Apple's Ternus era begins as Nvidia bets on the whole AI stack

It's officially the Ternus era at Apple. Tim Cook stepped down as CEO this week, handing the company to former hardware chief John Ternus, whose first memo promised a “huge launch next week” — timing that puts Apple's next iPhone event on his desk before he's even settled in. Cook isn't going far, though: he's staying on as executive chairman, focused on the kind of policy relationships that recently turned something as small as a map label into a very public balancing act. All of which raises an obvious question: what does the Ternus era look like, and how much rope will shareholders give him to figure it out? On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec and Sean O'Kane unpack what Ternus is walking into, why he may actually be better positioned to make progress on software than hardware in this new AI era, and more of the week's news. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: Why Nvidia keeps making moves that look less like a chipmaker and more like a company trying to own the entire AI stack, from its Hugging Face acquisition to its investment in MediaTek and deeper compute deals A chaotic week for robotaxis: Tesla's Cybercab event, Waymo's expansion into new cities, Zoox's first paid rides, and what happens when these companies start competing head-to-head What Andreessen Horowitz's new $1.1 billion “Machine Age” fund signals about where early-stage AI hardware bets are headed Why the $285 million acquisition of GoPro marks the end of an era for one of Silicon Valley's original consumer tech darlings 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 1:12 Tim Cook steps down & John Ternus takes over as CEO 13:33 Nvidia's spreading its AI bets 21:58 A big week for robotaxis: Tesla, Waymo, Zoox & Uber 29:09 a16z's $1.1B "machine age" fund and $8.5B growth fund 32:39 GoPro's $285M acquisition and pivot to AI/defense 36:34 Outro Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Equity is brought to you by Schneider Electric. Schneider Electric, advancing energy tech.

• 0:05Kirsten Korosec?

  Apple has a new CEO and John Turnus is already teasing a huge event next week, leaving all of us wondering what the company's Turnus era will look like. Also this week, Nvidia keeps spreading its bets across the AI stack. The robotaxi industry is heating up and we're keeping our eye on a few deals, including the $285 million acquisition of GoPro.

• 0:34Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, September 4th. I'm Kirsten Korosec, Transportation Editor, and I'm joined as always by our Senior Reporter, Special Projects, Sean O'Kane. No Anthony Ha today, he will be back. He is enjoying a vacation, but there is so much to talk about. What's top of mind for you today?

• 0:59Speaker 02

  Well, I'm a little bit sick. My kid started first grade, so I'm being introduced to a whole new, you know, biome of wonderful things happening in that room, as is the case at the beginning of every school year. So I'm dealing with that, but otherwise, I mean, I think we've got a lot to get to, especially excited to talk a little bit about robotaxis at the end.

• 1:18Kirsten Korosec?

  Yes, well, we will get to robotaxis and we should of course say, when we say robotaxis, Tesla Cybercab event is happening as we record this. But let's get started with a different company first, which is Apple and sort of the end of the Tim Cook era, right?

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, at one point, maybe its own robotaxi play until they decided to up and kill Project Titan. And I've seen some speculation this week, oh, maybe the new CEO will bring that back. I highly doubt it. I'll plant that flag pretty easily right now. But yes, Tim Cook steps down, John Ternus, the new CEO, just in time for a new iPhone event and whatever else they might throw at us next week. I'm sure we're going to get into it, but Tim Cook had the sort of unenvious position of having to follow Steve Jobs. I think a lot of people would think about it that way. That's, it's sort of, I'm a baseball fan and a Yankees fan. And I remember the conversation about who's going to be the shortstop after Derek Jeter retires. This has a very similar feeling to me.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  There's been a lot of focus on Ternus being a product guy and that being a positive for the company.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  I think, you know, we're just going to have to see what that means, because you can only be sort of leading with your products when you're a company as big as Apple, especially one that makes so much of its money from its services. And so I'm very curious to see how he walks that line. And then I think the other thing that I'll say just up top is like, you know, Cook gets all this attention and praise for being the operator that he was and the sort of numbers guy and the just-in-time manufacturing, all that stuff. And that's all true, but he's also like, behind the scenes, a pretty ruthless guy. Like the thing that I always come back to is that sort of reporting from Mike Isaac

• 3:06Speaker 02

  in his book about Uber where Tim Cook pulled Travis Kalanick in to a meeting, you know, back in the mid 2010s and was like, you guys are breaking all these rules that we need you to abide by, or else we're going to boot you off the App Store. And he really, for a long time, I think, behind the scenes has wielded Apple's power as a marketplace and as an app store provider to sort of make things happen or stop other things from happening. I do think we saw that soften in his last few years. Like there were, I think arguably clearer violations of Apple's Ternus of Service when X, you know, sort of went in some of the directions that X went in under Elon Musk.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  And that never really, you know, there was a moment in time, a year or two ago, where like Musk showed up at Cupertino and they clearly met on campus. But it was not, you know, I don't think it was reported as being the same kind of tense standoff that we saw with Travis Kalanick years ago. So those are the kinds of things that I'm thinking of. You know, what kind of political operator behind the scenes and in, you know, in front of everybody, in front of the cameras at the White House is John Ternus going to be?

• 4:13Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, that's an important point, so I want to jump in here. First of all, we know that Tim Cook is still going to stay involved with Apple. So he may not be in the position that he was in, but to your point of behind the scenes, sort of the quiet but ruthless leader, he's still going to be around. And in fact, the company has said even that, that he is going to be kind of paying attention to that White House relationship, which frees up John Ternus to focus on the important things, I think, that shareholders really care about, which is, you know, continued growth, which is how do you grow a very mature company, you know, one of the most valuable companies in the world?

• 4:55Kirsten Korosec?

  How do you put out new and interesting products while also on the hardware side and pushing that forward while also pushing forward on the software side? So that is what he's going to be judged on. And Tim Cook isn't totally going away. So I think that that's like really, you know, kind of an important point. I want to circle back to something you said in the beginning, which is, I also remember when Tim Cook took the position and there were all these questions, like, could he live up to Steve Jobs? And I think that the same questions are being asked today. And to me, it isn't that these questions are being asked. To me, really kind of the underlying question is how much time are shareholders going to give John Ternus

• 5:40Kirsten Korosec?

  to get up to speed? And how much grace are they going to, to give him? And I mean, I think the first test is coming up next week, which is September 9th. There's going to be a big hardware event. Obviously, Tim Cook's hands are going to be all over that, but it will be the first time we're going to see how Ternus is received, you know, in a very public sort of way. And then the future products and software moves, I think that's, you know, going to take six months, a year, two years for us to really see, you know, his effect on the company. So I guess, you know, I think we're kind of in agreement on things, although, you know, I just want to like highlight that Tim Cook's not going away.

• 6:22Kirsten Korosec?

  I'm wondering if you think that he is going to be kind of quietly disappearing in the background? Or if we're going to actually see Tim Cook quite a bit at the White House?

• 6:32Speaker 02

  It's a good question, right? I mean, I think we've seen so many of these other situations where somebody bumps up to like, you know, quote unquote, executive chairman or whatever the title might be, that allows them to continue to move, you know, do the more soft power stuff. And I could see that happening. I mean, by all accounts, Trump seems to like Tim Cook, unsurprising, given the things that Cook has handed him, quite, you know, quite literal things, like gold things in the White House or more, you know, sort of esoteric things, like during the first administration, where Cook sort of gave him the ability to brag about bringing Mac manufacturing, quote unquote, back to the US when it was really a factory that was already making Macs a third-party contractor.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  You know, he has shown that he's willing to go in a lot of different directions and do some, you know, I think frankly, shameless stuff when it comes to just securing the, the sort of, courting the administration in that way. And so it would be a useful way to keep him around.

• 7:32Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, and I would say even recently, sometimes that soft power isn't necessarily handing on the White House something, but just complying with, you know, the doctrine or executive orders that, that Trump signs. So this just came up recently with how Apple Maps displays Lake Ontario. And now if you're in the US and you're a user of Apple Maps, it now shows Lake America, which, you know, Apple is following Google's lead on this. But there is one company, MapQuest, that is not. And, you know, I think in another era, maybe in another administration, Apple would have stood up to this, but they're not.

• 8:14Kirsten Korosec?

  And so it's not so much giving things to the White House as much as also complying with what Trump wants. And in this case, something as simple as, you know, changing the name of, you know, one of the Great Lakes to the name that Trump wants, you know? It's, it's making the White House happy right now.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I won't go on a big tangent. I grew up on Lake Ontario, you know, shout out Oswego, New York. I do think it's very weird that an executive order the president signed this week resulted in my mom being on the local news talking about, you know, this issue. You know, there are gradations to this stuff, right? Like, I think the, the lake name thing, even more so to some extent, I think, to the Gulf of America, Gulf of Mexico thing, is just one of those things where it's, it's too easy frankly, for these tech companies to just go along with, because they have the fallback of being able to say, well, you know, the executive order did this and it changed this database and therefore, you know, we go on the database and et cetera, et cetera. It's really, it's those other things where you have to kind of, you know,

• 9:17Speaker 02

  either serve a created reality under, you know, that this administration prefers or create ones that, little ones that it can sort of gloat about on the world stage, that, you know, I'm interested to see how, I don't think any tech company CEO right now is going to change their willingness to do those things. So it, you know, that, that said, it makes me want to pay close attention to how Ternus does this. While he's also getting, you know, not, let's go back to the baseball metaphor, maybe not necessarily a fastball down the middle next week with a hardware event, because there is this iPhone fold that might be coming out.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  And that has a lot of questions and has a decent chance of not being a very successful product. If you look at how some of the other foldable phones have gone as far as raw sales are. But, you know, something that is like an easy, an easy first step for him as CEO.

• 10:15Kirsten Korosec?

  On, on the product side, I think one thing that we haven't really talked a lot about, which is sort of surprising, since we talk about AI so much on this show, which is how Ternus is going to keep Apple as a leader? Or certainly in the game of, of AI? And, you know, Apple Intelligence has been criticized. The company has tried to catch up and they've made some progress on that front. But there is, all eyes are on that. That really matters. I mean, as much of how we think of Apple as a hardware company, I mean, The AI component of this and what they do it and how they apply to their hardware really matters here. And that matters more than, you know, the relationship with the White

• 10:56Kirsten Korosec?

  House, I would say, or, you know, other matters, even, you know, lawsuits that Apple has right now, the one with OpenAI is a good example. All of those kind of fade to the background. What really matters here is how Apple is going to lead or at least keep up.

• 11:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I actually think he's better set up, you know, talking about having a good first step next week with a hardware event, I think he's almost better set up to make progress on the software, if only because of how, especially on the AI side and Siri in particular, how badly Apple has lagged on that stuff over the last decade. And, you know, the early reviews, our own, you know, Sarah Perez has written about this a few times on the site, of the kind of revamped Siri in the new version of iOS. It's just like night and day with how much more usable it is now versus really where it's been over, over the last 10 years. And so the ability to do that, plus also, there's been a lot of shakeup inside the software organization and the design side of things at Apple, which,

• 11:58Speaker 02

  you know, backing away from the like liquid classification of iOS alongside making Siri better, it's just like, it's going to be very easy for a lot of people to look at Ternus's first, you know, few months of his tenure as CEO and say like, boy, doesn't this feel like a fresher Apple than we've had recently, you know, as long as everything else goes well.

• 12:20Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, that's a good point. I think that within the company, you know, we've focused a lot of attention on like how shareholders are going to react and how much grace they're going to give Ternus. But, you know, what, what employees think really matters here? And we've already seen a bunch of executives go to different positions or leave the company altogether. And so, yeah, I think that you're right, that a fresher Apple may, may come out of this, which I think should benefit Apple, assuming that those, the fresher Apple is a better Apple. But it certainly internally could at least revive sort of ambitions within the company. Don't forget, I mean, there's a lot of pressure from other, other companies

• 13:03Kirsten Korosec?

  to hire talent away. And, you know, Apple certainly pays its engineers very well and things like that. We know that. But it's very exciting to go work at an OpenAI or the other company that we're going to talk about, which is Nvidia, another incredibly valuable company, I think five and a half, we'll, we'll round up, five and a half trillion dollar market cap. This is a company that's also doing really exciting things and absolutely dominating in the AI space. So can Apple hold on to that talent and, you know, stave off the OpenAI's, Anthropics and Nvidia's of the world?

• 13:39Speaker 00

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• 14:06Speaker 02

  I think that's a great point. The idea that it is not just an easy win to be Apple and have people want to come work for Apple, especially when you're trying to compete on this frontier technology. And we, we haven't really seen them do that in the way that they have to do that lately. And, and it's, it's got to be hard, right? Because like, let's talk about Nvidia, this company that has become so valuable, valuable and so dominant in this space for a number of reasons. It's not just because it's also done one thing, like Russell Brandon wrote a really good piece for us this week about how Nvidia is changing itself and trying to be more than just the company that made the good GPU that everybody wants. And, you know, that must be really challenging to try to, you know,

• 14:51Speaker 02

  compete with when you see a company that is being very dynamic like that. I mean, this is, there's shades of like innovator's dilemma here, right? Where Apple, you know, had gotten sort of set in its ways for a lot of reasons. And, you know, it's, I guess it's biggest foray as far as like how it wanted to experiment over the last 10 years was the car project. Because, you know, it was stuck with this problem of like, you know, we've made ourselves so big, Tim Cook has done such a good job of like expanding the user base and building up the services thing. They really had kind of know, if they wanted to keep growing, no other way to grow other than to move into something like possibly healthcare, which hasn't really turned into the big cash cow that they, they were maybe positioning it as, or automotive and self-driving, which is, you know, something that was more attractive,

• 15:36Speaker 02

  I think, to them when it was more theoretical versus when they actually got into the nitty gritty of it over the last couple of years. And Nvidia is kind of like speedrunning that to a certain extent now, where they're trying to get themselves ahead of the problem of being the kind of outdated GPU provider, especially as all these other companies are also trying to beat them at that game. And so, you know, Nvidia getting its hands in not only the AI companies by making deals with them, circular or not, but also trying to, you know, place bets on other startups that are in the space and bringing them in the fold, either just keeping them close or, you know, with Hugging Face this week, like finally closing that, that deal that we've talked about and actually acquiring

• 16:21Speaker 02

  them. It's, it's a really interesting time for, for Jensen and Co.

• 16:26Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I want to back up though with, with Nvidia, which is, you know, like I teased earlier, the second company we really want to focus on is one of our themes. And, you know, for those who've been writing about or reading about, maybe even investing in Nvidia, there was a time where its biggest business was gaming and how far that company has come. The need and appetite for GPUs, you could be a company that just simply is like, yep, this is going to be our business and we're going to dominate at that. And then get lucky, cross your fingers. And I just don't think Nvidia is really the, the culture of it. Based on my conversations with insiders, you know, and executives at Nvidia, that's very much not the culture. So they're doing a few things here. They're

• 17:07Kirsten Korosec?

  developing their like open weight models that they're using both, you know, to develop their own products, but also putting it out in the world, which almost ensures that every startup is going to be using that for on the development side. But then they're also trying to own the hardware. And to your point, they're making acquisitions. And Hugging Face is really, you know, or investing in companies. And you're seeing that across the board. Like, they're investing in Wave, for instance, which is the UK self-driving startup. But they're also investing in Media Tech, which was another deal. So that really runs the gamut. And, and to me, my question for you is, you know, is it too much? Like,

• 17:49Kirsten Korosec?

  to play the devil's advocate, like, is it a distraction to try to do such a broad variety of things?

• 17:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't think so. And for two reasons. One is, you know, to your point, I think there is an element of this where this is Nvidia hedging itself away from some of the risk. I mean, we're still talking largely about AI companies or companies in the infrastructure chain to support that AI. So like, you know, caveat that, but like, there is an element of them kind of trying to put some, not distance, but, you know, padding around the biggest AI companies and those really just like obviously circular deals by working in this way. The other thing that I think is interesting here and worth considering is like, you know, Nvidia, I think, understands this stuff on a fundamental level in a way that none of these other major companies, you know, like an Apple or something

• 18:39Speaker 02

  do. And what I mean by that is like, you know, you mentioned their gaming roots. Like, I remember sitting in the production trailer at so many CESs years ago, when I wrote elsewhere, where it was like, almost like people were drawing straws to be like, who's going to sit through the like, three hour presentation that Jensen's about to do, that is going to be about stuff.

• 19:00Kirsten Korosec?

  He still does three hour, he still does three hour presentations, to be clear.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, now they're events. Now like, you know, it's like a, you know, it's like a mega church event when he's on stage. But back then, that wasn't the case. I mean, it was at CES, so there was attention on it, but it was not the thing that people were dying to see. And, and I say that just to note that like, I think they understand this in a way that makes it easy for these companies to sidle up to Nvidia because they know that they get it. They know that they have this knowledge. It's not just that they have the resources that they want or need, but that there is a fundamental understanding. And I think that's really interesting. And I think part of me wants to compare them to Uber and what Uber's doing in robotaxis, where it's making all these strategic bets. You know, maybe they're not strategic because they're just investing in everybody. But

• 19:46Speaker 02

  I think the difference here is that, you know, Uber is more explicitly transactional with the companies that it's making those investments with. Whereas Nvidia, I think there is a bit more of like a coherence between them and these, these smaller companies that they're, they're finding themselves invested in or working with. And I just, I find that dynamic really interesting.

• 20:06Kirsten Korosec?

  Here's one more question for you. So, um, you know, they just had their earnings recently. And within those earnings, which, you know, it's always interesting to see a company like beating expectations, just like basically generating so much cash, it's almost hard to wrap your mind around it. And shareholders being like, meh, and kind of shrugging. But that aside, there were some interesting more, you know, I would say traditional deals that happened. The big one that we wrote about was, you know, Amazon. And it wasn't just a straight Amazon deciding to buy additional GPUs. Actually, it's deeper than that. It's CPUs, it's like the Nvidia infrastructure, which goes to what we kicked this conversation off about, which is this piece by Russell Brandon, which

• 20:51Kirsten Korosec?

  is, you know, Nvidia wanting to kind of own that whole stack. And the deal with Amazon reflects that. You know, in the past six months, there's been a lot of chatter about Companies like Amazon creating their own chips and how this is going to be putting pressure on Nvidia. So is that just a false flag? Like, should, should we kind of shrug at that and just say, you know, Nvidia is going to continue to be dominant? Clearly, they're still selling these to all these companies. Or should Nvidia be a little bit worried about all these companies creating potentially competitive CPUs at least?

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yes, to all of them. You know, I think, like, I think that's just where we're at. I think we're in a moment of, you know, everybody's still trying to figure this out, but also these big tech companies have done enough over the last few years to put themselves in a position to be able to hedge in this way. It almost makes me think of like, just, you know, because it's something that I think about a lot or write about, you know, I remember watching all these electric vehicle players try and, you know, start to get their, themselves involved in like the commercial EV market. And that's been hard because like none of the like major FedEx or UPS is, they don't like make up their fleet out of just one vehicle often, you know, they're always mixing and looking for the right mix and match

• 22:09Speaker 02

  of the right types of vehicles. And I feel like there's a similar dynamic happening here where everybody's hedging a little bit and putting themselves in a position where if it looks like one thing is going to be the best option, then they'll go, you know, completely after that. But until, until that becomes abundantly clear, there's just so much froth right now that it's just, it's better for them to do it this way.

• 22:31Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, you mentioned vehicles, so I'm going to do a right hand turn here. So follow me on this pun, people. We're going to talk about robot taxis, which, you know, both of us have spent a lot of time talking about. And it's a big week for robot taxis. I'm going to quickly list it. Tesla Cybercab event, everyone's watching that. We've got Waymo expanding into San Diego, Tampa, and Denver. We've got Zooks starting to give rides that they're charging for importantly to the Las Vegas airport, which is operationally important for them. We've got testing expansions happening elsewhere. I mean, what else am I missing

• 23:11Kirsten Korosec?

  here? There's a lot going on. And, oh, Uber and Wave, I would call it a soft launch. They still have a human safety operator behind the wheel, but this is happening in London. So here's the big question. I just listed a bunch of things that are happening. Are we at a tipping point when it comes to, we've moved past the research lab, we've moved past testing, are we really moving into what I would call like mass adoption scale? Or is this just merely a busy week in, you know, robot taxi announcements?

• 23:43Speaker 02

  I think it's probably more the former than the latter. I think, you know, Waymo deciding to go into Denver now is maybe the thing that stands out to me the most among some of these other companies, like the idea that they're going to start operating in a city that is, you know, that maybe has the most dynamic weather of the ones that they've been in so far.

• 24:04Kirsten Korosec?

  It will snow this month. It will, no, I used to live in Denver. I guarantee you, it will snow in September. It happens every year. There's a freak snowstorm. It will happen. And so, well, I guess we'll see how it handles that.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, but that's not to say they haven't dealt with severe weather already, right? Like, there's been a ton of rain this summer in parts of Texas. They've had to deal with flooding. I think they're still trying to get themselves situated in San Antonio where they had some of the worst of that and one of their vehicles got swept away. You know, I think that just shows that plus they've added, you know, a few hundred more vehicles to their registration in Texas this week in advance of the Cybercab event. You know, I think they're, they are ready to be moving forward, you know, and we know that they still have at least probably six more cities they want to get into this year by year's end, including overseas. They're aiming at, you know, Tokyo and London as their kind of first extensions out. So yeah, I think this is a big moment. The, the big

• 25:03Speaker 02

  question is like, what do they do to solve some of the operational issues that they've had, you know, up until this point, right? Like, they're leaning on what is, you know, by our last public count, fewer than 100 tele operators to handle the kind of ins and outs of like awkward interactions when they're dealing with cars that get stuck or cars that wind up needing help from first responders. And, you know, all of those questions, copy and paste them right onto Tesla, right? Like, they're about to launch in some capacity, their Cybercab, starting in Austin. We've seen that they've staged a whole bunch of these Cybercabs around the country. Whether or not those get activated in the next couple of weeks or not, you know, remains to be seen. But, you know, all of those questions

• 25:47Speaker 02

  there Tesla's going to have to answer to, and they're going to have to answer in a different way because that, that vehicle in particular can't be manually driven away if it gets into, you know, much like the Zooks vehicle, if it gets into a situation where it gets stuck or, or whatever, you know, they're going to have to find a different way to get it out of harms way. And, and so it's just, yeah, it's a really interesting time to see how the fabric of urban streets is, is changing and who's doing the changing.

• 26:14Kirsten Korosec?

  Especially in specific markets. So in San Francisco right now, Waymo has, we think about 1,400 vehicles. Most of those are the Jaguar i-Paces. You see Zooks finally getting a federal exemption because like the Cybercab, it doesn't have a steering wheel, it doesn't have pedals, you know, it's, it's chosen a couple of different tactics, but ultimately ended up applying for an exemption, received that exemption. So that means it can now, once it gets some final permits in California, it can charge for rides. So we should expect that scaling. But let's look at other markets. Las Vegas, Waymo, Uber through its partners, Tesla, all received permits that will allow it to charge for

• 26:57Kirsten Korosec?

  its robot taxi service that in the next two years could mean 8,000 vehicles on city streets in Vegas. Zooks is already there. Do I think they're going to hit 8,000? Probably no. Then you've got Texas, Austin. So you've got these places where multiple companies are coming together, that I think that's going to be, when you talk about the fabric of a city landscape, there's nothing like competition to really, and saturation to really, you know, spot some problems in operations and potentially successes. And so I'm really paying attention to those markets where Cybercab, Waymo, and others are operating

• 27:38Kirsten Korosec?

  all within the same city. So for me, top of the list is Austin. You mentioned Denver, but right now Waymo has that market on its own.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  To me, the question, when you talk about competition, I, up until now, we haven't really seen competition. You know, we've seen Uber kind of competing against Waymo, or, or Waymo competing against like Uber and Lyft or just traditional ride hail. There's a lot of interesting dynamics there. But like, when I think about Tesla, if it's, if it's going to be able to make this work in some capacity with the Cybercabin, it's going to try to scale this beyond a few dozen vehicles that it's had in Austin and a few other cities over the last year. There's an element here of like Charlie from Always Sunny in the wildcard episode where like, I, I, I am genuinely curious what these other robot taxi companies think and how they're going to respond to this because I feel like,

• 28:27Speaker 02

  you know, what comes to mind first is like, you know, a lot of people have been comparing the sort of early quote unquote, like pricing of Tesla's robot taxi system or the Cybercab or whatever. And it always seems to be more aggressive than Waymo or Uber or Lyft or whatever in the same market. But like, I could see, one, I don't think that price is like really reflecting much because there's no scale or anything yet. And two, you know, I could just see Elon Musk going as far as he went. Like, he's been waiting to do this and promising it in different ways for many, many years now. And when he gets committed to something, he commits to it in like, let's just say, very serious ways. And so like, how do you

• 29:09Speaker 02

  compete against a guy who is willing to burn it all down to a certain extent in order to, to make himself the one who's, who's right and who's the winner? That's just an element that we haven't seen in this whole dynamic, like over the last couple of years as robot taxis have really become a real thing. And so like, that's the thing that like, I can't stop thinking about is like, you know, even if Tesla's, you know, tech works, what happens then on the competition side? And how far is Elon Musk willing to push it in order to become, you know, to fulfill his own prophecy?

• 29:42Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, I would say, here's my prediction. We do have a couple of deals that I really want to get to for the end of the show, but I will say, as someone who's covered Elon Musk for a decade, back in the day, interviewed him many, many times. He's the least risk averse person I've ever encountered in my life. And he can probably credit a lot of the success that like SpaceX and others have had for that willingness to, you know, go far beyond the line of what a normal company would do in terms of like everyone saying, hey, we're out of money, don't do this anymore. Like, he will push it. So I fully predict that he will 100% push it there. And in a way that is almost theatrical. But then

• 30:25Kirsten Korosec?

  the question is, six months from now, what does that look like? And that's what I'm really, really interested in is, how saturated will the market be with these Cybercabs six months to a year from now? Not in the first two weeks after this event. But we have two deals I really want to get to, so we should transition. As much as I love to talk about Tesla and Tesla Cybercab event, A16Z, they're quite active. Not only are they have a growth fund that reached 8.5 billion, they also just launched a new 1.1 billion fund. Which one do you want to talk about, Sean? The 1.1 or the 8.5?

• 31:03Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, I love a big number, but I've had multiple founders sort of in the physical AI space, I guess, if you want to call it that, sort of reach out to me this week about the machine age fund, which is what they're calling the 1.1 billion dollar fund, just sort of like, ooh, like here's opportunity for us, as if there wasn't enough money flowing into those kinds of startups these days to have Andreessen Horowitz sort of set, you know, what I think is interesting here is like this, they have a lot of money to play with right now. They have not only the fund that got extended that you just described, but also their overall sort of like, quote unquote, American dynamism fund of like billions and billions of dollars.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  And yet this was a new pot of money that they are, you know, aiming at this idea. And it's, it's got the attention of a lot of younger founders right now. I'll tell you that much.

• 31:54Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I mean, I would say for the early stage startup set specifically within the physical AI, there's so much interest in this machine age fund. Really the focus of this is going to be AI hardware. So these are companies developing chips, you know, memory, networking and storage. So I expect a lot of interesting pitches coming our way and fundraising, you know, announcements from small startups. I am also interested in what they're going to do with the growth fund because to me, it's like these mega funds, where are they going to be placing their bets? They've already placed quite a few big ones in AI labs. So what do they do with this money now?

• 32:37Kirsten Korosec?

  Do they just double down on existing investments, which I suspect they will? Or are there going to be some new entrants that we didn't expect before or in some other areas like in frontier or deep tech, as we like to call it, that, that are just sort of like percolating up? I mean, I think most people can accurately predict that they'll go to AI labs and adjacent companies, but what's the new, what's the new growth startup that they're going to be targeting?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Maybe Apple spin out a new self-driving car project under John Ternus and that, that'll, that'll eat up 8 billion real quick.

• 33:12Kirsten Korosec?

  Weirder things have happened. And, you know, speaking of weirder things that have happened, a throwback company that you used to, I think, write about quite a bit, got acquired and I'm talking about GoPro.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's funny to me, man, that this was one of the first companies that I ever really wrote about when I started covering tech over 10 years ago. And it's just funny to me, I think, back to that time when Nick Woodman, who founded GoPro and is still the CEO, was like such a prominent figure in my eyes. And I think a lot of other people's eyes as far as like one of the quote Silicon Valley billionaires and like Silicon Valley tech CEOs. And, and that has just totally gone away in recent years, in part because it's a conservative effort. He genuinely moved to the woods in the pandemic and has been living sort of with his family out there. But yeah, they got bought by this company, you know, called Starman Optical. It's part of this larger holding group that owns a few other consumer tech brands like

• 34:08Speaker 02

  Incipio and Griffin. So think like phone accessories or phone cases. So in some ways, like, you know, it's a company or a holding company that has some consumer tech experience and some consumer tech retail experience. But the, the sort of positioning around this is that this optical division that they have, which is relatively new, is all about making specific types of equipment for artificial intelligence data centers. And, you know, GoPro said earlier this year, when it was already kind of copping to how tough its financial situation was, that it was considering getting into defense, maybe AI. And so this is one of the ways that, you know, I think this is just wound up being one of the options on the table as far as some of the folks that I've spoken to since I wrote this story the other day.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  But yeah, it's a weird one because like this is not like a company that has itself like firmly established in the world of AI infrastructure. It feels more like a bet. And the other weird thing about it is that like GoPro is going to remain a publicly traded company, even though it is now majority owned by this, you know, Starman Optical. They say that they are going to, you know, continue supporting the existing consumer cameras. And in fact, like, you know, they just put out a couple of new ones that seem like it's got people excited in a way that they haven't in, in a few years and a few generations. And, you know, my question is like, I think you could look at the announcement and read it really cynically as like, these may be the last real true consumer cameras that they

• 35:36Speaker 02

  make because like they're talking about broadening their portfolio and, you know, refactoring the financial side of things. And you're just like, it, all these things that you usually read when you are going to have a major restructuring of some kind. We should say the deal isn't closed yet. You know, the acquisition was for $285 million. Supposed to close by the end of this year, so I guess we'll see what happens. But, uh, you know, and certainly an end of an era for a company that was one of, you know, at the forefront of, you know, Silicon Valley consumer tech a decade ago.

• 36:07Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, I like to think of GoPro like in the early days when they were blowing up and the, and the founder far more public and not in the woods yet. It was sort of like tech billionaire, tech multimillionaire 1.0. You know, now, you know, now he'd be a mere peasant compared to some of the other, some of the other folks out there, like the Sam Altman's of the world. But yeah, it is end of the era and I'm curious to see if they do do this pivot to defense and AI. You know, a bit of an eye roll there because, you know, every company is doing that. And like you said, it does feel like, you know, a little bit desperate, a little grasping, but they do have to diversify in some way or grow their consumer product base.

• 36:52Kirsten Korosec?

  So, you know, I think they're going to have to make a choice and probably an exit here was the best choice for them. I'm just curious to see if a year from now, they will still exist in the same way.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Well, before we go, we should remind everybody that Disrupt is coming back next month, our biggest event of the year, and it'll be from October 13th through the 15th at the Moscone Center. And if you want to be there, you can use a discount code EQUITY25 at checkout.

• 37:21Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, actually I'm very excited because I'll be interviewing Rivian's founder and CEO, RJ Scringe, but there's so much more there and I hope to see you there. But we are out of time right now. Equity will be back next week. Until then, you can always find us under the handle at EquityPod on X and friends.

• 37:44Kirsten Korosec?

  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.