Pod Insights Equity Podcast Are megafunds squeezing out small VCs and distorting the seed market? About this episode Here’s what we got into:
Deals of the Week: Ruth Foxe Blader is leaving Anthemis, albeit slowly; Exponent has a second fund set up, but without a pure fintech focus; and Alex wanted to talk about why 2024 could be a pretty alright year for crypto.
Layoffs, shutdowns: Frontdesk laid off 200 people and is shutting down, which makes for a good conversation about its business model. Countdown Capital is also throwing in the towel, due in part to larger multi-stage funds inflating the entry point for hot seed deals. It’s a trend worth keeping an eye on.
Helping one another: Israel is working to support its startup industry which has been disrupted by the Israel-Hamas war, and how the new Tech for Palestine group was formed.
And that’s Equity for this week! We’ll be back on Monday!
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Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:10 Speaker 00 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. This is January 5th, 2024. My name is Alex. I'm joined by my bestie. It's Mary Ann Azevedo. Mary Ann, hello. Welcome to the new year.
0:26 Speaker 01 Yes, I am actually really excited about 2024. Past couple of years were a little bit rough personally, but I just feel good about this year in general. I think it's going to be a little bit more of a, we're going to see more positive stuff happening in general this year.
0:42 Speaker 00 Well, now you've jinxed it.
0:43 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh.
0:44 Speaker 00 Now we're going to get hit by an asteroid.
0:46 Speaker 01 Oh, gosh.
0:46 Speaker 00 When that happens, you can blame Mary Ann.
0:48 Speaker 01 It's all my fault if that happens. Oh, no, don't be optimistic.
0:51 Speaker 00 No, I'm actually, I'm actually entirely on board with you. And one of our stories on the show today does deal with a dose of optimism from the TechCrunch crew. So we will talk about that in a little bit. But on today's show, rolling with that positive vibe, we are going to talk about in our deals of the week, what's going on with Fox Capital and Exponent? And then corporate venture capitals role in a potential crypto rebound. That is the positive note that I can't wait to bring up. Then we do turn the page a little bit and talk about some downsides, talking about layoffs and shutdowns at Front Desk and Countdown Capital respectively. And then we'll wrap with some good news for both startup support in Israel and support for the Palestinian people from tech. Mary Ann, it's going to be a great show, but we are going to start off with a very interesting situation
1:32 Speaker 00 involving Ruth Fox Blader, Fox Capital, and also the fact that she's still investing for her old job. What's going on?
1:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, so Ruth Fox Blader, she was a partner at Anthemis Group for almost seven years before she decided she wanted to venture out on her own. And it's not, it's not unusual for a partner to leave a firm and start their own fund. But this is unusual because she's left Anthemis, but she's still investing out of the fund that she was hired to manage. And so she's doing it as a sub advisor for Anthemis. So she's, she's managing that vehicle she was hired to run seven years ago, which is a little bit unusual to me. And once all that capital is deployed, Then she says she's going to start to fundraise to make new investments.
2:22 Speaker 01 So for those of you who are not familiar, Ruth is brilliant. She spoke on the TechCrunch Disrupt stage in 2022. She was just awesome. And she, Anthemis is a fintech focused VC firm based out of London. So I'm not shocked that she decided to venture out on her own. I think she'll do great. But, but yeah, I did find this whole sort of the circumstances around her departure to be a little unusual.
2:45 Speaker 00 Okay. So it took up until about 10 seconds ago for me to have an idea about why this happened. Cause I read the story. I prepped for the show. I thought about it and I was just like, what is going on? This makes no sense. And then I remembered the demise of OpenView. What happened at OpenView? Well, a couple of key people left and the whole thing dissolved. There are often, for example, in LPGP agreements, key person requirements. Like you can't have the person we're most excited about investing in the fund leave because then we don't want to be part of it anymore. And you set this all up in advance. So I wonder, Mary Ann, and this is a hypothesis. This is not even a rumor. This is just my thought.
3:26 Speaker 00 I wonder if Ruth has stayed at Anthemis through the end of the current fund to avoid triggering a similar provision there. But she's also like, the moment we're done though, we're done.
3:36 Speaker 01 I do think there is something there related to maybe contractual obligation of sorts. So I think you're on target, but it sounds like they're on good terms. Obviously Anthemis is, has an economic interest in that vehicle still. I don't know if it's going to be an LP in the, the firm when it starts investing in new companies. Cause that would be interesting because that almost seems like they'd be competing against each other at that point for deals. Right? So it's all a little different. Anthemis, you know, had a weird year last year. I covered their, what they described as a restructuring, which was technically a layoff of about 16 people or almost 30% of its staff, which is also a little bit unusual.
4:15 Speaker 00 Less unusual this year though. I mean, we have been seeing a lot of people leave VC. A lot of firms begin to struggle, some soft fundraising numbers. And I think that there's a general anticipation that we're going to see quite a number of fund, sorry, firm shutdowns this year. Quiet or announced, we'll have to see, but I think that's going to become more common.
4:35 Speaker 01 Yeah, I agree. I agree. But at the, at the time, which I think was last April, it wasn't, wasn't something I'd been hearing a lot about. And so, you know, and behind the scenes, I have, I have heard that there's been some kind of a little bit of internal strife at Anthemis, some, I think discontent perhaps with the way some things have been run, but I'm not going to get into all that right now. But anyway, Ruth did bring over an investment associate from Anthemis, as well as a former principal, Kyle Perez and Sophie Winwood. And so she says she hopes to start investing in new companies in 2025.
5:07 Speaker 00 And that brings us to our other bit of, I think it's also fintech focused venture capital news, which is that Exponent has a new fund, and I believe, Mary Ann, it's about 50% larger than its fund one.
5:17 Speaker 01 Yeah, Exponent Founders Capital. So they kind of, really, there's essentially emerged from stealth today. They've been around for a couple of years, but they announced that they raised $75 million in capital commitments. And they're not actually exclusively fintech focused. Which is interesting, because the, the two managing partners and co-founders do come from very strong fintech backgrounds, having worked at Plaid, Robinhood, Ramp, for example. But they actually invest in SaaS, enterprise SaaS, fintech infrastructure, go-to-market software companies. So not just fintech, but I don't know, I really love this story. I mean, I was familiar with Charlie Ma, who's one of the co-founders, you know, for a while. He worked at, he was one of the first business hires
5:58 Speaker 01 at Plaid, at Ramp, and then went on to Alloy. Really nice guy. And he met the other co-founder, Mahdi Raza. Actually, they were kind of on opposite sides of the negotiating table when they were at, I think it was Plaid and Robinhood respectively. And that's how they met. And so then they, they separately went on to become angel investors and then decided to team up and start this firm in 2021. So they quietly raised in 2021, let's see, I think it was 30, was it $30 million? No, 50 million, ah, 50 million in its first fund, November 2021. They invested about 40 companies, they said, out of that fund.
6:40 Speaker 01 And now they're looking to back about 20 to 30 new ones out of this fund.
6:44 Speaker 00 Yes, a larger fund, 75 to now 125 under management. And according to TechCrunch's reporting, they're looking to put between 500,000 and $5 million into a check targeting 5% to 10% ownership in companies that they back. So if you are building an early-stage company in one of those areas, one more fund to keep in mind as you pitch. Now, Mary Ann, I want to put on my happy hat and talk about why I think one particularly out of fashion part of the tech world could have a good year. It's crypto, just in case anyone was curious. We all know that crypto had a really big 2021 and then had a couple of years really, really far afield from a couple of different hype cycles. I mean, there was a moment when AI took off and everyone was joking that VCs were dropping
7:29 Speaker 00 their crypto moniker and moving to become AI experts. It became kind of a meme, but I do think that the winds are shifting a little bit. And here's what I'm thinking. We have seen in the last couple of months, the value of major crypto tokens, be it Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, whatever, greatly appreciate. And we've also seen a commensurate rise in value of total trading activity. And because a lot of exchanges in the market, your Coinbase's, your Binance's, eat off of trading revenues, historically at least, I think we're going to see a lot more money at those exchanges. And that means, finally getting to the point here, that we could see a rebound in corporate
8:10 Speaker 00 venture capital activity as a result of that, because historically Coinbase Ventures has been one of the most, if not the most, active investor in the Web3 startup space. And so I think that there's a number of factors coming together here that paint a much more bullish picture for Web3 in 24.
8:26 Speaker 01 I think you're right, Alex. Obviously, we see that the price of Bitcoin went up a lot. I think this was the highest it's been in a while this week, reaching or topping 45,000.
8:37 Speaker 00 45, 47K, somewhere in there. I forget the exact time, but it's around 45 as we record, yeah.
8:41 Speaker 01 Exactly, which is huge. And I feel like, you know, The whole FTX SBF debacle really kind of hurt crypto in 2022, 2023. Not just that company, there were a couple of companies, right? Binance, others that that just sort of put, um, what's the word? A damper on the space, but I feel like people are starting to move on from that and starting to see, okay, crypto is, it's not just because there's some bad players in the space. It's not all bad. There's still potential here.
9:12 Speaker 00 Some, some bad players in the space, Mary Ann. That is, I do appreciate it when you break out your British understatement and just kind of bring that to bear. I want to throw in some more good news. Fred Wilson over at Union Square Ventures, one of my favorite and kind of the, one of the original, I think, venture capital bloggers out there, talked about how he thinks this year is going to be the year of regulatory clarity for crypto. That has been, well, the question is what kind of regulation and who's happy? We don't know, but at a minimum clarity by itself will have some value attached to it. And there's a lot of other stuff going on. I mean, I am talking to Jackie on the TechCrunch Plus team, also listened to Chain Reaction Podcast. It's fantastic about the Bitcoin spot ETFs that are coming out.
9:56 Speaker 00 And so there does seem to be quite a lot of factors that I think could yield a pretty good year for an out of favor sector. Will we see what we saw in 2021? No, but I do think at least we can bring in some startups from the cold and hopefully keep some of the early stage companies alive that may have otherwise just petered out, run out of money, you know? I mean, that's happening a lot lately.
10:19 Speaker 01 Yeah, it is. And I think, I think it was really smart of you to kind of tie in this rebound that we're seeing in crypto to how we might see more venture dollars flowing into crypto startups, you know? So that's why you're so awesome, Alex, because you connect the dots in a way that not everybody can.
10:35 Speaker 00 Little do people know, to connect the dots, all you have to do is overly caffeinate in the morning and then panic when you don't have an idea for your morning column and then ideas will come.
10:44 Speaker 01 Well, it, it made, it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense. So, I mean, hey, I know there's a lot of people that are skeptical about crypto, but, and I admit I was one of them, but I do think there is potential there. I do think that we're going to see a good year and hopefully we've weeded out a lot of those bad players and the reg, new regulation is going to help keep things a little bit more on the up and up.
11:06 Speaker 00 One last note about this because I think everything you said is correct. And we also got through the FTX lawsuit, oh, sorry, the SBF slash FTX court case. And we also had the Binance resolution to some degree last year. So that's totally dead on. The thing that I'm impressed by is the tenacity of the crypto faithful.
11:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, never dedicated. They're definitely loyal and it's nice to see that, right? I like it.
11:31 Speaker 00 I think the opposite of like music fandom when they're like, oh, their last record was trash. That band sucks now. Bitcoin goes down like 50% and everyone's like, eh, you know, now I just can't eat lunch.
11:42 Speaker 01 I can buy more and then it'll go back up.
11:44 Speaker 00 Don't forget, Mary Ann, this is good for Bitcoin. We are going to take a very short break and then when we come back layoffs and shutdowns, what's going on at Front Desk and Countdown Capital. But first, a short break.
11:59 Speaker 00 Okay, so we had our sunny side up. We're going to put that away, put on our sad hat and we're going to talk about what's going on at Front Desk, which, Mary Ann, I'm not going to lie. When I read your story, I thought it was a different company in the same space, but it turns out it was a different company in the same space. So what's Front Desk and what's going on?
12:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, so this was a scoop for me this week, as was Ruth Foxblader's new firm.
12:22 Speaker 00 Say that again, just can you, can you say it one more time?
12:25 Speaker 01 I kind of have to brag a little bit sometimes. It was a scoop. I got it. I had a scoop.
12:30 Speaker 00 Two scoops.
12:30 Speaker 01 Which is not a fun kind of scoop, right? Though I don't like, I don't like when my scoops are related to layoffs. But what happened, Front Desk is a company or was perhaps is a better way to describe it, a short-term rental provider in the prop tech space that laid off its entire workforce on Tuesday. As I understand it from the folks who were laid off, it was a two-minute Google Meet call and it was about 200 people affected, including full-time, part-time and contractors. And they really weren't told too much other than that the company was, was seeking estate receivership, which is similar to Chapter 11 bankruptcy. But not quite the same because it has a lot of real estate assets.
13:12 Speaker 01 And what's one of the things that struck me most about all of this was how you can tell that the company really just wasn't being realistic about what was happening because seven months ago, they acquired another startup called Zen City. As early as two months ago, they have job postings on LinkedIn, including one for a chief of staff that were still there as of Tuesday. So I get the vibe that the executives were just really thinking this was not going to happen. And, and from what I hear from the employees that were let go, the company was trying to raise more capital, but investors were, were not buying it. So they, they couldn't raise more money. They had no choice. They had to shut down.
13:54 Speaker 00 Yeah. When the cash goes to whatever the effective zero number is for your business, everything stops. Cash is business oxygen. And if you can't breathe, you, humans die, businesses apparently go into state receivership. It does sound like they had what they thought was a promising funding round coming together. And a lot of things they could kind of build up to that and then afterwards, and then that didn't come together. What we don't know at this juncture at least is how realistic was the expectation that the funding round would close, they could keep going. But this is a business model point, but, but roll with me here, Mary Ann. Short-term rental providers have to secure real estate. They have to manage it. They have to kit it out so people can actually stay there.
14:36 Speaker 00 Then they have to advertise it and they have to compete with other short-term rental options, which range from Airbnb to long-term stay hotels. It seems like an enormously capital-intensive way to get into a highly competitive market that does have quite a lot of regulatory overhang to eke out thin margins on a non-tech product. So why were there so many of these companies backed by venture capital dollars? What am I missing in this picture that made this seem at one point to be a viable way to deploy capital?
15:06 Speaker 01 You know, I think maybe a lot of them, this one started in 2017. A lot of them started before, I think rents and just housing prices in general went nuts. You know, during, I think the pandemic really affected housing markets everywhere and, and the short housing shortage and the low interest rates. And so rents went up, home prices went up. And so. I mean, that's my guess. I think they just didn't really think long term about what would happen if the market changed or turned. Maybe they just didn't project enough to like factor that into their models. And, and in front desk case, what I hear is that they were, they were looking to try to move into management, like building management, which I've seen another,
15:51 Speaker 01 I think it was Zeus Living tried to do that as well. And it died, or reportedly died a couple of months back as well. I think they realized it wasn't working. But, you know, they, they also, from what I understand, were not making rent on a number of their properties and pissed off the landlords, which made things even worse. And then I think they were charging too much, you know, asking too much for the rentals as well. And people are just like, you know, not wanting to pay.
16:16 Speaker 00 Yeah. Well, I wonder who the target market was on the consumer side. Like, who are they trying to rent things to? Because there is a market, for example, corporations will often have a handful of apartments in certain cities if they have to dispatch one member or another to that city. It's easier to have a couple of places in New York, you can stash an executive for a couple of months versus going out and finding one every time you need to bring someone to a particular city. But those relatively high dollar, you know, low concern with cost contracts aren't so big. And so at that point, you're just kind of trying to sell the digital nomads, I guess. I don't know.
16:53 Speaker 01 Yeah. And I wrote about another company, like, this is the one exception, I feel like, in this space that seems to be doing okay, back in October, called Anyplace. And they, and they're doing something very similar where they, they offer people furnished rentals and kind of more longer term, they're like a minimum of 30 days. And so they just raised more money in October, and they seem to be growing. So that company feels like an exception to a lot of these others that haven't done well, because front desk is not alone. As I mentioned, there was Zeus Living, there was Wanderjaunt, Stay Alfred, Lyric, Domio, and actually, Front Desk bought the assets of some of those failed companies, which is kind of ironic because now it's joining the ranks of the failed companies in the space.
17:34 Speaker 00 I mean, we've seen that before. I mean, there was some consolidation in the scooter market, for example, and now, as far as I can tell, Lime is kind of the last company standing there. I'm not going to talk about Lime because whenever I do, their PR team yells at me. But, I mean, mostly, we saw some consolidation in that space and then mostly failures. And I think, you know, I wouldn't be shocked if we see that in kind of like the e-commerce roll-up players that raised a lot of money to go after Amazon a couple of years ago. I bet there'll be consolidation there. We've already seen this in the 15-minute delivery space, which is mostly full of, I would say, smoking craters in the ground where cash and optimism have landed and burned. Maybe, actually, that's an interesting indicator, Mary Ann. If there is rapid consolidation inside of a space
18:17 Speaker 00 with players being bought because they're dying, maybe we should just view that as like more like contagion than salvation.
18:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's a good point. Yeah, because we have seen that play out more than once.
18:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, and sometimes you have to count down to the end of your capital, and sometimes Countdown Capital capitalizes on their own countdown because they're done, Mary Ann. What's going on there?
18:35 Speaker 01 Ah, yeah. So, Aria had her own scoop with this. Countdown Capital announced this week that it was going to shut down. And, yeah, and it was kind of a sad, sad story, really. The founder and solo GP is Jay Malik. Basically, he said that funding industrial startups is not inefficient enough to justify our existence. And he was very blunt in explaining his reasoning for shutting down the firm, which I also thought was interesting. He said that larger multi-stage venture firms are best positioned to generate strong returns on the most valuable industrial startups. This just made me sad because it's like a smaller firm that really seemed to have potential and trying to invest in this space, but he
19:17 Speaker 01 was basically admitting it was just really hard to compete with the bigger venture players.
19:22 Speaker 00 Yes, I want to throw that my understanding of his comments about the inability or inefficiency of investing in industrial hard tech was more predicated on his funds strategy vis the market than investing in that category.
19:37 Speaker 01 Overall.
19:38 Speaker 00 Large.
19:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
19:40 Speaker 00 Right. But, you know, that's my take on Jay's perspective. The thing that really stuck out to me was his discussion in his letter he sent to, you know, his team about this. And he was talking about how he thought they could essentially be a very competitive fund. They could fight for deal flow, fight for inclusion in hot rounds and so forth. But it turned out that that was really tough because multi-stage firms would come in and offer a 50 to 100% quote price difference at the pre-seeding seed stage. Because in his view, that's not super material to a billion dollar fund, but to a small fund, that's the difference between being able to write the check or not, or being priced out or not, or being a lead or not. And so it really does seem that some of these multi-stage funds are not consciously or
20:24 Speaker 00 on purposely inflating seed deal values, but they just don't care as much. And so it's making the actual seed players struggle. And, you know, the market will always sort things out in the long term. But, you know, I saw some data about Q4 2023 from PitchBook that showed that median seed deal values in the US hit a record high last year. And so I wonder if this that we're seeing here from the demise of Countdown and the decision to shut it down, by the way, didn't fail, he's returning capital and just kind of
20:57 Speaker 01 Right, right.
20:57 Speaker 00 Calling it quits. I wonder if that's why seed deals are so expensive and also why Countdown's kind of out in the same stroke.
21:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I think probably so. I think it is hard for these smaller firms to compete when you're dealing with much larger players with deeper pockets. And it kind of boils down to a few different factors. And I think Part of it too is the startups themselves, you know, because do they have to take the capital from this firm or do they have to take from, you know, it's a tough call too, you know, right? I don't envy any, anybody in this situation, but I don't know. And sorry if I mispronounced the name. I'm not sure if it's Jai or Jay, but I could feel kind of just his disappointment or his sadness in what, how everything had transpired. And I appreciated his candor.
21:41 Speaker 00 Well, we, we, we got the message and then broke the story. I don't think he was particularly happy about that, but I do appreciate that, no, he didn't send to us was candorous.
21:49 Speaker 01 Well, yeah, and I appreciate his candor, at least in communicating about it to others.
21:54 Speaker 00 Yes, which we then got to learn from and then we can bring to, to everyone who's with us today. I, I was just talking to Tim on the TechCrunch Plus team about a little town in Washington where there is a kind of confluence of battery focused, hard tech investments right now. And he just reminded me about how distributed a lot of this work is. And so I just hope that like, well, distributed and also critical. And so I just hope that what happened to Countdown isn't representative of other folks trying to invest in serious, hard industrial tech, because we do need a lot of that here, frankly. And so I, I'm disappointed for a VC here, which is rare for me because
22:37 Speaker 01 I know, me too.
22:38 Speaker 00 What's our, what's our rule? No crying for people richer than you. That's rule one on equity. I can't, but yeah.
22:44 Speaker 01 I do think because it is so capital intensive, it does make it harder than other spaces, right? Other, other industries. So applaud them for trying.
22:53 Speaker 00 Yeah.
22:53 Speaker 01 Yeah.
22:54 Speaker 00 Okay. Marian, I had more to say about the, the price differential, but we have more to get through. So let's put down that and pick up something else. Israel, which we all know is currently fighting with Hamas, which has impacted its technology industry. One thing that the Israeli government is doing is putting together a kind of like relief package. And I thought it was done in an interesting fashion. So according to the FT, the Israeli government is essentially putting together a $100 million facility over several tranches that will match private investment into existing Israeli startups. And the money from the government won't have to be repaid unless the company becomes profitable, which is funny because startups aren't. So it's kind of, it's almost like free money, but tied to private capital to ensure that it's not poorly allocated. And I think they put
23:38 Speaker 00 out about 40, 45 million of it so far. So Marian, in terms of keeping things afloat, I think it's quite smart.
23:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Yeah, according to the article, they've paid out about 41 million so far. And the condition is to be able to get access to this emergency funding is that the startups have to find matching funds from the private sector, as you pointed out. I think it's definitely admirable of the country, the government, and investors as well, to try to help keep the startup ecosystem there alive. Definitely it's hard to keep operating as you want to as a company, as a startup, when you're in the middle of a war, and everything around you is being impacted. And a number of people, I think it was like 10 to 15%, I read in the story, of workers in the tech sector had been called up for military service as well. So yeah, I was surprised that 41 million
24:27 Speaker 01 had already been deployed. That was fast.
24:30 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, keep in mind that when we talk about, you know, growing tech scenes, Israel has really come into its own. I would say in the last, oh, man, I'm going to butcher this timeline, 10, 15 years, it really feels like. And there was a massive boom in investment, especially in Israeli cybersecurity companies. Through the kind of 2021 period, there was some interesting data from Nadav Lev over at YL Ventures that we have over on Tech Crunch Plus recently. There was 1.89 billion invested in Israeli cybersecurity companies last year. That was 71 different rounds. That was down 41% from 2022's figure, which was 3.22 billion, and down from 8.8 billion in 2021. So I think that the money that the
25:15 Speaker 00 Israeli government is putting to work here would have been useful regardless. But I do think as well as an emergency measure, is a pretty intelligent way to defend what has become a kind of key plank in the national economy there. And so you want to make sure that that's up and running for you, once you get the security stuff sorted out.
25:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, The Financial Times also reported that there's actually been a decline in the number of startups that are being founded in Israel each year, which dropped from about 1,400 in 2014 to around 620 in 2022. That statistic surprised me.
25:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, that is a little surprising.
25:48 Speaker 01 That was surprising because that's more than half. But maybe like this initiative is also just to help ensure that the companies that are there, you know, don't shut down or fail due to a lack of funds related to the war.
25:59 Speaker 00 Yeah. Elsewhere in the region, there has been a lot of discussion about what has happened to the Palestinian tech ecosystem. We're not making any sort of political comments on the show whatsoever, so please don't take anything that way. But there is a cool new group out there called Tech for Palestine that's bringing together engineers, investors, and kind of other folks in the tech sector to try to find a way to help the Palestinian people. And I thought it was a really cool idea. Small group so far, clearly kind of like a loose collective, if you will, Mary Ann. But good to see that people are trying to reach out and make sure that everyone has as good of a shot as they can. Inside of tech, there has been a lot of discussion of the conflict between Israel Hamas and the impacts on both Israeli and Palestinian citizens. I was just encouraged to see people
26:44 Speaker 00 coming together and trying to work towards more harmony, more care, and hopefully to ameliorate some of the, I mean, the clear negative impacts of war.
26:55 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, obviously Palestine doesn't have the size tech ecosystem that Israel does, but it was growing in its own way. There was apparently a lot more companies that had either that were hiring like freelance engineers out of the region, or some that had had set up maybe satellite offices, I believe. And so the war has really devastated, obviously, what has existed there. And I think this organization called Tech for Palestine, which was founded by Paul Begar, again, don't know if I've butchered his name. He's a founder of a company also called Circle CI. I think Paul is just trying to to help bring a voice to people who support Palestine in a way that hasn't been formalized. And he's encouraging
27:38 Speaker 01 them to build open source projects, tools, and data to help others in the industry advocate for the Palestinian people.
27:45 Speaker 00 Yes, and let's just hope that 2024 is a year in which we see the end of several wars versus more bubbling up as we have in the last couple of years. It has been sad to watch and it's just sad. Anyways, that's the end of the show for today. On that particular note, we were shooting for some positivity there, seeing people work together. But the good news is the Equity will be back next week. We'll be here on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. As always, we love you guys. Thank you so much. As a small reminder, we did have a number of excellent shows in the Christmas through end of the year period, three in fact. So if you haven't gotten a chance to listen to those, we have interviews, we have rundowns. It is an absolute jam. And if you want even more of Equity, in the meantime, we're Equity Pod on X and Threads, not Twitter. I keep almost saying that. And
28:27 Speaker 00 we're also TechCrunch Pods on TikTok if you are a TikTok person. All right, we're back on Monday. Goodbye.
28:33 Speaker 01 Bye. Happy New Year, everyone.
28:36 Speaker 00 Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azevedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.
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