Why Thrive, Founders Fund, and Antonio Gracias are betting on hearing aids

“Why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses?” That’s the question that drove Matthew de Jonge to spend six years building Fortell, an AI hearing aid startup that recently raised $163 million from the likes of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Valor Equity Partners CEO Antonio Gracias. The buzzy startup aims to build hearing aids that understand the sounds around you in real time, figure out what’s important and turn down the rest — instead of turning everything up at the same time, as most hearing aids do. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan is joined by de Jonge to break down what it takes to disrupt a decades-old industry where five companies make 97% of the products, insurance won’t cover the cost, and innovation has been slow to arrive. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: How de Jonge went from mechanical engineering and a hedge fund career to building handheld ultrasound machines at Butterfly Network, and why that experience gave him the confidence to take on hearing aids next. The AI architecture behind Fortell's approach, including a custom chip built by a former Google TPU designer. Why the five companies that dominate the hearing aid industry have been so slow to innovate, and how that shaped Fortell's pitch to investors. De Jonge's take on Apple's AirPods as both a hearing aid alternative and an at-home hearing test, and why he sees them as complementary rather than a threat. The regulatory hurdles around remote hearing aid fittings, and how state-level telemedicine laws are shaping Fortell's path to scale. 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 1:14 Why Matt built Fortell 5:16 The problem with hearing aids: everything's just... loud 7:36 How Fortell's AI separates important sound from noise 12:12 The funding pitch that won over Founders Fund and Thrive 16:31 Hearing aids vs. AI wearables (Meta, Apple, Legato) 20:34 Pricing, insurance, and the hearing aid "cartel" 23:25 Scaling up: new clinics and remote fitting 26:57 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.

• 0:00Rebecca Bellan?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Bala and this is the episode where we bring on an industry expert to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. We've talked a lot on the show about AI wearables, but there's an unsexy part of the market that's getting increasing attention, hearing aids. We've seen Apple take a stab at them with improvements to their AirPods and smart glasses companies like Meta and Legato incorporating hearing aids into their frames. To talk to us about the ways that AI can disrupt a med tech industry that has been stagnant for years, today we're joined by Matthew DeYoung, co-founder and CEO of Fortell, the buzzy AI-powered hearing aid startup that's gotten the attention of Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, and Antonio Gracias.

• 0:47Rebecca Bellan?

  Matt, welcome to the show.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 0:50Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, super excited to talk to you again. Our listeners don't know this, but I came to visit you on, at your office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and got to experience the hearing aids myself and I was pretty impressed. So I'm really excited to talk to you more about it. But before we get into what you're doing now, I just want to give our, our listeners a sense of who you are and where you came from. So do you mind just giving us a few sentences about your background?

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Great. I grew up in New York City.

• 1:16Rebecca Bellan?

  Represent.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  And studied mechanical engineering in college, spent a long time wandering through the desert, figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I did a long stint at a hedge fund, discovered there a real passion for artificial intelligence. And eventually I decided that what I wanted to do was work on high stakes medical devices. Got my education in how to do high tech medical devices at a startup company called Butterfly Network, it's now a public company. We built a handheld ultrasound machine and that gave me the audacity and access to capital

• 1:58Speaker 01

  and talent and confidence that you need to take on something like building a better hearing aid. And my co-founders and I started Fortell about six years ago now. And about nine months ago, we finally came out and launched. And as you mentioned, you know, we were honored to host you at our first audiology clinic, which is on 61st and Park Avenue. And now as a company, we're scaling up so we can reach more users while we simultaneously continue to push the boundaries of just how good a hearing aid could be for the millions and millions of people on this planet that need help with their hearing.

• 2:41Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. And you, was it you or your co-founder who had like a personal reason for wanting to get involved in hearing aids specifically?

• 2:47Speaker 01

  This has affected my other co-founders in varying degrees, but all four of my grandparents lost their hearing and just drifted away. And so I became, it's almost 20 years ago that I first got curious about why the hearing aids weren't more helpful to them. You know, I had this like frankly naive question, why do I have to beg my grandparents to put on their hearing aids, but no one has ever needed to ask me to put on my glasses? When I put on my glasses, I can see again. I can see just as well as a healthy seeing person with my glasses on. But when my grandparents put on their hearing aids, they're, it didn't seem to work that well.

• 3:26Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Speaker 01

  Outside of like the most quiet and simple environments. So that question unfortunately was like, kind of fomented into an obsession because I had to go through this tragic cascade of hearing loss and cognitive decline.

• 3:43Rebecca Bellan?

  Right, because you start to just pull away, right?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I just, I saw this, four people I love dearly.

• 3:49Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Follow this very similar trajectory. And so that got me very, very interested to the point where it was very difficult to think about anything else in my life, except for why, you know, how could I make the hearing aids better? Six years ago, we had this aha realization that there might actually be a path to, to a major improvement in how hearing aids work for people. And so we just decided to chase it and thankfully we did. And we didn't know if it was going to work, but it did work. And now we have a, a platform that allows us to help a lot of people.

• 4:23Rebecca Bellan?

  So you're using AI to do that. Like what is different about your approach, right? So for, for listeners who haven't dealt with anyone who's hard of hearing, I have people in my family who are hard of hearing. And when they put on their, their hearing aids, well, the biggest complaints they have is that all sounds are the same, they're the same like volume in your head. So it could be a plane overhead or someone right next to you and you can't really orient yourself and tell, you know, how, how loud something is in comparison to other things, right? Or you're not picking up the selective thing that you're wanting to pick up, right? Like you might be in a crowded restaurant or even just a dinner table with five people talking and you're trying to hear what one person has to say. And you know, for the best of us with good hearing, that's, that can be, that could be difficult. You can get distracted really easily.

• 5:06Rebecca Bellan?

  But for people with a hearing aid, it's just like overload in your senses and your brain. So, so how does your product, tell us how your product does this differently?

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And, and before I talk about our approach, let me just give some language to the phenomenon that you described. For, for 30 years, since hearing aids went from analog to digital, hearing aids have been really, really good at making sounds louder. And so if you're someone who has a hearing loss and you put on your hearing aids, the hearing aids are really good at making sure all the sounds that hit the microphones of the hearing aids are amplified sufficient to give you audibility, right? Because your ears, when you have hearing loss, your ears are less sensitive to quiet sounds. Typically you see more loss in high frequencies than you do in the mids and lows. So the hearing aid is programmed to make sure the world is loud enough for you to hear it. And that's called audibility.

• 6:00Speaker 01

  The hearing aid's primary job is to give you audibility. And for 30 years, hearing aids have gotten really good at making sure the world is loud enough for you to hear. But the problem, as you described well, is that these hearing aids are almost indiscriminate in the amplification that they create. And this problem is very noticeable to a healthy hearing person who puts on a pair of hearing aids, but it's actually even worse for someone with a, a sensory neural hearing loss, with an age-related hearing loss. Because in addition to having a reduced sensitivity to quiet sounds, they also, as a consequence of aging, have an impaired signal processing facility.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  So as a young, healthy hearing person, we could go to a noisy restaurant and mostly we could just kind of tune into the sounds we care about. But grandma, grandpa, they're struggling with the signal processing associated with quieting the voices around them and focusing in on the conversations that, that matter. So then you add indiscriminate amplification to this cacophonous space. Their signal processing facilities are already impaired. Now this is like a perfect storm.

• 7:10Rebecca Bellan?

  Totally exhausting.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  Right. And so what you, we've seen over the last 30 years is this fundamental mismatch between what the technology can do, which is make sounds louder. And I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but fundamentally these digital signal processing techniques that have powered hearing aids since the late 90s, early 2000s, they are really good at making sounds louder and really hard at differentiating important from unimportant.

• 7:35Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And so what we do as a company is we, we built this very, very large, powerful AI that in real time is trained to call balls and strikes on sounds in real time and separate incoming sound into two tracks independently, important stuff and unimportant stuff.

• 7:56Speaker 01

  And then we can do normal amplification techniques, like normal heightened hearing aid stuff to the important track, make the important stuff louder while attenuating the background noise, even if that background noise is other people talking. So we've trained this AI to understand sound at a semantic level and filter it on the basis of what it is, what it means to the user, instead of just the frequencies that comprise it. And that allows us to address, you know, the sensory and the neural, the ear and the brain portions of hearing loss. So you can make sounds louder and clearer at the same time.

• 8:33Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah. And, and I can attest to this. So I, you know, I don't have hearing loss, knock on wood, but you know, I came and we went outside and I put the hearing aids in and we went outside on just a street in Manhattan. And of course it was overwhelmingly loud, like, and this is what someone who's hard of hearing, using hearing aids would experience. And then you pushed a button on an app and it just all quieted down. And then I could hear the person I was standing in front of, right? And that changed as I turned. So there's something to do with where the mics are positioned as well, like how, what sensors are involved in, in the, in the hearing aids?

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, these, these hearing aids are, they're tiny, they have to hide entirely behind your ear and they have to last all day. You know, so our hearing aids last for 24, over 24 hours on a single charge. But to pull off this magic trick requires an unbelievable amount of compute power and sensors. And this technique of using AI to help people hear better was considered, you know, forever, it was considered an intractable problem. It was like, don't even, the, the guidance we got from kind of experienced scientists and engineers in this industry was like, don't bother, like that's impossible. We've been trying to do it for 20 years.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And, and they were kind of right in, insofar as if you limited yourself to the components that power today's hearing aids, it is completely impractical. You just, it's like, don't even try. So part of our approach. Was that we we knew from our previous company that we could design our own custom chips. And so we built this little AI processor. My co-founder, one of my co-founders, our CTO, was an early designer on the Google Tensor Processing chip. And so we knew that he had this unusual talent at being able to design chips that could do very large amounts of AI processing on very constrained, you know, amounts of power.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  So we knew that we would have a very unfair advantage relative to others who have tried this before. If we would, you know, first figure out, okay, on the signal processing side, is it even possible to give you important and unimportant? Use the biggest computers you want, right? Okay, you know, give me a rack of servers, right? First prove the science problem works. And then, doesn't matter how much compute power it takes, we're going to build a custom chip to squeeze all of that compute into the hearing aid. And to your point, yes, like, in addition to this unbelievable amount of compute relative to any other hearing aid that's come before, we also did some novel things about just how much data that AI chip is consuming from the world. And and a particular thing

• 11:18Speaker 01

  that we do that's that's that's really exciting, just insofar of the results that are possible, is we we use inputs from multiple microphones. And that tells us not just what the sounds are, but also where the sounds are coming from. And so if you can give people preferential amplification on sounds that are both important, based on their semantic content, like, what does that sound like? Oh, that sounds like someone talking to me. And in the noisiest environments, also tell the AI, just give me the people I'm looking at, because these people are distracting me. That's very powerful. So we do this filtering at the intersection of both the what and the where. And the where comes from comparing and analyzing subtle

• 12:00Speaker 01

  cues, subtle differences between the signals that arrive at all four of the microphones on the wearer's head, that teach us, that allow the AI to infer where those sounds are coming from.

• 12:12Rebecca Bellan?

  So this has gotten you, you know, when you think hearing aids, you think medical tech, you don't necessarily think venture backed. And yet you are, right? So I think, you know, Forbes reported in late July that Portel has raised, correct me if I'm wrong here, 163 million firm investors, including Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Valor Equity Partners, at a valuation of $740 million.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, there might be like, you know, a decimal point that's off. But yeah, that's by and large, that's about 160 million, about 700 million last, last, last round.

• 12:43Rebecca Bellan?

  And Antonio Gracias, so he's, you know, known for his history on the Tesla board. He co-led your Series B. He's also known for his role with Doge.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Well, I would just say, like, he's, I knew about him for his role in Tesla.

• 12:56Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. I mean, then he knows how to scale manufacturing.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, I knew of Antonio as this guy I had read about in a book by Walter Isaacson about the creation of Tesla and his like unbelievable support for hard tech. And so, yeah, like, we were, we've just been so honored to work with this guy.

• 13:15Rebecca Bellan?

  So what's the pitch that got, you know, these people involved?

• 13:19Speaker 01

  I think it had two components. The first is that curing loss is unbelievably prevalent. So if you just think about the total addressable market, like any investment thesis, you're trying to figure out, like, all right, if this thing works, right? These guys are pitching me on some crazy ideas, unbelievable amount of, you know, technical risk. If it works, is it, is the pearl worth the dive? And hearing loss is so prevalent. It affects an unbelievable number of people. The prevalence goes up as people get older. And almost nobody is happy with their hearing aids. There's no cure for hearing loss. There's no cure on

• 14:00Speaker 01

  the horizon. Like, the best thing we have for people is go to the audiologist and you're going to be wearing hearing aids. So I think part of their interest in supporting our dream here was if if you really can build a better hearing aid, it could help a lot of people. It could become a very big business because it's so prevalent. I think the other thing was, was, was more like, we have to remember, like, these investors are people and they have families. And in every case, probably because of the prevalence of hearing loss, our investors had seen similar trajectories with their own, in their own families.

• 14:38Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. So they respect the mission.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:40Rebecca Bellan?

  They see the need.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, that happened to my dad. That happened to my grandpa. That happened to my mom.

• 14:45Rebecca Bellan?

  Does the chip, the fact that you guys created this really incredible chip, does that have anything to do with it? Do they expect you to monetize that through a different business segment eventually?

• 14:54Speaker 01

  Well, I, you know, I think that we had this unusual credibility building chips as a small team from our previous experiences. Right? So, you know, Josh Krishner, when we first met him, you know, Josh was invested in us at the most risky time, when we were just a couple of guys and an idea. But he had, he was intimately aware of what we had done at Butterfly. And it's because our target market was emergency medicine physicians. We were building these, you know, this handheld ultrasound machine for emergency medicine doctors. And it just so happens that his father-in-law is an emergency medicine doctor, retired now. And so I think it was this combination of this market could be very

• 15:36Speaker 01

  large, if you really can pull it off. Wow, I wanna, I wanna make the world better and I wanna, you know, it's like, we're all kind of doing this out of revenge for what we saw happen to our grandparents. And then the third thing is, even though we had this crazy approach of building custom AI and custom chips, that our track record doing this in the medical imaging context, and then Andy, our CTO, after Butterfly went on to Google and was this GPU designer, I think that those three elements came together to make this a fundable concept.

• 16:10Rebecca Bellan?

  Right. So the team had a lot to do with this as well. Where do you, do you feel like hearing aids are the final form factor? I mean, we're seeing other companies that are, you know, Ray-Ban, Meta's got, you know, some kind of a hearing aid situation in the glasses. There's a hearing tech startup, Ligato, they came out of stealth recently with a 12 million and some AI hearing glasses as well.

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Bloomberg piece calling the Meta glasses perv spectacles. Sorry to laugh.

• 16:39Rebecca Bellan?

  It's more about their cameras than their hearing, I think. But yeah, but yeah, I mean, the, let's not get into the immense surveillance issues that are involved. But I mean, where do, where do you think that hearing aids like yours sit in the broader AI wearables conversation? Is this med tech? Like, how is it being priced? Is it being priced as like a wearable company, a healthcare services company, an AI company, or just?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. The reason we started this company is to help people with disabilities live life in the ways that they want as themselves for as long as possible. We really see ourselves as almost like we're, we're making medicine. We're here to solve high stakes problems. And when we looked out into the ecosystem of companies, we saw a lot of attention, a lot of smart engineers, a lot of capital being funneled towards consumer use cases with, you know, arguably like very limited kind of consumer surplus at the end of the day. Like, how important is it for me to be like, hey, Meta, like, who, tell me about this painting? Like, that's cool. But like, what motivates us is like, can we help people

• 17:46Speaker 01

  on their worst days? Can we help people with high stakes needs? And we just felt like there's not enough talent globally funneled at problems like this. How many of the smartest engineers you know want to go work at Medtronic? And yet, like, those products are really important.

• 18:09Rebecca Bellan?

  Right.

• 18:09Speaker 01

  And so Portel exists to constantly push the state of the art on helping people hear better. We don't have a passion for, you know, like, kind of lower stakes consumer use cases. Not to say the technology we've built couldn't be applicable for glasses or headphones or what have you. But it's, it's not something I would expect that we will pursue first order. Maybe we'll license our tech. You know, I want better headphones. Headphones are great. But the reason we exist is to help people in profound, high stakes

• 18:48Speaker 01

  moments. And so we're going to stay focused on curing disability rather than entertainment or, you know, other fields where where where big companies are already, I think, doing great work.

• 19:03Rebecca Bellan?

  Have you been approached at all for acquisitions? Like, Apple's got the AirPods that say that they can, I don't know what you think of their AirPods that can do some version of of what your, your company is doing in terms of hearing aids. But I'm curious, like, if a, if a big player like that came to you and said, hey, we want your tech, like?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  You know, I probably shouldn't comment on that. But what I will say is, you know, I think that what Apple's done with AirPods is a profound improvement in access. Like, the idea that for $200, $300, you can get, like, pretty sophisticated amplification. That's, you know, I would say largely as good as what you might get from like a mid to high-end hearing aid. Not a Fortell hearing aid, but like if what you need is audibility to make sure the world is loud enough for you to hear it, AirPods do a pretty phenomenal job of that.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  And then the other thing that's not been reported on nearly as much, but AirPods are also clinically valid audiometers. They're capable of testing your hearing in a clinically rigorous way from home. The idea that now the millions and millions of AirPods out there can allow people with very low friction in the privacy of their home to test their hearing in a way that's clinically rigorous, that's valid, that's awesome. And we like just completely applaud the work that Apple's doing there.

• 20:34Rebecca Bellan?

  Well, speaking of, you know, accessibility, so, you know, when Wired first covered your company, they, I think that the title of the piece was "Want This Hearing Aid? Well, Who Do You Know?" They talked about the fact that customers paid $6,800 for the devices. I think that it's probably a little bit more complicated than that, right? Like, there's, from what, you know, discussions that you and I have had, there's been somewhat of a monopoly in med tech over hearing aids and whether or not you can be one of the companies that insurance can cover. Or does insurance not even cover hearing aids? I'm just, yeah, curious what your thoughts generally around, like, the price of the hearing aids and how to break into a market that's got a bit of cartel going of medical device companies.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's true that there are five major companies that make all the hearing aids. As a consumer, it's not always obvious because there's, it's kind of like the cereal aisle where, you know, it seems like there's a lot of choice. And, but actually, it's like Kellogg's and General Mills. It's a similar dynamic in the hearing aid industry where there's five big companies and they make 97% of the product. So it's like, it's honestly, it's a particularly bitter pill to see that hearing aids are both expensive and haven't gotten better at the pace that we think consumers.

• 21:51Rebecca Bellan?

  Are they covered by insurance? Can they be covered by insurance or no?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  So it's a little complicated, but the short answer is they're not covered by insurance. Medicare does not cover hearing aids at all. And I think that's like outrageous, to be honest. Like, hearing aids are medicine, and I think that they should be covered by insurance companies, just like medicine.

• 22:15Rebecca Bellan?

  Where does the cost of your hearing aids fall compared to what's existing out there?

• 22:21Speaker 01

  We priced our hearing aid better in all the ways that it is, under the top-of-the-line products on the market today from the incumbents. So our product is $6,800, which is, that's a cost, that's a lot of money, no matter who you are. We bundle it with five years of audiological care, three-year warranty, extensive diagnostics. And then the other thing that's a little bit unusual about our model is we're updating the software and improving it constantly, and we don't charge you more money every time we make it better. We just released, we call it AI 2.0, and it was a major improvement to the core experience of the hearing aid, and it went out as a free over-the-air update to all of our patients.

• 23:06Speaker 01

  But, you know, there are hearing aids available at every price point, all the way down to, like, over-the-counter style AirPod price points. And so I would say we're on the high end of the market, but less expensive than the top-spec hearing aids from all these big five companies.

• 23:25Rebecca Bellan?

  Okay, so at the moment, if someone wants to use your hearing aids, they have to come into one of your offices, one of your audiology clinics. You've got one in Manhattan, I think you've got one in Greenwich, Connecticut, and then Palm Beach, Florida. How do you scale this, right? Because when you talk VC, you want scale. So how are you, like, what's your path to scaling?

• 23:41Speaker 01

  What we want to be is the best combination of medicine, you know, audiology and technology. So the limiting factor on our scale up is not actually like how quickly we can manufacture the devices or how quickly we can open up brick-and-mortar clinics, but it's how quickly can we find and train audiologists that we would be happy to send our own parents to see? We interview a ton of audiologists every week, and we're very demanding about, you know, the qualities that we're looking for in terms of like, the horsepower, the empathy, the intellectual curiosity, the aptitude to learn about our technology.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Because it's a complicating new variable that a lot of experienced audiologists have not had to play with. Like, you know, how much signal-to-noise ratio improvement do you want to target for this user? How does it, how does that decision, you know, influence the rubber tip that you use to put inside? So this, it's complicated. So we're opening up more clinics in new cities. So soon we'll be in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Boston, Miami, LA. And we're just building them again as fast as we can find and train excellent doctors. Other thing that we have started doing in the states where we can do it legally is we started fitting people fully remotely.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  And this is an amazing solution, particularly for experienced hearing aid wearers. If you send us a picture of your hearing aids, from that picture, we can tell, okay, how long a wire do you need? What type of rubber ear tip are you accustomed to using? What size? We can basically get all the physical fit. You send us your most recent audiogram, and over Zoom, you work with an audiologist that's licensed in your state, sometimes even co-located in your state in order to comply with state-level regulations. And then we can give people the full Fortell audiology experience, no matter where they are. So this is something that we've started doing quietly.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  We're doing it at, you know, a pretty exciting scale now, and I'm really excited about this as a tactic to get quickly to people who need us. But it's complicated and slow-going because there is a morass of state-by-state regulation that, you know, the incumbents have put into place to try to reduce the likelihood of competition. It's a kind of these anti-telemedicine laws. So, yeah, it's a lot of careful review of state laws and making sure we're compliant. And we're very careful because we intend to do this for a long time.

• 26:20Rebecca Bellan?

  Yeah, okay. Well, Fortell disrupting the hearing aid industry, love to hear it. Is there anywhere that our listeners can connect with you online if they want to learn more or, you know, get fitted for a hearing aid?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, Fortell.com. And then, you know, we're, I personally pay close attention to questions on Reddit. So Reddit has a very active community of people who wear hearing aids or are interested in hearing aids. And if you go on Reddit and search "Fortell hearing aids," you see it's a lot of great back and forth with members of the community.

• 26:57Rebecca Bellan?

  Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show. It was really great to talk to you and hear more about your mission. To our listeners, you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter, and you can find Equity on Twitter and threads at EquityPod. Talk to you next time.

• 27:12Rebecca Bellan?

  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.