The 'together tech' wave might be the most intriguing startup bet of 2026

While the AI fundraising machine keeps breaking its own records, some founders are building in the other direction. Mirror founder Brynn Putnam just raised money for Board, a startup focused on bringing people together through in-person games and social experiences. Cyberdeck creators are going viral crafting whimsical DIY computers that literally encourage users to touch grass. Unlike the AI-free browser crowd, this doesn't just feel like backlash, but also people genuinely gravitating toward things that feel a little more human. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into the week's headlines, from the "together tech" wave to what Anthropic's confidential IPO filing means against the backdrop of Alphabet's $80 billion AI raise, and whether the money is all flowing back to the big guys anyway. Listen to the full episode to hear: Why ex-Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer raised $250 million for climate tech specifically, at a moment when almost nobody else is How rocket engine startup Impulse raised $500 million — and is loudly emphasizing that those funds will be spent on people, not AI A look inside Anthropic's S-1, and what the team is looking forward to once we can finally compare the AI labs' financials What two YouTube directors cracking the box office tells us about creator economy power Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Chapters: 00:00 Intro 01:45 YouTubers are taking over the box office 02:46 Everyone's fleeing climate tech — except this $250M fund 07:03 Impulse Space raises $500M and is hiring humans 13:03 Anthropic quietly files for IPO as Alphabet drops $85B on AI 21:52 The token bubble is starting to burst 26:08 From Board games to DIY cyberdecks, founders are betting on IRL 33:09 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Kirsten Korsak, Transportation Editor here at TechCrunch, and I'm joined, as always, by our Weekend Editor, Anthony Ha, and Senior Reporter, Sean O'Kane. I'm wondering if you have watched Obsession or Backrooms?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  I have seen Obsession, and I am hoping to see Backrooms this weekend. And I think the reason that you're mentioning them is because those were the two biggest movies last weekend at the box office, and they were both directed by people who first made their names on YouTube.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Movie time is a pretty hard one to line up with a five-year-old when you require a babysitter to get out for a few hours. So I haven't seen either of them. I will say, boy, the YouTube ad rev share must be so low these days that you have to go out and make a movie to make some money.

• 0:54Speaker 01

  I think, I mean, it's interesting because, well, for a variety of reasons. But I was trying to describe this to my wife a couple of days ago, and she was like, wait, YouTubers? You mean like guys who just like, you know, like do essentially, I guess, what we're doing now, except for a much bigger audience on YouTube? And no, it's people who use YouTube as a distribution mechanism for stuff that kind of looks more like traditional filmmaking. Like, I mean, Backrooms started as sort of like a short film on YouTube that was like, almost like a special effects demo reel. It had this kind of real retro vibe. The director of Obsession, Corey Barker, also like posted like a 60-minute horror film, like found footage horror film on YouTube. So it's not what we would think of as kind of typical YouTube,

• 1:36Speaker 01

  but just people who like found it an easy way to like get their, you know, early filmmaking efforts out to a wide audience.

• 1:44Speaker 02

  The logical end state here clearly is YouTube buying a bunch of ailing movie theaters, creating its own movie studio, and locking these creators into 10 film deals. And we find ourselves back in the early 1900s Hollywood.

• 1:58Speaker 00

  That is the true horror film. Thank you for that. Scary look into the future. We should get into the rest of the show today. We have deals from a climate fund, from GigaScale and Rocket Engine startup Impulse. Then we're going to get into talking about AI scale versus governance and the culture shift towards in-real-life interactions.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  So let's get started with the first deal. And I love the headline that one of our reporters had zigging when most are zagging. Ex-Meta CTO Raises $250 Million Climate Fund. Everyone is not investing in climate right now. And so I thought it was pretty cool and interesting that they raised so much money.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  My reaction to this when Tim Deschamps was first writing about this the other day was sort of like, you know, a little bit of surprise. It's hard to imagine a ton of money going into a new climate fund these days, in particular, one that is being sort of specific about that. You know, we've seen a kind of rebranding of sorts of like, quote unquote, climate tech over the last year or two to like resilience tech or, you know, throw in other buzzwords there. So, you know, I found it interesting that this was more specifically angled at that. We're dealing with a fund that's going to be sort of investing in energy generation, critical minerals. I mean, in some respects, that's not surprising because there is so much action on that end,

• 3:30Speaker 02

  both in the private sector and coming from, you know, support with the, from the federal government. So like, you know, it makes some sense, but it was a little bit of a surprise to see in 2026.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  I'm going to say that I'm not surprised because there's so much interest in activity around data centers and then the energy and power and questions about grid infrastructure as well as critical minerals. So I'm going to take the opposing view on there. I think that more funds should be raising money and putting money towards these types of energy generation and to support the type of infrastructure that is actually depleting water and natural resources and, you know, causes some real questions.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's also telling that even though it seems like this is sort of unapologetically a climate fund, I think the sort of the tagline is not climate. The tagline is like the physical economy. And so even there, there's some effort to rebrand a little bit. Because I do think there is a certain amount of investor resistance to the idea of climate tech right now, which to your point, Kirsten, is like, seems a little off because the energy needs are only growing right now. And it's frankly kind of horrifying to see like how these like massive natural gas projects to fund data centers. And it just seems obvious that like the necessity for like clean energy is only going to grow.

• 4:59Speaker 01

  But that's one thing to understand in the abstract, one thing to raise $250 million to fund that. So I found this very encouraging.

• 5:07Speaker 00

  I think that moments like this, when so much money is being piled into sort of the data centerpiece, there is real opportunities there. And, you know, I'll probably be wrong, but I do think, and I sort of hope that there are some other investors out there that see the opportunity to invest in climate tech as a result of so much growth around AI. It doesn't mean that you have to pile all of your money into AI. You can put your money elsewhere in support of, you know, the extreme power grab that is necessary to support, you know, training models and inference and just sort of the use cases around data centers.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  I also wonder to what extent, you know, because investing, not in every AI startup, but in certain kinds of AI, and certainly some of the big companies that we're going to be talking about later in this episode, involves like, to a certain extent, a kind of like comfort with like real, serious capital expenditures, you know, a degree of patience. And all these things that I think made climate tech scary in the past, that maybe like the idea of, okay, like putting, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars or more into like, you know, solar farms and things like that, like something like, oh, well, that doesn't seem quite as like hard to swallow as it did maybe a decade ago.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Well, I think that we want to talk About something other than climate tech, which is Rocket Engine Startup Impulse. This is a company that just raised 500 million. And again, this was another headline that really caught my eye because, you know, when we see these big raises, I think we're very much used to on this show and for our listening audience to, to see stories that generally it means that they're related to AI, maybe defense tech, and they're spending on things like compute. But this CEO and founder went out of their way to talk about how they're going to be hiring people.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is Impulse Space. They're one of a number of, I mean, there are a lot of companies out there that are founded by former SpaceX people, but in particular, there are a handful of them from very early SpaceX employees. This one is from Tom Muller. And, you know, they're doing a couple of different things, which I feel like is interesting. You know, there are companies out there like Stoke Space or, you know, to a certain extent, you know, Rocket Lab, they're trying to like directly compete with SpaceX and others in, you know, in the sort of space launch world. Impulse Space is trying a couple of different things. One of the most interesting things I think they're doing is they have a sort of a spacecraft that would kind of like shuttle payloads to higher orbits.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  So like you could, you know, you're basically using less fuel and spending less energy and spending less money to just get it off Earth. And then they'll take you the rest of the way there, which is, you know, a fun idea. If that math pencil is out, this is certainly, I think, not the last company we're going to see raise a whole bunch of money heading into and out of the SpaceX IPO. I think there's just so much attention and excitement around what these space companies are working on and the idea of an economy in space. And to your point, like that is going to require just a ton of people working on this stuff and, and engineers are in really high demand. These folks are located in Los Angeles. Their, their original headquarters was actually right next to my brother's old production company.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And there was like a funny moment once where I remember him saying, oh, you know, one of the early SpaceX employees may be enriching uranium next door to where I work. And, and then he was like, never mind, never Never mind, it's the one that's working on rockets and stuff, not the uranium company.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  Never, never say that to a reporter, right?

• 8:47Speaker 02

  I know, right? I was like, hmm, interesting. But yeah, I mean, they're in a hotbed area for engineers, not just because of SpaceX, but a lot of EV companies are located there. And California's not cheap, so they're definitely going to need this kind of money to attract a lot of people and build up this capability as they scale.

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It was funny that the way, like, at least the way we wrote it up in a sense, I'm guessing this is kind of the way they were pitching it, was this emphasis on the idea that it's sort of counterintuitive, that they're going to be hiring, you know, hundreds of new employees, because, you know, you think five or 10 years back, like, if you were writing about a lot of funding announcements, they'd always do this question where you're like, "Okay, what are you spending the money on?" And they would kind of give you this high-minded, ambitious answer, but the real answer, realize that we're going to hire people. And, and so it's funny now in 2026 that that can feel like a slightly counterintuitive answer. Although, of course, yeah, it certainly makes sense here, and I should say that, you know, both my parents were aerospace engineers. My mom is still an aerospace engineer, so I'm biased, but I would imagine that this is an area where automating everything is probably really dangerous

• 9:51Speaker 01

  and a risky move, because you can, you know, you can put out like a vibe-coded mobile app and fix things on the fly. That really is less likely it'll work in space.

• 10:01Speaker 02

  And not just dangerous, but like possibly ineffective. I'd encourage people, you know, if they're interested, go read the story that Tim Fernholtz wrote for us. But in large part because he spoke to COO Eric Romo, who, you know, was pretty blunt with him about how they've tried a lot of that kind of stuff in the past, and you can do all of these simulations, and they could be like the best simulations in the world, and there's still just no substitute for putting the hardware through the kinds of forces that they need to be put through on a test stand and learning from that. I mean, like, like the approach or not, but like, the way that SpaceX does things is the reason they've been able to create, you know, the most reusable, reliable rocket system in the world,

• 10:44Speaker 02

  in the Falcon 9, and, and, you know, there was no way they were ever going to simulate that into reality. And so I think that's the right approach here.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, you mentioned something a little bit earlier. And I don't want to get too far afield, but I will just for a minute. And you talked about sort of this, the follow-on effects of the SpaceX IPO. And we've already seen sort of a lot of folks who have left SpaceX to create their own companies, some within SpaceX, some outside of it. And there has been some momentum because of the company and its success. But I do think that the IPO is going to give, you know, a lot of folks more, I guess encouragement to start their own companies or to get into the field altogether. And I'm talking about like the next batch of young people who are graduating high school and going into college.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Because it does, to Anthony's point earlier, and I did not know your parents were, by the way, aerospace engineers, that's very cool. That this is a very people-focused industry. And that is an area that in spite of everything that's happening sort of chaotically in the economy right now with jobs, that is a job that is probably not going to go away anytime soon. So I wonder if we're going to just see like just a huge wave of, you know, aerospace engineers jumping into the fray, but also startup founders as a result of the SpaceX IPO.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  I think not only because there's so much interest in the space, but also, you know, to your, further to your point, like people are going to have a lot of money to play with, right? It's just going to be easier to like noodle on an idea that's been, you know, in the back of your head when all of a sudden you have a little bit, a little bit, when you maybe have a lot of spending money and you don't need that angel. Or these people, you know, a lot of these people are probably going to go out and start their own sort of angel funds and do their own kinds of investment. You know, to me then, the question is like, how saturated can this market get? Like, how big is the space economy really? What sorts of ideas will take hold? There's just so many, so many questions that we're going to spend the next couple of years answering in a way that we haven't had a chance to before.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  So, speaking of IPOs, Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO. What did you guys make of the story? I know that there's not a lot of numbers out there yet, but what are you going to be looking for?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Well, I ended up writing this story, which was kind of fun for me because oftentimes I play in the world of transportation, but I jumped in on this one. I think, to me, what was most interesting is that Okay, one, yes, we don't have any of the numbers, but we do have some information, which is that they just raised a huge amount of money. They're valued at close to $1 trillion. And this is a company that was founded, what, five years ago? So the scale is certainly has my attention. And what I'll be waiting and watching for, I mean, Sean, luckily, we have you on the show because you're really into S1s even more so than I am. And you're very good at finding like little footnotes and things like that. But I know that like

• 13:47Speaker 00

  the first things I'm going to look at is who's got the voting power here? Who's got the control? Who's going to be making? Who's going to be the big winners? What their risks are in terms of like legal matters or anything like that? And any kind of deep dive into their financials. Those are all the like sort of top line things I'll be looking at. And then Sean, you're usually pretty good at finding all the weird obscure things that no one's paying attention to.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I would say there's part of me that may even be more excited to read this filing than the SpaceX one in large part because, I mean, Anthropic by the reporting that we've seen is maybe in a better financial position than the other leading AI labs as far as the money that it's bringing in and how it's spending against that. You know, they're supposedly sort of like looking pretty good in the operating profit area. We'll be able to like test that, you know, in these filings when we see them in, you know, a month or two, whenever that might be. But also, you know, they're one of the first big, they're a company that I think of when we think about like a lot of the reporting that's happened over the last like three or four years around ARR as like this important metric to understand

• 14:58Speaker 02

  that how quickly a business is growing. And so like getting under the hood and seeing what that has looked like for them over the last couple of years and what it looks like sort of currently is really interesting to me. Whereas like compared to SpaceX, I think we all had a good idea roughly what the business looked like. You know, the specifics, we didn't really know heading into the their IPO filing, but we we kind of had an idea of what it looked like and it wasn't really. Built in the same kind of way that an AI lab like Anthropic or OpenAI are built. So that's one of the reasons why I'm very eager for this. And also, we just weren't, I think, expecting this to happen so soon. I think there had been some reporting this was going to happen by the end of this year,

• 15:40Speaker 02

  but this popped up maybe a little bit sooner than than folks imagined.

• 15:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, and then to remind our listeners, we're also expecting OpenAI. So I'm wondering, Anthony, what you are interested in comparing the two? Like, what are you going to look for first when you, once the OpenAI IPO drops, which we're expecting, right?

• 16:03Speaker 01

  I'm boring. I'm going to look at profitability because I'm curious. You know, again, I don't have a great sense. Obviously, we don't know for sure because to the extent that we know it's from reporting, it's from leaks, it's not from official filings. But yeah, it'll be certainly be interesting to see if Anthro. I don't think any of the big AI companies are hugely profitable yet because that's not really what they're going for. But if, especially if Anthropic is profitable and OpenAI, I'm pretty sure is not, that'll be an interesting contrast. And then it'll also be interesting to see how much that matters. Like, is, you know, are Wall Street investors going to be like, we don't care about profitability for these companies, we just care about growth, which also, you know, could be a significant issue for these companies?

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Or are they actually going to reward one company over the other?

• 16:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, against this backdrop of, you know, privately held VC-backed companies filing for IPOs, we're also getting a sense of this scale of spending around AI by looking at what's happening with publicly traded companies. And this is, what I'm speaking to specifically is Alphabet just had an $85 billion stock sale. And Julie Bort, our venture editor, wrote, you know, that it signals investor appetite. And I was like, yeah, no kidding. Yeah, it signals investor appetite for AI-related offerings, which I thought was pretty hilarious.

• 17:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's more than SpaceX is going to raise in its IPO. I would say that's a pretty big appetite.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  To be fair to Julie, actually, her headline was also that it was a hell of a good signal, which to me was also just delightful because maybe this is too inside baseball, but like the amount of profanity in TechCrunch headlines has gone down over the years. So I felt like hell of a spelled hell U V A was a good way to kind of get that back in there. But I, yeah, I think it was, it was interesting because it both shows that there's a tremendous amount of appetite, to use the same phrase, but also the fact that, you know, how high the expenditures are. Again, like the fact that Google is going out and raising more funding, this much money specifically for this purpose is also just a sign that they need to spend a lot of money, or at least they think they do.

• 18:18Speaker 02

  I mean, this is what I'll be looking for in this, you know, in an Anthropic IPO and in an OpenAI IPO, which is like, how does this stack up against what a company like Google can do? It was not that long ago that Google was seen as the one that was behind these startups. Now they have, you know, matched or exceeded in a lot of places, the capabilities of what those AI labs have put out. And on top of that, you know, they're going, they're doing it in sort of omnidirectional way, going for enterprise, going for consumer, rolling out all this stuff into Google Search. They have sort of exposure to people in a way that these labs, you know, really don't, even despite

• 18:58Speaker 02

  how popular ChatGPT has become. And so to me, the question is like, yes, this is on some level good for companies like Anthropic to show that there's so much appetite for this, but there's also the question of like, Google's already, Alphabet's already spending nearly $200 billion in CapEx this year on AI and has said now with the prospectus, like along with this raise, that that's going to significantly exceed that next year. Anthropic could have the best IPO in the world and like, you know, they're just not going to be able to match that financial might. Now Anthropic, as we've talked about, like seems to have a more coherent business that it's working on. So it may not need that kind of.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  Financial firepower, and maybe this is a bigger question for the OpenAI's of the world, but I mean, that's just, that's what comes to mind when I see Google go out and do this and Alphabet go out and do this and, and, you know, set it against these IPOs.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  But also, I think it's worth mentioning before we move on and talk about other things related to AI scale, that I thought it was really interesting that Berkshire Hathaway was one of the buyers, which, you know, they are known for value investing. And so to me, when a company like that is, is part of this stock sale, to me, it is a signal that they see stability in this, which is really interesting and that they want to get in on it now. So I, I think that that's an interesting indicator to me. And then to your point, Sean, $85 billion is so far outside the imagination and that they have so much capital to throw at this. It's hard, it's really hard to like not imagine

• 20:37Speaker 00

  them coming out on top. Like if they don't absolutely blow this out of the water, that is, that's saying something. I mean, they're, they're the expected winner, right? Out of all this.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  One thing I think sort of that leads into sort of the next kind of chunk of this big kind of AI scale discussion is as companies are going public, as you know, all this money is flowing into the system, presumably at some point, it's not going to be flowing in at the same rate. There's going to be expectations around profitability, and you're starting to see some of those levers already get turned. So, you know, when we were planning for this, I think, Sean, you called this token apocalypse, that some companies are, and I want to hear obviously more about what you think about it, but like, my sense is that there are companies, like there was an example of, you know, Microsoft deciding with like GitHub Copilot, that they're going to start charging more per token, because like this whole ecosystem is heavily, heavily subsidized by investor

• 21:34Speaker 01

  money. And so stuff that seems like it has no cost, in fact, is incredibly expensive. And now we're going to get to a point where more of that cost is going to get passed on to the end consumer, to the customer. And so how is that going to change behaviors? I don't think-

• 21:50Speaker 02

  We know, but I think there's going to be a lot of pain. How many token-related risk factors do we think are going to be in the Anthropic S1, right? Like, this is a big question. It's something that I've mentioned a lot on this show. And we seem to just keep running into it where, you know, Uber, Uber has done like the full arc in the span of like a month and a half, right? Of saying, oh, boy, we kind of blew through our budget on this stuff way quicker than we thought this year. And then, oh, like, maybe this is going to be a little too expensive to us to like this week. Oh, we need to put caps on this and we need to limit people's usage inside the company. Like, that's just a, that's a little worrying, I would imagine, if you see that happen so quickly at a company like Uber. That, you know, is sort of using this stuff a lot.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  And it's just a question of, you know, can these companies, these AI labs sort of collapse that cost, like progress the tech enough? In a way that it sort of eventually meets in the middle with, you know, where people's appetite for spending, I mean, like customers' appetite for spending. You know, I think a funny thing to think back on is like, I don't think there was really any strategy involved in OpenAI charging $20 a month when ChatGPT originally came out. It was just sort of like, let's spit out a number. And like, we've all been reckoning with that kind of ever since, right? Like, clearly, people pay more for this, for the more advanced models. But like, even that still isn't enough to kind of close that gap to the true cost.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  And so that's, that's clearly the biggest question here.

• 23:18Speaker 00

  All of this, to me, illustrates how quickly things are moving. I mean, when you really think about it, like, the whole token maxing thing has, like, become a thing, peaked, and now is seen unfavorably within six months. I mean, the, the, the scale of this, the whole pricing mechanism, to your point, was put in place before business models were really shaped and solidified around AI labs. And then, at the same time, you have the government sort of trying to catch up. I mean, also this week, President Trump signed an executive order designed to give the government a chance to review powerful AI models.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  So you have all of this happening at a pace that I don't think I've ever experienced. And that's why I'm kind of really looking forward to some of these S1 IPO registration statements because of the risk pieces. Like, how do you even write these risks in because they are evolving? Like before our eyes and day by day.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Uber is an interesting example, Sean, because you mentioned their AI spend, but I feel like they've also come up in the AI discourse because sometimes people who are very skeptical about these companies think there's this bubble. They'll bring up the fact just sort of how wildly unprofitable presumably these tools are, these companies are, and then people will bring up Uber as sort of a response. Like people talked about how unprofitable Uber was, but eventually you get to scale and then you close that gap. And I think that's true, but also for Uber to do that, it had to really transform itself as a company in a lot of ways. And like what Uber was at the beginning and what it is now, all the different areas of business that it's had to expand into, the different ways that customers and drivers have gotten squeezed.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I think those are things that have had to happen to get to the point where it could be a profitable company, leaving aside the question of how it's adopting AI. And I think you're going to have to see similar transformations for a lot of these AI companies if they're going to survive.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, is there any way that these labs can squeeze pennies like Uber has squeezed the drivers over the years? Is there something squishy enough there for them to do that? I don't know. This seems like harder, more straightforward costs in a lot of ways, so it'll be interesting.

• 25:35Speaker 00

  Anthony, you mentioned the word transformation a moment ago, and I think that it's worth talking about another interesting cultural transformation that is happening as a result of AI scaling, the change of business, the change of industries. And that is not just the backlash, which we've talked about. We actually talked about it a couple of weeks ago, last week, the booing happening at the graduation ceremonies, but actually opportunities to start new companies, businesses, products that are all about in real life.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really liked reading all the TechCrunch coverage that our producer Theresa rounded up about this because I think I'd missed some of these stories. And it is very exciting and encouraging to see startups pursuing different avenues. Like one of the most recent ones was Bryn Putnam, who was the founder of Mirror, has a new startup called Board that she's raised money for, and it's supposed to be about kind of... Even though I think there's a digital component, but there's also like it's about like kind of playing games in person. And I wouldn't necessarily say that any of the ideas that I've seen, you know, so far, maybe I could be wrong. I don't know that any of them is going to be like a huge company. But in aggregate, I find it like really encouraging that that it's not like it's not like every startup is going in the same direction. Because sometimes

• 26:52Speaker 01

  I think when we like talk about AI deals, it can just feel like there's essentially one thesis and everyone in the tech industry is betting on it. And I mean, I think to a large extent, that's true, but that it's good to see people swimming in different directions because I I'm hopeful that there are there are different kinds of opportunities.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  To your point of like swimming in different directions. I mean, I think this is being these opportunities, this sort of tech together idea is a reflection of what is happening of that singular thesis towards AI. It's just that there's a group of people out there who see an opening of what people might want or a shift culturally and what people might want, which is, you know, to get together. I mean, you've seen dating apps changing to reflect this and not just be about swiping and getting away from that idea of only interacting with your phone or doom scrolling, swiping left or right, and really kind of creating apps or other products that bring people together. And you're also seeing that actually

• 27:51Speaker 00

  how people are using search. I mean, we had a long discussion recently about how Google search has changed. But now we're seeing all these other different companies pop up that are offering a very different experience. I think all in reaction to, you know, to that singular thesis around AI that you mentioned earlier.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  The encouraging thing to me is that there's a really big spectrum, right? There are startups that are more traditional, like board in some ways where, you know, this thing is, you know, certainly meeting a moment now, but it's also not something you could imagine being too strange to have existed 10 years ago, you know, setting aside some tech limitations. But there are also like creators who are finding their own ways to do stuff like Amanda Silverling wrote this really awesome story this week for us about these people who are creating. I had to like read it a couple of times as I was like. Oh, man, I'm out of the loop on this cyber decks where like, you know, there people are creating like all these interesting little kind of like Raspberry Pi or like Pi adjacent

• 28:49Speaker 02

  computers and like building them into really fun form factors. One of them, you know, looks like that sort of clam shell phone from It Follows that I think everybody wanted when they saw that movie 10 years ago. And there's one that somebody made where you can like literally touch grass while you're using the computer. Like just really fun stuff. To me, the question is like, out of all of this, what becomes durable, right? Like, is there, is, are those cyber deck things? Something that is just the trend of the moment and every creator on Tik Tok or reels is doing it. And so you do it because you want to get, you know, the views to. I don't think that's the case. Clearly, a lot of these people have some like real technological capabilities that allows them to do this stuff.

• 29:32Speaker 02

  That they're not just sort of following like paint by numbers and like hacking the latest trend. But like I am, that's what I'm kind of looking out for is like, is there something in all of this that will actually be around for the next five to 10 years? I think it's too early to really know that for sure, but there is so much of it happening kind of all over the place, which is really fun.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  I do worry that I think similarly that especially if some of this stuff turns out not to be durable or not popular, that will lead people to kind of react a little cynically of like, well, no one really wants this. And so it's not worth producing these avenues. But, you know, first of all, it's just worth remembering that most startups fail anyway. So if some of these fail as well, that's just normal. And I do think that, you know, sometimes it is that when you're trying to solve these kinds of issues like, like our discomfort with like how much screen time we might have like, you know, we don't, we can all group, maybe we might all have that discomfort, but like hopefully different startups are experimenting with different ways to solve that. And again, most of those ways might fail. Like, I mean, I'm reminded also of, you know, a year or two ago, we were talking about humane, which was like

• 30:35Speaker 01

  somebody that was talking about like, oh, so we don't like screen time. So we've instead we've invented this like voice AI assistant that's also kind of a surveillance device and has, you know, like really janky UI. And so just because you've diagnosed the problem doesn't mean that you're going to solve it. But I'm glad at least that a number of startups have diagnosed a number of problems that I also have like unease about.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  Bold of you to bring up humane at the end of the podcast where now all I want to do is talk about that company for 40 more minutes. Leave him wanting more, Sean.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  I thought that you wanted to talk about that, but we're gonna not talk about that. Another show. I will say that, you know, it's not about whether, you know, Cyberdex are gonna become a thing. I think it's really reflective of like a wave of like a real cultural shift that's happening where people are looking for things that are whimsical. And I predict, and I'm really all about predictions in the show, but I really see this probably gonna be reflective in fashion, in design, in interior design, in literature, things like that, and in our tech, where it is going to reflect this, where it's not just about

• 31:44Speaker 00

  a negative backlash, but also people propelling towards things that are feel lighter and more authentic, even crafty. I think consumers ultimately do have a say in the direction of these things. So there, who knows, there may be some breakthrough products. I don't think that it's gonna be wearable AI assistance. I think it's gonna be something a little bit different than that.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  One other thing that I find very cool about it is that I think a lot of these are aimed at younger users. And of course, as soon as you to talk about them that way, immediately is to age yourself and to out myself as a middle aged man. But like, I do think sometimes we think about these technologies as if like, oh, like all of like things like AI are being sort of embraced by by like young people. And if you're resisting it, you're sort of a fuddy duddy. But like, in fact, I think there are portions of the younger audience, younger consumer base that like have, again, some of these same questions. And also, like you were saying, like this thirst for authenticity, for whimsy. And so like, I'm really hopeful that actually you're gonna see, yeah, some of these countervailing trends among, you know, a new audience.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  And probably only accelerated by the fact that this is apparently the whole thesis of the new Toy Story movie coming out this summer, right? So like, here comes a whole new, a whole new world of kids who might think twice about it until they see the lily pad toy in a Target store after they see the movie.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  So that is a movie that you will be able to see. You won't have to get a babysitter for it, right?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sean, do not see obsession with your child. That would be a very, very bad decision. And that goes for all the listeners. Yeah. Well, let's wrap things up there. So Equity will be back next week. Until then, you can follow us on social media, at Equity Pod on X and Threads. And thank you so much for listening.

• 33:29Speaker 03

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