Ben Horowitz’s cozy relationship with the LVMPD - and why it matters

Over the last few years, VC Ben Horowitz has donated at least $7.6 million to fund police department purchases - including the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s new drones from a16z-backed Skydio. Skydio is not the first of a16z’s portfolio companies to benefit from these donations, either. Today, on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Devin Coldewey and Margaux MacColl dug into the implications of Horowitz’s approach and why others in the VC world should maybe hold off on praising the controversial move. Listen to the full episode to hear about: Elon Musk’s new role in the Department of Government Efficiency. The crew wondered how much change Musk and co-lead Vivek Ramaswamy will actually be able to enact. And yes, DOGE jokes were made. Klarna’s plans for a U. S. IPO. Unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to wait for 2025 before we get another IPO, but Margaux has a theory about what might be behind the slowdown. Vecna Robotics’ $14.5 million raise and the CEO choice that caught Kirsten’s attention. Starfish Space’s latest round and impressive batch of contracts for its full-size Otter spacecraft. Who’s joining the unsolicited bidding war over Cursor-maker Anysphere. Equity will be back next week, so stay tuned! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. For the full episode transcript, for those who prefer reading over listening, check out our full archive of episodes over at Simplecast. 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. 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.

• 0:11Kirsten Korosec?

  Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. Today is Friday, November 15, 2024. I'm Kirsten Korsak and joining me today are my fellow TSEers, Devin Coldewey and Margot McCall. Welcome you two.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:30Kirsten Korosec?

  Hi. You know what was not on my bingo card for 2024?

• 0:35Speaker 01

  A lot of things that have happened recently.

• 0:37Kirsten Korosec?

  Everything in the last week? Yes. Well, I predicted some of that, but I would say the Onion buying the bankrupt Infowars was not Oh, yeah. on my radar. So just wanted to flag that little deal, that little mini deal.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  I mean, obviously it was in bankruptcy and stuff, but I wonder how much they actually paid. The Onion piece by the head of Global Tetragon or whatever is very hilarious, but they said it was under a trillion dollars. So I think that that's, that leaves open quite a range.

• 1:04Kirsten Korosec?

  Hmm. You know, speaking of trillions of dollars, I did want to mention before we got into the deals, one of the other crazy but predicted items on my list was Elon Musk being tapped to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency, AKA DOGE, which, you know, is a nod to his cryptocurrency. And, you know, I know that there's been a lot of like talk and discussion about what this is and what this means and a lot of eye rolling. We'll see. It's outside of the government. So there is the funding issue, which, you know, Congress appropriates money to these, usually these things. The fact that that is not in the government has been answered, but two things stood out to me. One, the fact that he's selling merch for something

• 1:49Kirsten Korosec?

  Awesome. that is so profiting off of that. Also, the Department of Government Efficiency has two co-chairs, which doesn't seem very efficient.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58Kirsten Korosec?

  And finally, he had talked about like, cutting 2 trillion from the budget, and I see nothing in this press release by that. So those are my initial thoughts about the Doge office.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, I think that everybody was expecting him, and I don't think anybody was expecting Vivek, but they were expecting him to be in some position of actual power. But that would aid requiring him to divest from his companies and B, it's not so easy to just cut things. I mean, we have entire agencies dedicated to, you know, we have the Office of Management Budget, we have the General Accountability Office, we have the Office of the Inspector General. To be, to be honest, like, having to list them all like that, you're like, well, maybe there's too many efficiency agencies. But they exist, and they do this job. So he's just going to join the thousands of other federal advisory organizations that are all themselves federally regulated, and he's going to submit a report

• 2:50Speaker 01

  like everybody else, and probably Trump will pay more attention to his. But that's basically the limit, I believe, of his actual power in this position.

• 2:58Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, he's on calls with Zelensky already, so.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  That's not in his capacity as Doge leader. He's in his capacity as, as a buddy in chief, or whatever. What do they say in First, First Bro? Is like, basically, he's going to be there until, until Trump gets sick of him.

• 3:14Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, which inevitably is, my guess, will happen. But Margot, you being on the Hill, I just, my wish is for you to pay special attention to the First Bro and see what is percolating over there.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  I mean, for what it's worth with Vivek, I cornered him in a hallway at the RNC, and I asked him about Elon. And back in July, he was like, me and Elon, we talk all the time about how to make this country great. So I imagine these conversations between them have been happening for a long time.

• 3:41Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, well, we'll see if they continue. Well, enough about Elon. We have three deals to get to. Klarna's IPO, a raise by Vecno Robotics, as well as a very interesting hire over there, and a raise over at Starfish Space, a company I'm super interested in, plus digging into Ben Horowitz's cozy relationship with the Las Vegas Police Department, and the AnySphere bidding war. And Margot, you have Klarna. Read us in about the buy now, pay later startup Klarna announcing that it has confidentially filed a draft registration statement with the SEC. So we don't have all of the data and info yet. Can't wait to see that S1. But what's going on there?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, Klarna is one of the few fintechs that I really closely followed this year because of how crazy its story has been. At one point, it was valued at 45 billion and then plummeted to 6.5 billion. And now it's around 14.6 billion. And it's been gearing up for this IPO for a year or two now. And it's been like succession level, like drama behind the scenes. Sequoia is a massive investor. PitchBook said they own 22%. And earlier this year, Klarna basically, Sequoia tried to oust Mike Moritz, who is a very famous OG Sequoia partner, from the board. He had left Sequoia but still had a board seat because he was really close with Klarna's CEO.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  And yeah, Sequoia tried to oust him. The details about why are a little fuzzy. It eventually came out that the CEO, Sebastian, supposedly wanted like special shares. He had a quote where he said that, "I was a believer in one vote, one share, but then I found myself in a boardroom where some people said, 'We must sell the company urgently.' Other people like myself said, 'You're wrong.'" And basically, a previous co-founder of the company did not want him to have those special shares. So there was a lot of drama. Mike Moritz did not end up leaving the board. They actually, Sequoia ended up replacing the partner who wanted him to leave the board. Lots of drama, all leading up to this IPO. I'm very excited to see what that S1 looks like, what valuation they end up going with.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Man, this is why I could never get into global corporate management and IPOs. I feel like I would just, I would immediately die. It's like Game of Thrones out here.

• 6:01Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. Do you think, or do you have any inkling, maybe you've heard, did this slow the process of filing for an IPO? Because looking back at the beginning of 2024, there was seemed like all this momentum. We had the Reddit IPO, we had a few others. And everyone's like, oh, IPOs are back. And then everything kind of stalled. And I'm wondering if drama like this, like at Klarna, is just like pushing everything to 2025? Or if this is just a one off? And this type of drama or these sort of like wrestling matches that are happening at the board level of all these companies that had talked about IPOs is just isolated to Klarna?

• 6:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I don't have any like proprietary information or look into Klarna. I will say that it really made Sequoia have to publicly double down on Klarna because of how embarrassing it was and how it looked like they were not supporting the CEO. I had dinner once with a Klarna employee and they described Sebastian, CEO, as kind of Elon Musk-esque and a big character. And now he very much has Sequoia on his side because they, again, had to very publicly say, we support him, we support this company, and we support this guy taking it public.

• 7:10Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, and then to be clear, so it sounds like this IPO is going to happen in 2025, sometime in the first half of 2025. And we're seeing that with a few other IPOs. I believe Shein is one that it looks like might be happening in 2025. So maybe the hot 2024 IPO market is actually going to be 2025. Stay tuned on that one, I guess. The next deal is actually something that I wrote about. And this is Vecno Robotics. Very different kind of situation here. They raised about 14 and a half million. And now their total raise is about 179 million. This company, Robotics is the name, it gives a nod to that. But really what they're doing is automation in warehouses. So think of autonomous forklifts and pallet movers.

• 7:54Kirsten Korosec?

  And they already have commercial customers. What got my attention on this deal wasn't so much the money, although Tiger Global was the lead investor and had been a previous existing investor in the company, but their new CEO. So the new CEO is a guy named Carl Janjema, who is really considered like an early pioneer of the AV world. And he has been really focused on robotaxis. So this is a little bit of a pivot. He was an angel investor in Vecna. And he had Been leading emotional, which is this joint venture, this $4 billion joint venture between Hyundai and active, which is like an automotive supplier.

• 8:37Kirsten Korosec?

  And recently in the past year, emotional has really gone through some hard times. Active was like, yeah, guess what? We're not going to put any more money in this. Hyundai became the majority owner by putting another billion dollars into it. And they went through a restructuring and really paused and delayed all this stuff. So Carl stepped down. So now here we are like pivoting to warehouse automation, which I know you two don't maybe watch very closely. But to me, this was like a very interesting story of working on tech that it feels very frontier and has years to go before commercialized. And then going, oh, I'm going to bet on the thing that is now applied to a commercial sense.

• 9:18Kirsten Korosec?

  So autonomous vehicle technology, but happening now as opposed to robotaxis.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it kind of sounds like they were spreading money all over the place. And then finally got a single handhold in an existing market that everybody knows is valuable. And they're like, oh, okay. What I'm, what I'm confused about is they raised 14 and a half million. They've raised a total of 179 million. Like, what do they need 14 million? They've already raised 170 million or 160 million dollars. Like, what did they spend that on? They're like, oh, we just need a little more, just a little, just a little smidgen more to achieve our goal of whatever. It seems like kind of a small amount to put on top of this much larger amount.

• 9:58Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah, actually, and that's a good point because earlier this summer they had raised, you know, a significant amount of money. So this is an additional. I don't know. I just, I oftentimes see these startups continuing to raise money and then saying at the same time that they have commercialized. And at what point do you just like turn off the tap, you know, and like start just doing things on your own? And stop giving away equity.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I ask these people all the time and they take a ton of money and then the more often we see these huge companies kind of like burnout or like their valuations go down for, you know, years later and they never had actually made money. Like we just saw Grubhub the other day sell for a fraction of whatever it was originally sold for, right? Like it was bought for billions and now it was sold for like a couple hundred million, right?

• 10:44Kirsten Korosec?

  Oh, yeah. They sold for 91% less than they were acquired for previously. Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, like that's the outcome. When you see people raising money, money over and over and over and they're like, oh, we're commercializing, we're moving towards profit. No, they never are. It's always just positioning themselves to raise more money. They're like laying down the tracks as they go and then they run out of track and the, you know, the founders and investors are like, peace, I'm rich and go on to the next thing.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm also seeing too with startups this year of like they go out and they try to raise a whole nother round and realize that they can't. And then they just take whatever they did fundraise as like an extension round. Whenever I see that companies raised any sort of extension rounds, I'm like, okay. I do wonder if that was just part of the next round that they couldn't quite close.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I know. And nobody, nobody ever wants to say it like that.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, like it's all branding.

• 11:32Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, we do have to move on, but I want to wrap up. Devin, you have a really interesting deal. Starfish Space, a satellite servicing spacecraft missions company? Explain this.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  They're making like space tugs. It's like there's a lot of utility vehicles that are going into space these days. You know, it used to be you put up a satellite and then it just stayed up there until it burned up or it, you know, ran out of juice. And then it was just floating around in orbit for 50 years. There's a lot of those. But now that we're putting up thousands of satellites, you know, there's going to be 50,000 satellites up there in 10 years, right? So they want to be able to, A, extend the life of big, expensive satellites that cost a billion bucks. You don't want to just leave them a billion dollar asset sitting up there. And if you have stuff like a, you know, Starlink satellite that is in a dead orbit and isn't working, right? You want to be able to go over and give it a little push and send it down to burn up. So that kind of like orbital maintenance stuff is, I don't know if I would say it's it's

• 12:27Speaker 01

  super hot, but everybody is like realizing now that it is gonna be necessary and they're starting to make serious investments. Orbifab was one of the early companies on this for like orbital refueling and they were on stage. We had them super early. They're cool guys. And Starfish Space is another one. They did a great mission last year. It actually went sideways, literally sideways. It was spinning like crazy when they launched their little satellite that was supposed to go and, you know, touch another satellite. It was a test thing, but they actually ended up making it a success and they've since landed a bunch of contracts with military and NASA and some other like commercial stuff. So they've got traction. They raised 29 million, which makes sense because they have the contract deals, but they don't have the money and they need to make the actual things before

• 13:12Speaker 01

  they get paid. So it's a pretty straightforward deal. Like they demonstrated their capability. A bunch of people are interested. They made some contracts and they're ready to execute on those, but they need some cash upfront to actually build the, you know, satellites.

• 13:26Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay. One investor caught my eye, which is Toyota Ventures. Do you have any insight as to why they participated?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  I really couldn't say. It's probably, you know, peanuts for them. I think that they probably want to be, you know, Toyota is of course a vast company with many divisions and they probably make components that would be used for something like this. So they probably just want to be part of the team, just like, you know, get in the, in the club. It's like, oh, if you're going to be making SUVs for space, you know, the best selling SUV is the Toyota Tacoma or whatever, you know?

• 13:59Kirsten Korosec?

  Right.

• 14:00Speaker 01

  That's probably, that's, I'm doing their marketing for them.

• 14:02Kirsten Korosec?

  Good job. Thank you for that. We have to go to break, but when we come back, Margot is going to dig into this really interesting story about famed investor Ben Horowitz and the Las Vegas Police Department, and we'll get into that in a bit.

• 14:23Kirsten Korosec?

  We are back and I'm just going to hand it all over to Margot because I have so many questions. Margot, what is this story about with Ben Horowitz?

• 14:32Speaker 02

  I've been working on the story for so long. I'm very excited it's out in the world.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  It's awesome, but I just want to say at the top, super awesome. I'm so glad to have this.

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So basically I got a tip many months ago from someone in like the drone industry where Skydio, which is I believe the biggest American manufacturer of drones up there, had announced a spashy partnership with the Las Vegas Police Department, which is obviously a massive police department. And the source was like, they were all donated. Like Skydio didn't win this contract. It didn't go through a normal process. It was all donated by Andreessen Horowitz investor Ben Horowitz, who they are an investor in Skydio. And so what I did was I filed a FOIA just asking for all the communications between Ben Horowitz and the Las Vegas Police Department. And then I partnered up with Sean O'Kane, who is a absolutely brilliant reporter

• 15:21Speaker 02

  here. And he's so good at like going through public records and filling in a lot of gaps for me. And we got back basically over 100 emails between both Ben and the police department and internal emails where the police department are like talking about Ben and talking about his donations. It turns out it went much deeper than Skydio. He had donated Skydio drones. He was giving input on where they should be docked and how they should be used. He also donated flock safety equipment, which they basically do like surveillance cameras. They're also another Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company. And then for at least four other portfolio companies, he had either introduced them to the police or kind of help facilitate

• 16:02Speaker 02

  communications to get them working with the Las Vegas police. So it was very interesting to research this because it's not illegal. Like Ben Horowitz did not break the law at all, but he used a really interesting strategy, which is that he donated to the Las Vegas Police Foundation. Most major police departments have nonprofits called foundations that they set up on the side. And it basically allows like corporations, private citizens to donate money and earmark that money for certain technologies or programs. So yeah, what Ben Horowitz was doing was that he was giving the money to this foundation and saying, spend it on, you know, this blank Skydio drone or whatever.

• 16:44Kirsten Korosec?

  Well, I think that it's worth noting here, while not illegal, why this is problematic. Yeah. And I know Devin has a lot to say about this, but I would just note the obvious, which is, you know, essentially influencing and instead of a bid to find the best tech, this is benefiting a company that Ben has invested in, right? Like, that's the obvious one. What else, though? Maybe, maybe our listeners are missing as to why this is not maybe awesome.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's just fundamentally, we have processes in place for a reason because this is taxpayer money that's going, I mean, this isn't taxpayer money because it was donated, but like, it's taxpayer time, it's taxpayer expertise and manpower. It's a very important organization, the police, and the things they use affect how they do their job. And there are reasons we have limitations on what they use and when and how it's documented because there is a possibility for misuse or of wasting money and time on a thing that doesn't actually make sense. There is a bureaucracy around this, like many things, that is probably too big, but it doesn't mean that you should completely circumvent it using a loophole, like donating

• 17:56Speaker 01

  millions of dollars worth of your own company's stuff to, you know, an adjacent organization to avoid red tape entirely. Like, I understand they want to bootstrap and like, you know, accelerate the adoption of new technology in law enforcement. I get that, you know, you can be pro or anti that, but doing it this way just feels unnecessarily like roundabout in a way that clearly benefits the donator and is clearly like on the side of the police, very much like a, oh yeah, we'll do what you say because we get millions of dollars of gadgets and services out of this. I don't want to say it's like a buyer and seller relationship, but it's not a healthy

• 18:39Speaker 01

  relationship to have between a private and public organization, I think.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I've talked to, you know, other drone companies that have expressed a lot of frustration when they go to a police department and they say, hey, like, can you try out our drones? We want to bid for certain contracts. And they say, well, actually, we've gotten a bunch of drones donated, so we're good. Right? Like, it's also historically been a way for controversial technology to get in the hands of police, or at least experimental technology. Palantir did this. This is how the LA Police Department got Palantir tech, was they had, I think it was a corporation, donate to the police foundation, and then they went and bought Palantir technology, which is used for surveillance purposes. Because it doesn't have to go through public meetings. It doesn't have to go through a city budget that the public has access to,

• 19:25Speaker 02

  and there's points of contact with the public throughout that process.

• 19:29Speaker 01

  Same with Clearview. You remember Clearview AI with all the like, super not ethical or legal face recognition stuff? That was being donated to tons and tons of police departments around the country. And it was like, you would ask anybody, and they were like, oh, we have thousands of departments using our technology. Yeah, because you emailed them a free trial to like, some random officer, and said like, oh, here, use this in your investigations. You don't have to declare it because it, you know, falls under this or that category, and you didn't pay for it. These limitations exist for a good reason, and we're, and you're seeing them be circumvented.

• 20:03Kirsten Korosec?

  And the other thing I think it's worth pointing out is that, you know, many folks might say, listen to this and say, well, it's donated. And sure, but what ends up happening is once a company gets a foothold within a department with tech, oftentimes then that shifts into them now paying for it, and then potentially the maintenance for that. So it's not free forever, and there's always a string tied to those donations. And that's sort of problematic. I think that what's going to happen is we're going to see more and more instances of this because technology is seeping into law enforcement more than ever before. These are tools that are being used. It used to be tactical weaponry, right?

• 20:46Kirsten Korosec?

  And while that is still happening, technology around surveillance, drones and other forms of tech, EVs, we've seen that play out with Tesla. I think we're going to see more and more of this. So I'm really looking forward to, Margot, all the future stories that you're going to do about tech seeping into police departments around the country.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  I know I'm worried that this is like a model for other VCs.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Oh, it's already happening. I want to mention like this is probably, by the way, already happening in many, many other places. This is not at all a unique relationship.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  Unique to Ben or venture capital or anything. There's a lot of these things that are happening. It's not always on emails. I think it was unwise of them to email back and forth 100 times.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  That's the big thing is that if he hadn't emailed the police department to like specify kind of what he wanted to donate, we wouldn't have access to this information. Like the nonprofits are not foible.

• 21:36Kirsten Korosec?

  Okay, let's stop providing the how to manual. Okay, let's wrap up the show with this, which is really interesting. This wild unsolicited bidding war over AI-powered coding assistant startups. Devin, can you kick us off on this theme?

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's just, I don't want to, you know, go too deep into this because it's, it's an extremely complicated sort of like space. But it's the kind of thing where basically this is about Cursor, which is the most popular, or you might, it's probably one of the most popular coding AI tools. You know, you use it, it can look at your code and find bugs and, you know, fill in gaps. It's a very useful tool. A lot of developers use it. And it turns out this is one of the few truly like monetizable ways to use the current AI technology. Like everything else just is a burning money hole. But in the coding world, people are willing to pay because they're like, boy, my job is really tedious. I would love the AI to help.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  And Cursor is among the most popular of those. And the company that makes it AnySphere is getting a bunch of people like coming in saying like, hey, let me buy you, let me buy you. And it's, you know, it's probably going to sell for about billions of dollars. And that to me tells me that bigger companies in the space are not really interested in innovation as they, they never really have. They've always been interested in consolidation and capture of valuable markets. So they watched this little startup become very popular because they did something better than Google and Apple and everybody. And now that they're doing something better, they buy them and integrate them into their own services. It's the tale as old as time. And now that the FTC is going to have its hands cut off, it will have nothing to do with these sort of predatory purchases.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  I mean, this hasn't happened yet, obviously, but I feel it is very likely to happen and everybody will be like, well, that's going to happen from now on.

• 23:26Kirsten Korosec?

  Yeah. And to be clear, like, these were unsolicited offers. So it's not like any sphere was like, looking for this. And these offers were coming from Benchmark, Index Ventures, and previous investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Thrive. And a lot of these companies, I don't think any of them commented for our story. What I'm really curious about is how any sphere navigates this, right? Like, clearly, there's interest. They could leverage that. They could go a lot of different directions. And I'm wondering if they will try to capitalize on it, or if they'll just try to remain independent.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  I think they'll sell, personally. I think that they started a startup in that was like, it hit the right spot at the right time. They're all gonna get out of it, rich as hell, and go on to do, you know, the 50 other things they're actually interested in doing. Because they, this is a very common pattern in entrepreneurship. You do the thing because it's interesting, it's the right time, you build it, and then you don't want to run it. So you sell it, and somebody else runs it into the ground, usually. And you go on to do more interesting stuff that you're like, maybe a better coding AI, or whatever.

• 24:32Kirsten Korosec?

  Do you think there's room for other, like, AI-assisted coders to have exits like this?

• 24:37Speaker 01

  I think that maybe after somebody buys Cursor and integrates it, like, if OpenAI, or Google, or whatever, it's were to do that and pay $4 billion for it, and integrate it, then there would be other aspirants to it. But I don't think anybody else would pay that kind of money to have a rival to Cursor on their platform. It seems like you'd just be like, paying for second place and a ton of money. So you would probably try to look at the next thing and be like, well, what's the next cursor? What's the next big place where AI actually makes sense?

• 25:07Kirsten Korosec?

  Those are all interesting questions that we cannot hash out today because we are out of time. So thanks, Devin and Margo, again, for joining the show. Margo, what are you working on that we should look forward to in the next couple of weeks? Or can you say?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm working on, there's like, a viral Twitter thread of this guy, Dryden Brown. He's the founder of Praxis, which is one of those, like, network state companies. And he, like, flew to Greenland to try to buy Greenland, basically. And so I interviewed him, the story's done, but I think it's gonna go up over the weekend. So, everyone, check it out.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  When are people gonna stop trying to buy Greenland?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Everyone's trying to buy Greenland. I don't know.

• 25:45Kirsten Korosec?

  Seems to me like it's for sale. Let's do it. All right. I cannot wait to read that story. Devon, aside from, you know, being the resident contrarian, what else are you going to be doing this next week?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  I don't have anything hot in the oven right now, but I just put up two really interesting interviews with interesting people. The head of Intuitive Machines and a really smart guy in AI named Orion Ezioni, who is doing, uh, he has a nonprofit that does deep fake detection. I mean, just, I don't know how to recommend people go back through my, my author archive and find these posts from, you know, like two days ago, but you should, they're definitely really interesting people and worth hearing what they have to say.

• 26:18Kirsten Korosec?

  All right. Well, listeners, go search for that. We are just about out of time. So thank you again. Equity will be back next week, but until then you can find Equity under the handle at EquityPod on X and Threads. And thank you for listening to another episode of Equity.

• 26:37Kirsten Korosec?

  Equity is produced by Teresa Loconsolo with editing by Cal. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator and we'd like to give a big thanks to our audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thanks so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.