How are founders positioning themselves for the next 4 years?

Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Margaux MacColl and Anthony Ha are digging into the latest tech and startup news from inauguration week in the U. S., including the new administration’s approach to startups and the potential transparency challenges that come with it. Listen to the full episode to hear about: TikTok’s rapid return and which apps are waiting in the wings – just in case. What is Stargate, and why are OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle and others committing $100 billion to the project? Why some shareholders are walking away from Divvy Homes’ acquisition with nothing. The IPO market for 2025: Who’s planning to make their debut, and who’s reconsidering going public? 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, your energy technology partner.

• 0:17Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, January 24, 2025. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor at TechCrunch. I'm Margaret McCall. I'm a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch.

• 0:33Anthony Ha?

  And I'm Anthony Ha, the Weekend Editor at TechCrunch.

• 0:36Kirsten Korosec?

  Ah, Anthony. We became so close over the weekend because there was a little bit of drama with our good friends over at TikTok. Can you please catch me up?

• 0:47Anthony Ha?

  Sure. I will try to do the abbreviated version so that this doesn't end up becoming the entire episode. Kirsten, you and I often talk on the weekend, which is fine for me because I'm working. I don't know what you're doing.

• 0:58Kirsten Korosec?

  Trying to have a weekend.

• 0:59Anthony Ha?

  Yeah, so TikTok went down this weekend, but probably for a lot less time than people were expecting because the law that the shorthand is basically to divest or ban law or seller ban law on TikTok took effect on Sunday. Seeing as how TikTok has not sold or divested, it seems like that was the end of TikTok. But then Trump started saying, no, no, no, like this should get pushed back because I want to save TikTok. And then the Biden administration started to say, hey, we're not going to enforce this law. It's cool. Like, just do whatever you want. But then TikTok went down anyway. I think basically they said that particularly their service providers like Oracle, which, you know, does their hosting, they weren't going to take the chance that they were going

• 1:41Anthony Ha?

  to, you know, end up being dragged into court because they continued to keep TikTok up. TikTok went down. And then Trump, the next morning, said, oh, this is terrible. I'm going to sign an executive order giving TikTok more runway before it's banned. And I'm also going to, in that executive order, it will retroactively say that no one will be, no one will be getting into trouble for keeping TikTok from going dark even before the executive order was signed. And then magically TikTok came back up.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  My favorite detail from this weekend, I was at, I'm in DC, so I was going to different inauguration parties and I ran into a guy that had come from the TikTok inauguration. It was like a TikTok sponsored party and all of the branding was like hashtag save TikTok. But by the time the party happened, TikTok was back. It was like already like up and going. And I love that. I love that they had invested so much into save TikTok stickers.

• 2:34Kirsten Korosec?

  And it was saved. Look at that.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It was saved.

• 2:38Kirsten Korosec?

  For now.

• 2:38Anthony Ha?

  I was gonna say, you know, obviously that the big question is what would an actual deal look like to save TikTok? Because, you know, one of their major investors and directors has said a deal will get done, but I think you kind of have to say that. But it does seem like everyone involved is optimistic that there's going to be a deal. Certainly TikTok seems very optimistic. Trump has been posting about, oh, it'll be like with 50% US ownership, which I understand it is not really what the law says. And I think there are a handful of China hawks who are not happy about this and are going to try to like make a legal fight. I have no idea how successful that fight is going to be.

• 3:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I'm super interested to see how this deal transpires and what the end result is because if you go back into the historical record, the number of members of Congress who voted for the ban was overwhelming. And now, obviously, Trump, who's now taken office, is singing a bit of a different tune. And some of these folks are supporters of his. So what's the political situation? And then we're actually the, the terms of the deal. And then who ends up ultimately owning it, I think is going to be incredibly important question. And there's some scary options out there, possibly scarier than ByteDance.

• 3:54Kirsten Korosec?

  I don't know. But we'll see about that one. But speaking of deals, I do want to jump into the rest of the show. And we have two deals of the week, one focusing on the players in the $500 billion data center project known as Stargate. Plus, we'll dig into the details about the Divvy Homes acquisition. Then on to our two themes about how founders are positioning themselves for the next four years of the Trump administration. And if 2025 is shaping up to have more IPOs. So I'm going to kick off the first one. This was so interesting to me. First of all, time has condensed over the past three days because we had the TikTok ban, up and down roller coaster ride, then the inauguration,

• 4:39Kirsten Korosec?

  then a flood of executive orders, then all of these announcements. And one of these announcements is a biggie for us here at TechCrunch. And this is OpenAI teaming up with SoftBank and Oracle, and actually some other tech partners on a $500 billion data center project called Stargate. Of course, it was like drama filled immediately. And I'm wondering if either Anthony or Margo, if there were certain things about this deal that immediately caught your eye. Because I have my own ideas, but want to give you the floor too.

• 5:11Anthony Ha?

  I think for me, what was striking was sort of a lot of the comments that Sam Altman made. Obviously, he's the CEO at OpenAI. And even in our own story about it, there's a lot of quotes from him about talking about how difficult it is to build data centers in the US. And he's excited to be doing this on a grand scale. You could probably connect that to other comments he's made about how he's very excited about Trump's presidency. And so it's this feeling that the message they're sending is like, this is sort of like a new beginning and really turbocharging this kind of infrastructure building in the US.

• 5:45Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, first of all, let's talk about the fact that $500 billion is an insane amount of money. I should say that the companies involved are expected to commit an initial $100 billion, still a lot of money. To me, what caught my eye, aside from all the buzziness around it, is the scale and how quickly it devolved into a tussle over on social media between Sam Altman and Elon Musk. And it felt a little bit of sour grapes.

• 6:15Anthony Ha?

  Oh, yeah, I had blanked this out because I think, I mean, there's so much going on with Musk that I'm sure he'll come up again and try not to let him completely take over this podcast. But yeah, I did completely blank that out.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  No, I love it. I love that Elon apparently has an office in the West Wing and he's still tweeting contradicting Trump. That's, I mean, that's crazy. That's like kind of his new boss that he's already very publicly disagreeing with, which is so interesting.

• 6:43Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, well, I mean, to catch anyone up who did miss it, I mean, basically Elon sort of placed some doubt as to how much money SoftBank has, and it did feel like a sour grapes moment. And Sam came back with some interesting quotes, basically something to the effect of, hey, I know that this might not help your companies, but I hope you'll do something and support stuff that supports the US, which was like the perfect zinger, because that has been Elon's mantra, really, for these past several months. So, you know, things have settled down a little bit. The project itself is starting in Texas,

• 7:21Kirsten Korosec?

  but this could grow quite substantially. And so I'm quite interested to see how quickly this scales up. Also, do we think that there's a potential saturation in like data centers? Because data center projects are everywhere right now. And I wonder, is there a possibility of overbuilding this? Anthony, do you think that, I mean, not that you're like a data center infrastructure expert, but

• 7:47Anthony Ha?

  I'm surprised.

• 7:48Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. But, but do you see this as a potential? Or does this seem like there's a never ending appetite?

• 7:54Anthony Ha?

  The real risk, as far as I can tell, is really about sort of what is the demand for AI and particularly generative AI going to look like over the next few years? And I know we've talked about this on some of our past shows, but like, I assume that like basically, the projections behind a project like this are basically that like, it's just going to continue to hockey stick. And I think that's probably the most likely outcome. But I think there's also another future where it's not like it goes away, but people are like, oh, like, actually, I don't love having this in all of my apps and taking over like Google search. And so maybe then like, the growth is a lot more reasonable or a lot less aggressive than it is. And suddenly, we do have these data centers that maybe are not as necessary as they thought they were going to be. I think both outcomes are

• 8:39Anthony Ha?

  possible. I mean, I think there's other reasons why to not be excited about data centers in terms of environmental impact, whether or not they have a positive economic impact. But from the point of view of these companies, I think it's a pretty rational decision that they're making to say, look, we think this is gonna go crazy, and we need to prepare for that.

• 8:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, just touching on like the energy stuff was I ran into a lot of nuclear founders who had made the journey out to DC who are obviously very excited about stuff like this. They clearly see their technology as the future for powering these data centers without like catastrophically ruining our environment. I talked to one founder who was interesting. He was talking about was Isaiah Taylor. He's 25. He's founded Valor Atomics. He's been to Mar-a-Lago three times in the last month. And his whole thing that he was kind of going around pitching people all weekend was that he really wants nuclear regulation to be up to the states. He was like, Texas already manages a ton of huge energy centers. It's crazy to him that we wouldn't trust Texas to manage like their

• 9:42Speaker 02

  own nuclear power. And I wonder how things like this in the states that are kind of willing to accept a lot of these data centers are even competing for these data centers, if they are then going to be lobbying to also have a say over the energy that it seems like people are expecting to power these data centers.

• 9:59Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, you make a good point that this deal specifically, but also what else is happening in the data center, isn't just about the direct investments that these technology companies are putting in, which by the way, also includes ARM, Microsoft and Nvidia. But to your point, also has a ripple effect in terms of how they are powered. And there's a lot of opportunities and I would say bullishness around nuclear energy right now, which is so surprising to me as a former energy reporter, like I could not have predicted this, you know, five years ago. But I mean, we've even recently done some reporting around, you know, some of these mothballed nuclear reactors, you know, these are projects that went way

• 10:42Kirsten Korosec?

  over budget, were under construction and were mothballed, meaning they ended, are now getting rebooted. And one in one case is a South Carolina utility, Santee Cooper, that wants to bring back a nuclear power station and is seeking outside investment. So I think we're going to see tailwinds for nuclear energy and also some startups that are working on, let's say, the next gen of nuclear energy. So it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out. I do want to move on to another deal that's super interesting to me. Margot, fill us in. It's not as big as $500 billion, but it is $1 billion.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yes, Divvy Homes, which is a like rent to own startup. They would buy houses for people and let them rent it for a few years before they saved enough money to buy it themselves. Just announced they are getting acquired for one billion by Brookfield Properties. That sounds like a big acquisition until you realize that they raised over 700 million in debt and equity. And they were last valued at 2.3 billion. And then our amazing reporter, Mary Ann, got a hold of a letter to shareholders from Divvy's co-founder. Basically saying that a lot of shareholders aren't going to make any money from this deal. That a lot of this money is going towards their debt and paying for this massive inventory of homes they had. So it's another deal. I feel like there's been a few deals that we've talked about on this podcast where,

• 12:06Speaker 02

  yeah, they're, they're big acquisitions, but unfortunate circumstances and a lot of the shareholders aren't making really any money from it.

• 12:13Kirsten Korosec?

  Right. It's like an exit, but not a lot to show for it. I'm so glad you brought up Mary Ann's name because listeners know her well and should say that she will periodically be coming back on the show to talk about fintech and other prop tech, which she's deeply embedded in. So can't wait to have her back on. This letter that she viewed and, you know, verified was real. Specifically talks about how basically after repaying all of their outstanding indebtedness and transaction costs and all this other stuff, that they're estimating that common shareholders, nor holders of this series FF preferred stock will receive any consideration. And another source talked about how, you know, essentially equity holders, you know,

• 12:57Kirsten Korosec?

  for lack of a better term, got zeroed out. So I am not surprised that this happened in prop tech. Quite frankly, there has been a string of shutdowns and bankruptcies. Rising interest rates really affected prop tech. But it's still always a little bit sad to see a company that has like struggled to survive for 10 years. The people who back them just getting nothing out of it.

• 13:23Anthony Ha?

  It also feels like with a billion dollars in this transaction, which is, I guess it's described as a total consideration. So there may be some financial engineering there to get to the billion dollars total. It's probably not just like a check for a billion dollars. But even so, like if you're spending a billion dollars, then you presumably think there's still something there. This isn't like a total fire sale where it's just getting shut down or sold for parts. There's like still something going on. So what is so interesting about this is that sort of disconnect between that very large acquisition amount, even if it's smaller than expected, and the fact that it sounds like so many people, it sounds like the founders, the employees, maybe the early investors are just going to get nothing.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  It's so sad with startups like these that the people they're affecting, these are like their homes. If I'm someone that's renting a house from Divvy Homes right now, after this acquisition, what happens to me? Do you know?

• 14:14Kirsten Korosec?

  I mean, that's a really good question. I will put on, let's say, an educated speculator's hat on here. So there's obviously some inventory. What's unclear to me, based on the reporting so far, based on what Divvy Homes and Brookfield Properties has shared, is how many homes they have in inventory and how many of these homes have transferred from renter to ownership underneath that business model. Let's say there are still a handful of homes under that renter model. If the terms of the contract are strong enough, I would assume that Brookfield Properties would just take that on and then these people would continue on with that term. But of course, that's not knowing what the terms are and not knowing how many of these are in that stage.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  No, that's the thing that I always think about, not to bring everything back to defense, but with defense, like when you're having these startups that are making like hardware, that they've promised the government and then they run out of money or they shut down. Like when you're promising not just software that people can migrate to another software, but you're promising actual things. I don't know, it can be really detrimental to the people you've promised them to. Right?

• 15:20Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, well, absolutely. And like in your world, the people are, you know, the Department of Defense who are not receiving it. And we just saw that happening, not to totally change the subject, well, to totally change the subject before we go to break.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Do it.

• 15:33Kirsten Korosec?

  EV startup Canoe, which had a military contract, you know, they just went bankrupt. And NASA and DoD each got one vehicle. Like, that's, that's it.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 15:44Kirsten Korosec?

  When you're dealing with bricks and mortar and delivering those bricks and mortar, and then you go out of business, yeah, not happening. But I think we're going to have a lot more follow-up reporting on Divvy Homes to kind of see how this plays out with the people, like, the actual customers involved. But we have to go to break now.

• 16:04Anthony Ha?

  What moves our world forward? Energy. History has been shaped by it, revolutions won with it, and progress dependent on it. For 190 years, Schneider Electric has been a leading force in this story, creating the technologies that harness energy and transform the competitive landscape. And today, in the dawning era of energy and industrial intelligence, Schneider is helping customers build more efficient, resilient, and sustainable operations across every sector, from data centers to homes, from buildings to industry. Schneider Electric, your energy technology partner. Discover more at se.com.

• 16:41Kirsten Korosec?

  And we are back and ready to jump into the first theme, which I'm super excited about because Margot is inside the Beltway. She's embedded in DC. And the question we've been asking is, now, under a new Trump administration, how are startups and founders adjusting to this new world? And Margot, you have some really interesting insights.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I spend all weekends going from party to party and trying to find founders. And it wasn't hard. They were all here. And something I thought was interesting was like the breadth of founders here. I expected a lot of defense tech founders that I normally talk to, but I was running into like healthcare founders, I was running into software founders, obviously crypto founders, and they were all here and they were all here with an agenda. And honestly, to the credit of the Trump administration, a lot of them were able to like get audiences with really important people and get access to big parties that in the past founders might not have been a priority for these big government parties, which is really different than than the Biden administration when every founder I talked to was like, it's so hard to even figure out who to talk to in government. So yeah, the founders were all here.

• 17:51Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. What do you think the difference is? I mean, is it a political difference, meaning Democrat versus Republican? Or is it just how Trump is as an individual and how he has shaped his administration? Like, why was it so difficult slash opaque for founders to have any inroads with the Biden administration versus now?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  On one hand, it's kind of like the oldest trick in the book, which is that VCs gave Trump a lot of money, period. And when Marc Andreessen gives you a lot of money, the best thing for Marc Andreessen to ask for is for you to meet with all of his founders, right? Not that I I don't like know that for sure, but like, come on, Marc Andreessen stationed down at Mar-a-Lago, it's totally in his interest. So yeah, on one hand, it's it's kind of just old school that they gave a lot of money and now he's going to pay attention to that industry because they gave him a lot of money. But I do think there is a very intense focus on like American dynamism, American companies, American infrastructure. And I think Trump this time around, a lot of people have noticed, doesn't want to play by the rules of the federal government in a way that he maybe tried a little more to

• 18:58Speaker 02

  the first time around. And I think he's really looking for alternative ways to do things. And startups are here, ready to pitch him on those alternative ways.

• 19:07Kirsten Korosec?

  One point before, I know Anthony, you probably want to jump in, but you just made a point that's really interesting to me, which is in my world, in the transportation world, I did see a lot of activity around EVs, EV charging startups, EV startups in general, but they're all going the federal government route, the traditional one, which is getting Department of Energy loan guarantees. And we saw a number of those, you know, companies like Rivian, which by the way finalized the deal days before, days before Biden went out of office, which will help them build their factory. That's the type of activity I saw. Whereas what you're describing feels more, I don't know, organic. I don't know if it's going through any specific programs.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Totally. And that's actually been a big complaint from like nonprofits is that Doge has been having meetings that they're not making public and they're not normally when if Doge is going to be inside the government, there's a level of transparency and meeting notes that are expected to be released to the public that they haven't been doing. And I talked to a lot of founders that are showing up at Mar-a-Lago that are running into important people. And there is no record of that if these people don't want to talk to, if they don't want to tell me. Something I found very frustrating was when I talked to these founders that had met with really important people and I'd be like, well, how did you get that meeting? You know what I mean? They understandably would be very coy about it in the way that I feel like founders are maybe coy about how they got in with

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Sequoia or how they got in with a big VC firm. Like it's their, their connections and their network. And I don't know, I'm used to government having a more structured way to reach people of power. And that's not the way a lot of these founders are getting audiences with important people for better or for worse.

• 20:49Anthony Ha?

  I wanted to follow up on something that you said earlier, which I think is true, but just to add some nuance to it, as you were talking about this idea of like, well, obviously like VCs gave a ton of money to Trump. So of course the Trump administration would be more open to startups. I mean, I think at the same time, like there are certainly people in Silicon Valley who gave a ton of money to the Democrats, right? And particularly the Biden administration. I'm sure there's still some like quid pro quo going on, but like obviously they made a lot of policy decisions that Silicon Valley was, that a lot of people in Silicon Valley were not happy about. I mean, one obvious example is that Reid Hoffman, you know, there's a lot of reporting about him being a big supporter of Biden, a supporter of Harris, but also being like, you must get rid of Lena Khan, which, you know, is happening because Trump is taking office now.

• 21:30Anthony Ha?

  But for the longest time, they had this antitrust policy that drove people in Silicon Valley crazy. And so it's, there's a difference of, I think, yeah, certainly the, a lot of VCs back Trump, but also like, it seems like the Republican administration is just more willing to be like, sure, come on in. And I was going to ask you, Margot, do you have a sense of like, how much of the mood here of people sort of descending on DC is like, this is a huge economic opportunity for us and how much of it is also like, hey, these are our guys, we like our guys, they're more aligned with just our general vision of the future?

• 22:01Speaker 02

  I think that, for one thing, a lot of the people I'm talking to, foreign policy is their biggest thing. And there can be a lot of overlap between Democrats and Republicans on foreign policy. Biden's also like a pretty big China hawk. And so I think on like that, I had a whole like conversation with the founder, we were talking about our like foreign policies. He's like, oh, I think you might be conservative. And I was like, I actually think there's a lot of overlap. And then we went through our thoughts on social policies and it was,

• 22:30Speaker 02

  but it, but it took a while to get to those.

• 22:33Kirsten Korosec?

  I can only imagine. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be interesting in terms of the amount of access that you heard about this first week. And if that changes over time, because right now, as I've seen numerous times when a new president comes into office, there's a flurry of activity, I think, under Trump, probably more so than others, but we'll see if this settles down. And then I do think in the future, while it might be great for the founder to get access, if it ends up that the federal government is actually investing in them, there needs to be some transparency around that.

• 23:16Kirsten Korosec?

  And that is where it's going to get really interesting, because if you look at The Charter of Doge and, you know, the Trump administration in general, it's freeing up bureaucracy, but you still need to have a paper trail and be transparent with taxpayers as to where money is going if it is in fact government money. So it'll be really interesting to see how that plays out.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  I will say that the world of lobbying has always been kind of icky, no matter the administration.

• 23:46Anthony Ha?

  More than kind of.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Like, there's always been, like, I was talking to the Shield AI founder and we were talking about, I was like, at what point did you know that you needed to do a ton of lobbying? And he was like, way too late. And once I did, it was like the most glass shatter thing where he was like, basically, like, at some point, you realize that, yeah, if you're not lobbying, the government's not even going to ask for your product or doesn't matter how good you're making it. So I don't know, I'm kind of torn on like, is this really that new to Trump? Or is some of the like, kind of the lobbying efforts and the being in the right rooms, it's just happening now to people who are like on Twitter and like are really vocal about it.

• 24:22Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, like all things, it's a combination of luck, timing and determination, right? But I do want to move on to our other theme, a different way to get money, and that's going public. Anthony, I was hoping you could kind of kick us off a little bit as we look at 2025 and I guess the appetite for and desire to IPO.

• 24:46Anthony Ha?

  Right. Well, I think to start us off, I thought maybe we could talk about this kind of wild sounding interview that David Solomon of Goldman Sachs gave with the FT where he basically said, you know what? Startups should actually think about not going public. Who wants to go public? Being public sucks. And you should just stay private for as long as you can. And I think that is particularly surprising coming from, you know, the head of Goldman Sachs, because you would think, oh, like, this is, you know, directly counter to his interests, to Goldman Sachs's interests. But in fact, when, I guess Goldman Sachs has been just sort of trying to adapt to this new environment already, and they're doing more work with startups as they're staying private, they helped Stripe raise a 6.5 billion round. I was going to say last

• 25:30Anthony Ha?

  But actually in 2023. And so it seems like part of what he's saying is essentially like, we're good either way. Like, you want to go public? We'll help you with that. You want to just stay private and raise these like mega rounds at like crazy valuations? We'll help you with that. Like, we'll make money either way.

• 25:46Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, either way, we're gonna make money because Goldman Sachs is one of the biggest, you know, investment banker, like, quote unquote, book runners for IPOs. So his statement was kind of surprising to me. But as you pointed out, they are sort of shifting their business model a little bit, which to me, I don't know if anyone here has the answer to this. But do we know why? Is it just because there were so few companies IPOing and Goldman Sachs just simply had to adjust to the marketplace over the last couple of years?

• 26:14Anthony Ha?

  I don't know why, but that would be my guess. It's just like, if you're on that team at Goldman, you're looking at like, all right, what's the IPO calendar for the next year? Oh, okay, let's figure something else out.

• 26:24Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Anthony Ha?

  But, Kirsten, I think you were looking at actually sort of what that calendar might look like in 2025.

• 26:30Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, exactly. Thank you. And we had this discussion a little bit on our end of the year predictions episode. And 2024, we did get some IPOs, you know, Reddit always comes to mind. But it wasn't quite as robust as imagined. Doing a little bit of digging and looking at some of the companies that are planning IPOs, I will say that 2025 does appear to be certainly more active than 2024. You know, there's a few that we've written about. We've got the trading platform eToro is said to be eyeing a $5 billion US IPO in 2025. Shein is still looking into an IPO, although I have to wonder how that's gonna go. And they are looking to list on the London Stock

• 27:15Kirsten Korosec?

  Exchange. So a little bit different. But there's a few others as well. Sailpoint, they're a cyber security firm. They filed earlier this month and they're planning to IPO on NASDAQ. And then there's Chime, which I think is kind of interesting. They're a mobile banking firm out of San Francisco. They're probably one of the buzziest IPO candidates. And they're, I guess you could put them in the fintech space as competitors to Klarna and Stripe. And they listed, or they filed to list for an IPO confidentially. So here we are with a whole bunch of activity. And then now it's a waiting game as to win.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Is there any like commonality in what industry these companies are in? Or like what industry is best to go public this year?

• 28:00Kirsten Korosec?

  There is, there is, of course, I would say anything related to AI, cybersecurity. There's certainly fintech, there's quite a bit there, but it's not all of that. There is some big industry stuff. I mean, like Medline Industries, but I would say fintech, AI, cybersecurity, software is, were a lot mishappening.

• 28:22Anthony Ha?

  Although it feels telling that like the AI companies that are at least talking about going public are not the kind of big brand names that, you know, at least TechCrunch readers all know about. And like you don't have like the OpenAI is in the anthropics of the world talking about this because from all the reporting, they're still essentially just setting a lot of money on fire. And that generally isn't great for if you're a public company, although there are exceptions and asterisks that when Wall Street will be like, yeah, it's fine. Just spend a ton of money on this. We're okay with it. But it does seem like a lot of the biggest AI companies are like, yeah, we can just continue to raise crazy amounts of money on the private market. So why would we deal with the stress of going public?

• 29:01Kirsten Korosec?

  Absolutely. I mean, I think companies like OpenAI have a zero. They are taking the advice from Goldman Sachs because they can, you know? There are other companies out there that don't have the cachet, but do have real revenue. And so that's the one thing I think I'm looking forward to the most in 2025 is seeing companies go public that have actual revenue. Because in my world, I was covering a ton of SPACs in 2021 and 2022 that were really more frontier or deep tech. And while they had the potential of being incredibly profitable, they had no near term plan for revenue. So that's what I'm shooting for in 2025.

• 29:43Anthony Ha?

  Right. It feels like such a turnaround from a few years ago when everyone was talking about SPACs. And there may be some exceptions that I'm forgetting, but in retrospect, it kind of feels like, oh yeah, like, because the whole idea behind the SPACs, right? Was the essentially like, it's way too hard to go public. Let's just have like every company go public. And then it turned out, maybe a lot of those companies should not have gone public.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Is there not LP pressure to go public? Like, are they not itching for liquidity?

• 30:08Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, so to me, that's really a it depends answer, which is super, super boring, and I'm sorry for that. But again, like in my world, some LPs are strategic corporations that actually have more of an eye on acquiring a startup. But I think it really depends on the terms and relationships of those LPs. Anthony, I don't, you were in the VC world for a moment. What do you think?

• 30:34Anthony Ha?

  I mean, so I worked for an early-stage VC, and in those cases, there were sort of long timelines. And frankly, by the time you were talking about an IPO, the early-stage VC did not really have much of a seat at the table. I think it was also relevant to the Divvy Holmes discussion we had earlier. When you're at the point where you're talking about a company that's raised a lot of money and is thinking about going public, these investors are in so deep that they probably want you to optimize when you actually go public. Because this is speculation on my part. I don't, no one has ever told me this. But my guess is that you're probably like, listen, if you can wait a year and you're going to make us so much more money than if you go now and it's kind of a bomb, like, why wouldn't you wait? Is my guess. I would imagine, though, if the conversation were like, well, we just don't ever want to go public, like, which it seems to be.

• 31:19Anthony Ha?

  If you were to take, you know, David Solomon kind of at face value, like, I don't think any investor would want to hear that. They'd be like, get out of here. Okay, when, when is this happening? You want to put it off by a year or two? That makes sense, but listen, when is this happening?

• 31:33Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, good points. Well, we have to wrap up. I did want to mention to listeners that if you want to dig deeper into global venture numbers for 2024 and what the IPO market could look like this year, we recently published an interview with Crunchbase News's Janai Tiere, and we will have a link to it in our show notes. Thank you to our listeners, and thank you to Margot and Anthony for joining us on another episode of Equity. We will be back next week. Until then, you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and Twitter.

• 32:12Rebecca 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.