OpenAI and Microsoft’s ‘frenemies relationship,’ and what you missed at SXSW

This week, OpenAI inked a five-year, $11.9 billion deal with CoreWeave, the GPU-heavy cloud provider, securing its own AI computing pipeline—and a $350 million equity stake in the company. With CoreWeave’s pending IPO and deep ties to Microsoft, OpenAI’s deal marks a significant shift in the AI cloud wars. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, Anthony Ha, and Rebecca Bellan are diving into whether or not the deal is a power move against Microsoft or just an inevitable step in OpenAI’s bid for more compute, key deals of the week, and what you missed at South by Southwest 2025. Listen to the full episode to hear about: What Kirsten and Rebecca are seeing on the ground in Austin, and which founders are making moves Who’s feeling the ‘vibe shift’ leading up to Y Combinator’s latest Demo Day, and why founders are raising less money Scopely’s $3.5 billion bid for Pokémon GO maker Niantic Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! 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 here. 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.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, March 14th, and I'm Max F., a senior reporter at TechCrunch.

• 0:27Anthony Ha?

  And I'm Anthony Ha, TechCrunch's weekend editor. Max and I are missing Kirsten, our co-host, but luckily you are actually going to be hearing both her and Rebecca Bellin because they are at South by Southwest. Before we get to that, though, Max, you've been tracking a little bit about the relationship between Microsoft and CoreWeave, right?

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Yes, CoreWeave's been in the news a lot recently. They're a big potential IPO contender, but a big concern about them is that they have a very concentrated revenue source in Microsoft, which is their biggest customer. But in kind of a chess move with Microsoft, OpenAI is actually pouring $12 billion into CoreWeave, kind of deepening their direct relationship with them. There's a lot of interesting stuff going on with CoreWeave right now because they're basically a GPU provider. And the information also recently reported that Nvidia is actually the second largest CoreWeave customer. And now it seems like OpenAI might be the third, but there's a lot of kind of circular investment going on right now. Anthony, I'm curious what you make of that.

• 1:27Anthony Ha?

  I thought that one of the words that we used in our coverage, that Julie Bort used in our coverage of this deal, was really apt, which is the word frenemies. And it seems like, and that has less to do with, I guess, CoreWeave is almost sort of intermediary or like the third point in the triangle here. But it's also about this sort of frenemy relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft. And that they're obviously, Microsoft is a big backer of OpenAI, but it seems like they've become increasingly competitive. And then this is just sort of another aspect of that competition.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  Right. It feels like the AI space is kind of shaking out in this way where no one quite knows, are we partners? Are we enemies right now? I mean, who's my friend? But we have a lot to talk about on the show today. Today, we have deals from Y Combinator. They recently had their demo day and there's some interesting vibe shifts going on in the company. Then we'll also talk about Pokemon Go maker Niantic, which is selling its games division to Scopely. And then we'll touch back with Kirsten and Rebecca at South by later on the show.

• 2:25Anthony Ha?

  So yeah, let's start with the deals and our first deal is not so much a specific investment, but more a quote unquote vibe shift that an investor at the Otherwise Fund posted about, which then I think led to this whole broader conversation about investment with YC and potentially maybe even with startups more broadly, which was this observation that YC founders basically are thinking more about whether or not they should actually raise big rounds because, I mean, in general, YC startups kind of, we'll talk about this in a second, but you know, you have demo day, all these investors show up, everyone's usually really eager to write checks for at least the most popular startups at the event.

• 3:08Anthony Ha?

  And there's sort of this bragging rights thing of like, who can raise the most money? Who's well-funded? And there's this question of actually, is that actually the approach you want to take? And this is not necessarily a new conversation in Silicon Valley, but it seems like something that is being enabled more by AI as well that like, you know, before he's like, yeah, yeah, maybe you don't want to give up control, but of course whoever has the most money can invest the most in product and in sales. And so like, it would actually be stupid to turn money down, but maybe that's not true anymore. Max, you were actually at demo day or at least watching demo day. What was your sense of the vibe?

• 3:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that at demo day, there is obviously a lot of focus on, you know, AI. I mean, YC startups are almost exclusively AI startups these days. Specifically, a lot of startups were building tools around AI agents. I mean, I'll just note here, I mean, one of the kind of most impressive demos I saw was from this company called Browser Use. They're a startup that has gotten a lot of buzz recently. Because they create tools that let AI agents use browsers. They kind of create tools and open source versions of these tools that let AI agents click around and navigate webpages. So I mean, it's really interesting, but it it seems like the interesting part of this is that you can build a lot of these incredible products and companies with just a few people.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  I mean, it was something that we've been talking about a lot. Cursor is a company that reportedly reached $100 million in ARR with only a team of 20 people. Now, any spirits reportedly and talks to secure our capital at a $10 billion valuation. So I mean, I I'm really interested in this kind of debate about, you know, whether you really do still need to raise the most capital to compete right now. I mean, in some ways in the AI space you do, but it seems like we're seeing these very lean companies kind of run ahead.

• 4:57Anthony Ha?

  Well, as you talk about it, I do wonder if there's also this, you know, really important distinction to make between there are the companies that are kind of building the core technology, building, you know, the the L L Ms. And those are insanely capital intensive businesses, as we've seen, as you've written about, you know, just raising crazy large rounds, not just because they can, but because they do actually spend a lot. They're burning through cash, but then potentially the the models that they're creating could enable startups to run much more lean. I mean, I do think that you should always take these kinds of claims with a little bit of a grain of salt. Every founder likes to claim that their round was oversubscribed and and, you know, every early stage startup generally does run at least to some extent kind of lean.

• 5:37Anthony Ha?

  But I could imagine a situation where, you know, again, yeah, you are that that there's a few companies that are just spending crazy amounts of money, raising crazy amounts of money. And then there's an ecosystem around them that that's much leaner. I mean, you could also, the the other potential scenarios at a certain point, OpenAI is like, no, we have to pass on a lot more of these costs. All these other companies that are using our models. And so that leanness is not necessarily an option anymore.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Right, right. I mean, it's really the product companies that we're talking about here and not the foundation model companies. And I mean, the product companies can use these foundation models to build great tools like Cursor. Eleven Labs is another one that we've been talking about. They're a very small company. The company announced that's $180 million Series C. I mean, look, like this is kind of something that has been playing out so far in the early stages of the AI race. I'm skeptical about what happens when OpenAI's and Googles and Anthropic's of the world start building products more, which we're seeing them do. I mean, we're seeing products more from Anthropic with like coding assistants, like very similar to what Cursor uses.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And I'm curious if these startups can still afford to be so lean and so capital light as they're competing with these very well-funded labs.

• 6:53Anthony Ha?

  Right. I mean, I think also it's interesting to think about like, what are the things that where they can be lean? Like, where are the things where it's like, oh, maybe we don't need to hire people anymore? And where are the areas where they continue to invest? My suspicion certainly is that, you know, I think there's this often this, especially on the consumer side in Silicon Valley of like, that you're not supposed to invest too much in in sales and marketing, at least initially. It's sort of seen as like, almost a confession that your product is not that strong, which we can, you know, that that is a longer and ongoing debate. But my suspicion is that you're not necessarily going to see these companies, you know, ignore sales and marketing and be like, oh, like, you know, a chatbot can sell this product for me.

• 7:35Anthony Ha?

  Frankly, I do think there is a an excitement, which I don't necessarily share with a lot of people in Silicon Valley about like, hey, we don't need to hire copywriters or artists anymore. We can just have a model sort of just create that for us. They can create the website, they can create the marketing email. I don't necessarily think that's a great idea, but I can imagine a lot of founders being really excited about that.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  Right. I'd also be remiss not to mention the fact that it's possible that some of these AI startups in in YC and whatnot are just raising less money because investors are maybe becoming more hesitant to raise, to give them more money. I mean, I mean, it's totally possible that, you know, they they their rounds are oversubscribed and they're putting their foot down. It's hard to know what's really going on behind the scenes here. You know, I mean, we're also kind of seeing like a market downturn right now. And I'm curious if how these things are gonna affect AI startup investments moving forward.

• 8:30Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, like I said before, like you always want to take what a founder says about their funding and do it with a little bit of a grain of salt. Because not that they're necessarily misleading, but you know, they're always going to sort of talk things up a little bit. And then there's also the additional fact that the YC ecosystem is a little bit elevated compared to just founders in general. Which and often like, I think when we write about these oversubscribed rounds, there's always founders who I talk to or hear from who are just always like, that is just such a different world from the world I live in where they talk, where you're like saying no to VCs, are you kidding me? But I do think like, I mean, it is a valuable conversation for founders to have because I definitely, I've, you know, in fact, lived with a founder who was raising what he thought was going to be a very small seed round.

• 9:15Anthony Ha?

  And then it turned, suddenly turned into a giant series A. And I remember him agonizing over whether or not he should take that money. Because it was really going to change everything about like, yes, like it's great that you have money to spend, but it also means that the exits that are suddenly considered successful, that changes dramatically a lot. A lot of things changed, but it was sort of understood like, well, you'd be dumb to turn that money down. And, you know, maybe that is really changing.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 9:43Anthony Ha?

  But we should probably move on to our next deal, Max, and this is about Pokemon Go and Niantic.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Yes. So the maker of Pokemon Go, which is the, you know, game that I feel like went very viral a few years ago, kind of during the pandemic, where you walk around and you interact with Pokemon and it tracks all your data. The maker of that game, Niantic, sold its games division to Scopely for $3.5 billion. Scopely is kind of an interesting company. They make a lot of popular mobile games like Monopoly, Go, and kind of like every board game version that's on an iPhone app, they make it. Like Scopely is just huge right now. It's an American company, but it's basically entirely owned by the Saudi Arabian government's public investment fund. So kind of.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Interesting what's going on here. And while Niantic is selling its games division, they say that they're basically completely pivoting to making these AI geospatial maps. They've said a few years ago that they were pivoting to making spatial intelligence and using all this location data to kind of create these real-world 3D maps. I mean, there's kind of a lot of angles to talk about this here, Anthony. I'm curious what really stuck out to you.

• 10:59Anthony Ha?

  Well, I think Niantic has always been a really interesting company to me because, I mean, I think in general, sort of like VCs in Silicon Valley, they have this sort of complicated relationship with gaming companies, which on the one hand, they're another technology company and it makes sense to invest in them, but it is like, you know, technology is not necessarily differentiated or it's much more of like a hits-driven business. And so often you'll see gaming companies kind of repackaging themselves as technology companies in order to kind of raise those like big VC rounds, you know, kind of VC valuations. And but in this case, it actually seemed to be kind of like valid that like Niantic has this sort of interesting core technology. They're opening up all these like

• 11:40Anthony Ha?

  new use cases that you wouldn't necessarily have thought about before. And so there was this real excitement around Pokemon Go, not just with the players, but I think in sort of like the technology industry of like, oh, is this kind of what the next generation of gaming looks like? I mean, Niantic itself was trying to take advantage of that by like just releasing a bunch of like Pokemon Go, but for Harry Potter. And I think there are other companies trying to do the same thing. And that really does not seem to have become like a huge, successful wave. It's like, it was Pokemon Go and then a bunch of other stuff that didn't quite work out.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think there's a lot of kind of, in my mind, like wondering what happens to all the data in this deal because Pokemon Go just does scoop up so much of your data. Scopely actually gave a statement to 404 Media about this, which wrote a very in-depth piece about what happens to your data with a Saudi Arabian government-controlled company having it. And Scopely said that they're going to take kind of anonymized versions of these AR Scans that people take in Pokemon Go and they're going to be provided to the new Niantic Spatial Intelligence Company as part of a technology licensing agreement. So it's kind of, they're still going to be tied together and Niantic is still going to kind of get that data.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  But it's just a really interesting kind of piece of Pokemon Go, which is probably a big business, even if they didn't take your location data, but they just now have this other piece of it that creates so much value.

• 13:10Anthony Ha?

  Right. And I mean, hearing you talk about that just reminds me also of like the, you know, obsession in the last couple of years over TikTok and the data that it has and the idea that China potentially has access to US user data. And, you know, I think obviously part of the discussion around this has been, yeah, like, you know, now does like, you know, the Saudi Arabian government, which is not necessarily have a great track record on humanitarian issues either, like, do they have, do they have access to to location data, which, you know, I would argue is way more sensitive than than just like, what dumb videos did I watch on TikTok? But I mean, my, my guess would be that just for a variety of reasons, like, we're unlikely to see that kind of crazy regulatory scrutiny that we saw with TikTok. I mean, what do you think?

• 13:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was, I was at a dinner earlier this week in, in San Francisco with a founder of a big kind of AI data company. And he was just kind of talking about how the race to get data to build AI is still so hot right now. Like, like, it's, I think that we're in kind of an interesting moment in the AI space around what's going on with compute. Like, we're seeing all these efficient models, which everyone thought would be necessary forever, but now isn't. But then with data, it's still like, we're running out of data, but data still makes these things so much better. So I am curious to see, we've seen the Saudi Arabian government do a lot of stuff in the AI

• 14:35Speaker 01

  space, too. I'm curious just to see what happens with all of this spatial data. I'm not exactly sure what they can use it for exactly, but of course, like, you know, self-driving cars, kind of these humanoid robots are the first thing that comes to mind. But I think it's going to be interesting to see kind of where this lands in terms of maybe some data licensing agreements. On that note, we do have to move on here. So we're going to throw it to Kirsten and Rebecca on the ground at South by Southwest. But first, we're going to take a quick break.

• 15:11Anthony Ha?

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• 15:54Anthony Ha?

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• 16:15Kirsten Korosec?

  This week, we're at South By. And you can tell in my voice that it's been a wild week. I've been at South By, I don't know, 10 years running. And I'm very curious to hear what Rebecca's thoughts are, but I'll give you mine just very briefly, which is, it wasn't as big of a year for tech. And we had talked about in previous shows whether maybe human X was pulling away. There was, I would say, there was lots of activity, like, there were sessions, there were activations, stuff like that. But based on previous years, the exhibition hall, which is where you see a lot of tech, it was pretty vacant. We saw a couple of cool startups, but that was a little weird for me.

• 17:00Kirsten Korosec?

  I don't know, Rebecca, what was your impression? Did it feel like, this is your first time?

• 17:05Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, so this was my first year at South By, but I could kind of also feel that it was a bit light in the tech. I don't know, there was just kind of maybe a lack of energy that I was expecting. And part of that could be just because South By is so spread out. But certainly in the expo hall, I Was like, oh, it's a little bit dead, but like still really cool. Like the stuff I did experience was pretty amazing. But I did hear just from chatting with people out and about that it was a big year for movies and film like there. It was sponsored by the, I think the whole thing was kind of sponsored by The Last of Us. There's Last of Us gear on everything. Pedro Pascal was here. Nicole Kidman, Blake Lively, Matthew McConaughey, like everyone, I guess Matthew McConaughey is always in Austin, but Hollywood was here this year. And so that was a big deal for a lot of the film and TV folks. So.

• 17:49Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, he had actually like, he is always here, but Matthew McConaughey's presence here was actually a big deal because he was in a film for the first time in several years and got a standing ovation.

• 18:01Rebecca Bellan?

  The Rivals of Amzia King.

• 18:03Kirsten Korosec?

  Yes, The Rivals of Amzia King, which we might try to go see. We'll see how lucky we are, though. There's probably gonna be a line. I would say this too. I am used to seeing like really over the top activations and installations around the city. There was one, that was the Rivian obstacle course, which of course we, we rode in. And Rivian was another one of those things that was everywhere, just like The Last of Us. They were the primary sponsors, so they were literally everywhere. They had multiple activations and installations. You saw their cars everywhere. The CEO and founder of Rivian, RJ Scringe, he had a keynote and then I caught up with him for a one-on-one interview later.

• 18:44Kirsten Korosec?

  They had a little reception and music. I mean, that, they definitely had a presence. And then another kind of installation party that we were at was the Uber Waymo party because their robotaxis are here. So those were, you know, elevated to what I would say like previous years. I think the big difference is that you would see multiple of those, not just, you know, one thing.

• 19:09Rebecca Bellan?

  When you were preparing me for South by Southwest, Kirsten, you told me there would be potentially busloads of puppies and I haven't seen a single puppy.

• 19:18Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, that was one year where I think Twitter had Twitter House had, this is pre Elon, had like puppies. And then there was one year where like Vice had like baby goats. Um, so you didn't see, you didn't see that.

• 19:32Rebecca Bellan?

  But we did, the Rivian thing was pretty fun though. I mean, it was the most thrilling two, two minutes of my life to go on a tiny obstacle course in the middle of the city like that. The way that they tilted like 40 degrees on this kind of off-road, I think we were in the pickup truck.

• 19:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Yep.

• 19:46Rebecca Bellan?

  I thought it was gonna flip over and it didn't. So that's a big win for Rivian, I think.

• 19:50Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, for me, it was not a win because I didn't get to drive. But hey, you know, I have taken those vehicles on obstacle courses in the wild before, not in an urban environment. So I wasn't surprised that they were able to stand up. I do want to say that, you know, the one tech theme that permeated throughout everything was AI. It was different, though, than I would say in previous years. And it's reflective, I think, of what's happening in the tech industry. AI was everywhere. It was popping up in conversations about film. It popped up in my panel on drone delivery. It popped up, you know, in conversations about

• 20:32Kirsten Korosec?

  in-car tech and entertainment. But, and there was a lot of optimism, but it felt more grounded. I don't know if, if you had that same feeling.

• 20:42Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it was like, how are we actually applying this technology? And how are we really speaking about it? When we say AI, do we mean LLMs? So yeah, certainly AI was everywhere. IBM CEO took the stage. He talked about the powers of AI. He says it's a valuable technology, but it's not a panacea. So there was, you know, a tempering of it. But certainly, I also noticed a mix of like AI and entertainment, which is pretty on par for South by Southwest, I think. Not sure if you noticed that as well.

• 21:09Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think that, that, okay, first of all, there's a lot of concern about, and this is reflective far beyond Austin, concern about what its role is within the entertainment industry. Will it take away jobs? Will it, you know, replace talent? And so there's, there's definitely concern. But Paramount CTO Phil Weiser, he was on stage and he kind of. Talked about it this way, he said he remains optimistic about the future of AI, but he said he didn't think it could replace the role of a director. Well, okay, that's like a very specific, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of those jobs. I think where people are more concerned is replacing the like thousands of creatives, not just the one director.

• 21:54Kirsten Korosec?

  But again, it all felt very cautious optimism, grounded, not too hypey. And also on the, on the flip side, not complete fear mongering around it.

• 22:08Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, wasn't a lot of ethics talks. I mean, and it wasn't just, you know, for film and TV that gaming was a thing that was brought up a lot with AI. And I went to a Conan O'Brien talk with the president of Activision Blizzard, which I actually didn't even realize it was Conan O'Brien. And I was happily surprised that he was on stage being funny. They didn't talk about AI as much as I would have hoped. Mostly what I got out of it is that I guess Conan O'Brien plays World of Warcraft sometimes, which is interesting, but certainly they talked about kind of the, the interactive aspect of gaming and how that that builds community. And I think there was kind of a vein of how that could translate to, you know, when we have different form factors, right?

• 22:47Rebecca Bellan?

  So you're talking XR, BR, AR, and how that could kind of translate to newer hardware forms.

• 22:56Kirsten Korosec?

  I wanted to mention two other things that I saw and didn't see. So very interestingly, very little talk of defense tech. And in fact, in the exhibition hall this year, in previous years, like the CIA has been there, like NSA, they've had exhibitions, they weren't there, there wasn't, defense was sort of stripped out. And I didn't even really hear it too much in conversations. On my panel around drone delivery, actually, one of my panelists did kind of bring up how wars and defense sometimes propel technology forward. And then it goes into commerce and he was using the drones as an example of that.

• 23:37Kirsten Korosec?

  But really I wasn't hearing it, not to the level that I hear about it everywhere else. So that was very interesting to me.

• 23:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, that is noticeable.

• 23:46Kirsten Korosec?

  What I did hear though, and see a lot around was quantum computing. There was a whole section, I mean, there's always been talks about. Quantum computing in the South by Southwest programming. This year it felt a little bit more robust. Shereen Chow, who is the COO of Google Quantum AI. She she had a talk. There was a number of other ones. And I thought her comments were interesting because she argued for government investing in quantum computing market, which is interesting because right now there's this big push for government investing in AI around this idea of like US first and US winning in AI.

• 24:28Kirsten Korosec?

  I didn't hear that so much a year ago around quantum computing, but now she's talking about it. So I'm wondering if that's going to be the next big push.

• 24:37Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. Well, it feels like with AI getting better as well, it's probably helping as people develop quantum computing and get to that point. So I imagine, I mean, the conversation is just generally, even I spoke to someone, you know, who's really deep in the XR space. And they were saying that this has got to be, they're pitching it to the government as well as something that we need to compete with China on. So I just think like competing with China is is the name of the game, particularly with this administration. So that'll that'll translate across industries.

• 25:08Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. And, you know, of course, here at TechCrunch, we care about founders. And Rebecca, I'm curious if you had the same experience I did, but I met up with a lot of founders, US and internationally, actually, that are looking for funding. They were like on the ground, looking for investors. I ran into that a lot earlier in the week, not so much later in the week.

• 25:30Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, no, I did. I did read, like even yesterday, I ran into a founder who was looking for investment. But it's not just founders, like there's entire, you know, country delegations that are that are coming over to try to, you know, meet LPs and try to get funding from from US investors. I met someone from the Czech Republic, actually, who came over on a delegation with like 30 people. They flew over on Air Force Two, it was like a very official thing. And they're, you know, they're, this is a seed stage, early stage VC, but they need to access those bigger checks. So that's why they're trying to maintain that relationship with the US. And I know we went to Ireland House, a bunch of stuff happened there. You you probably have a better view into that than I do.

• 26:10Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, yeah, we both went to Ireland House and that was very exciting for the people there. There were a lot of founders and the whole idea of Ireland House was it was put on together by a lot of government agencies and specifically one that I spent some time with, which is Enterprise Ireland. They have a new CEO, Kevin Sherry. And Enterprise Ireland, while it's a government agency, essentially what it's doing is it's supporting Irish companies basing them here in the US or other markets. So exporting their talent into other markets and they invest in a number of early-stage startups every year, about 150 to 180 a year, which is kind

• 26:54Kirsten Korosec?

  of incredible. And Ireland House, on the day we were there, was very abuzz because not only were these founders, many of them there, but the Taoiseach, basically, essentially the Prime Minister of Ireland, showed up, was shaking hands and talking to founders and even kicked off a panel about film, right before he then was whisked off and headed over to DC. And the reason why Ireland, I want to emphasize that, and also in the Czech Republic, is that there's a strong relationship in Ireland, between Ireland and the US. And I think that they're very keen to continue to have those relationships, even though

• 27:36Kirsten Korosec?

  politically things are a little wonky, you could say, especially with talks of tariffs and things like that. So, you know, I think the Taoiseach was there.

• 27:44Rebecca Bellan?

  The sixth-largest investor, right? The sixth-largest FDI investor into the US, which is huge. It's a country of like 5 million people. It's pretty wild.

• 27:52Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, so I think it's curious that all of these delegations, and I think there were several others that I didn't interact with, that were here on a mission to get funds and to spread their message. They're choosing South by to do that as opposed to, let's say, like a CEOs.

• 28:10Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, it was cool to see, for sure.

• 28:12Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, I just realized that the movie that we have been talking about, that we really want to see, is actually going to be playing soon.

• 28:20Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, we gotta go.

• 28:21Kirsten Korosec?

  So, on that note, we are going to treat ourselves and try to go stand in line. But Equity will be back next week. Until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and threads.

• 28:35Rebecca 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.