It's, I think it's smart to invest in infrastructure.

• 22:23Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, advice of the day. Anthony, do you have anything else to add?

• 22:27Anthony Ha?

  I guess I would just circle back to what you were saying earlier, Kirsten, about cost as well. And I do think with a lot of these new technologies, not all the time, but sometimes we talk about them as if they're sort of just like online magic. And remembering, oh, like, actually, you need a ton of infrastructure to pull this off, uses a ton of energy, has a huge impact on the climate if it becomes more popular and widely used. And I don't think that's a reason not to pursue these technologies, but I think sometimes rhetorically, people sort of like hand wave that away. And it's just good to remember that there is a huge cost associated with these things.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  I want to add, just on that note as well, there's a cost associated with the cost. People aren't talking about this yet. People talk about the energy cost, but there's going to be a huge hardware disposal cost. I'm looking at a paper right now, it's coming out in a couple of days in Nature, that's about the e-waste results of like generative AI and its large, all these things, all these H100s, all the like server racks and stuff that they go on, that has to go somewhere. When the H100s are, you know, old hat, people are going to say, oh, we'll just throw them. In the trash or recycle them or whatever, that's going to be like millions of tons of e-waste going straight into the, you know, it's like this unprecedented investment in computing infrastructure only lasts a couple of years before it's obsolete. And then you throw it away

• 23:42Speaker 01

  and it ends up in a heap in Bangladesh with a bunch of people picking over it to get the lithium and gold out of it.

• 23:48Kirsten Korosec?

  Wow, what an uplifting way to end that segment, Devin. I truly appreciate that. Picking over the leftovers. Let's move on to something slightly more positive, actually really positive, which is Disrupt Battlefield 2024. Okay, I need to give a little bit of a shout out to Anthony, because when I joined TechCrunch in 2018, it was my first Disrupt. And Anthony, you were like the face and the voice of Battlefield. So, thank you for coming back. I'm so excited. Things have changed a little bit since that era, which is now we have a different kind of selection process.

• 24:27Kirsten Korosec?

  And Devin and I were one of many who were part of this very long selection process. 200 companies were selected from around the world, 20 of which will get to pitch on stage. And Anthony, that's where you're going to come in. I'm wondering if you can give the listening audience insight, not pick any winners, of course, but insight into like what that process is like, because you're old hat at all this.

• 24:52Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, so like you said, there's this whole process that takes place before we get to San Francisco for Disrupt. And maybe you guys can also speak more to sort of what it was like to go through the applications, because we get a lot of applications and there's a lot of great companies, but also a lot of not so great companies. But certainly by the time we get to the 20 that pitch on stage, the hope is that they're all really strong and they will present for six minutes. Basically, we ask that they do a live demo and that can mean very different things for different companies, but it's not just a pitch deck. You're supposed to go on stage and show us your technology and show us that it works. And then there's a panel of expert, usually VC judges, they get six minutes of questions. If you do the math, that's 12 minutes

• 25:35Anthony Ha?

  total on stage, which is not a lot of time. And I think that's one of the things that makes disrupt and the startup Battlefield really different from a lot of other pitch offs is that whereas almost any other event, I think they can be great and they sometimes can go deeper than we can frankly, it also means you just get a lot of like boring pitches and it just kind of goes on and on and on. And Battlefield is merciless. You get on and you have to just deliver your message super quickly. I mean, that's really the main reason I'm on stage is to introduce people and kind of give them the metaphorical hook when they're running over. So it's a really fast paced, intense presentation.

• 26:14Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, isn't there like a famous story, it was before my time where Dropbox, which of course went on to like amazing success, didn't they like struggle in their live demo?

• 26:25Anthony Ha?

  I don't remember if it was live or I think it was live in the sense that you could, not just in terms of live on stage, it was like go to this link and sign up for Dropbox and they were not prepared for how many signups they have. I think that's, I don't think they're the only ones, but yeah, they're certainly one of the most famous.

• 26:40Kirsten Korosec?

  No, just one example of like how it's a pressure cooker, if you will, but you know, it's fun. It's usually packed during these 20 pitches. Devin, I don't know if you have any that you are particularly interested in or that you're paying attention to, probably AI in space. Were there any companies that stood out to you this year?

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Well, first of all, Kirsten, I wanna, if you're gonna make fun of my idioms, I'm gonna make sure that you know that Anthony is not old hat at this. He's an old hand at this.

• 27:09Kirsten Korosec?

  Oh, okay. Thank you.

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Been waiting to make that clear. So that now that that's out of the way, I really enjoyed our selection process as Anthony noted, like we were very hands on. The whole editorial team was in there like sorting through this huge pile. It was really hard to say no to a lot of startups, like getting it down to 200 was really hard. And then picking the 20 was really, really hard. I had a lot where I was like, this is actually really cool. And so it really is the best of the best who are up there. In the past, I feel sometimes companies will be up there because it's like, oh, they're gonna get bought by Google in two months for $50 million and that's gonna be a quick turnaround for the investors. But I think there's more of a focus. On doing something different and interesting, even if it's not necessarily an immediate,

• 27:53Speaker 01

  oh, you know, like Salesforce will love this or, you know, they'll be reinventing the CRM stack or whatever. Sorry to all my enterprise software lovers out there. But no, I think that there's a, there's a real diversity of stuff. There's space, there's health and biotech. There's of course the usual, there's the enterprise and there's consumer stuff. It's a good mix that I think really represents the different interests of the TechCrunch, like editorial team and like the diversity of the startup ecosystem. It's not just people trying to make money. It's people trying to do something new. I think that we're able to emphasize that a bit.

• 28:30Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I will say I'm not going to put Anthony on the spot because it would put him in such a weird position to like, talk about things that he is interested in and he's introducing them. So you're in the clear unless you really feel strongly about a particular one, Anthony.

• 28:42Anthony Ha?

  I don't have any particular favorites. I would just double down on what Devin said that I think when I first started and before I was emceeing it or before I was even at TechCrunch and I was going to disrupt in the sort of precursor events, like it was really a Silicon Valley consumer internet event. And it's been so cool to see that it's become a global event for startups from pretty much any sector that you can imagine. I mean, it definitely creates challenges. You guys talked about the selection process. I think the judges often struggle with this too, is they'll sort of look at each other and be like, how do I say this company is better than this company? They're so different, but that's why they make the big bucks.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  At least the judges aren't already investing in the companies like they used to be in the early days.

• 29:23Kirsten Korosec?

  I will say this. So Devin, you gave kind of a good overview of like all the different sectors. One thing I was happy to see was that it wasn't all AI startups. So there were some really interesting ones, like in my world. So sustainability, mobility, logistics. There was obviously a lot of like warehouse robotic stuff, but then some interesting crossover. The use cases were not just what you might think. It's also like could be used for mobility. To your point, there was a lot of health tech and biotech, which I thought was interesting. So I was like, just happy to see that we didn't get like thousands of AI applications.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, or we did because, you know, me and Kyle were looking at them.

• 30:01Kirsten Korosec?

  We did, but there were a lot of other ones. And then also certainly a lot from the Bay Area or from California, but from all over the country and from all over the world, some really interesting ones from like Africa, for instance, that were looking at mobility and healthcare in a different way. So. To me, that shows how much Disrupt and specifically Startup Battlefield has grown over the years. And also, maybe there are ones out there that are going to make the world a better place, Devin, to use a really tired line: silence.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Just gonna let that one leave there.

• 30:35Kirsten Korosec?

  Just absolute silence. Yeah, I'm gonna let it leave there, too. All right. I think that'll do it for today's episode. So, thank you again, Devin and Anthony. And I forgive you for making fun of me a few times. It's okay. If you see something that you want to talk to us about, hit us up on @equitypod on X and Threads, and I will hopefully see you all at Disrupt.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator, and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.