Peak XV's AI field trips, and why we don't set self-driving cars on fire

This morning we have an interesting mix of stories, which bring technology, politics and AI together in interesting ways. To work: Stocks: It’s another big week for earnings, including Hubspot, Instacart, Monday.com, and Cisco. We should learn a lot about the state of software and hardware sales as last year ended, and what some critical tech names see for the rest of the year. Crypto: Prices are up in the crypto world over the last week. Coinbase reports this week as well, which should give us a feel for how optimistic the leading North American crypto company is feeling. Waymo: Some folks set fire to a Waymo car in San Francisco. Which is so goddamned dumb that I would pull my hair out if I had any. Bugcrowd: A $102 million round? You love to see it. Mega-rounds have become less common in recent quarters, so when bug-bounty-focused Bugcrowd put together just such a round, we had to talk about it. AI field trips: No matter where you are founded, you are going to need to keep tabs on the AI work going on in Silicon Valley. We are back on Wednesday morning at the latest! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, the TechCrunch podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex. Good morning. Today is February 12, 2024, and this is Equity's Monday Show, where we take a look back at the weekend and a peek at the week that is ahead of us. Now, this morning, we are post-big football game. All I can say about that is let's go Chiefs and let's go Eagles next year. But I bring that up in case the news feels ever so slightly light this morning. I think that's due in part to people holding back their news until the sports game has worked its way through the system. Not that we don't have a lot of great stuff this morning, it just feels fractionally slower than I expect

• 0:53Speaker 00

  for this time of the year. Now, on the show, we do have a key earnings week, crypto's latest key price movements, Waymo on fire, tech politics and Starlink, bug crowds, big ground, and then we'll close out with a VC-sponsored AI field trip. Let's go.

• 1:12Speaker 00

  Let's start with a look at the world of money. And if you spin that globe, you'll find that stocks are mixed in Asia today, mostly higher in Europe, and flat in pre-market trading here in the US. But what I care about the most is actually the upcoming earnings week. Lots of names, lots of data coming. Here's what you need to know. On Monday, we'll hear from Arista Networks, Monday.com, ZoomInfo and Grindr. I care a lot about Monday.com because it's been one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies out there, and I'm curious to see if it can keep that streak up. On Tuesday, Shopify, Airbnb, Datadog, Akamai Technology, Zillow, Instacart, Lyft, IAC and

• 1:54Speaker 00

  BlackLine. Shopify will tell us quite a lot about the state of e-commerce. Airbnb will tell us about the tech consumer market. Datadog has also been a fast-growing SaaS company to watch, and Instacart is a recent IPO. Then Wednesday, Cisco.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  HubSpot, AppLovin, Twilio, JFrog, Fastly, Udemy, Upwork and NerdWallet. Another day of a lot of names, but HubSpot, of course, is a fast-growing SaaS company. So we're all watching that. Twilio recently changed out its CEO and I'd forgotten about JFrog, which is now worth, I believe, over $4 billion. Then Thursday is DoorDash, Coinbase, Roku, Dropbox, Yelp and Open Door. Questions include, what does Coinbase say about the rest of the year for crypto and can Dropbox reignite growth after all this time? And then there was crypto where I have a lot of news for you. First up, there has been a big price pump in the last week. That means that Bitcoin is up about 11% in the

• 2:55Speaker 00

  last seven days to around $48,000 and Ethereum's token is up about 7% in the last week to about 2,500. Now, there has been a slight pullback in prices in the last 24 hours, but we're still seeing good gains over the last week. So if you are a crypto kiddo, well, good news. You are now worth more money. Elsewhere, spot trading has earned back some of the recent declines we've seen in total volume, which is good news for exchanges everywhere. In total, I think this data set is another indication that crypto is having a far better start to this year than it had in the middle of last year. So positive, if you will. This is also why I'm so interested in Coinbase's earnings this week because

• 3:37Speaker 00

  sure, it will tell us what it did in Q4 of last year, but I'm curious about how much of an optimistic tone it can strike when it talks to investors about the rest of 2024.

• 3:49Speaker 00

  Next up, my favorite part of the show, what I call big news that matters. And today's biggest news is an absolute bummer. Yep, I want to talk about the Waymo assault. Over this weekend, a Waymo assault-driving car was attacked in San Francisco. The Verge reports that the car was initially attacked by someone who smashed its windshield and then a, quote, "crowd formed around the car and covered it in spray paint, breaking its windows and ultimately set it on fire," end quote. What the hell, everybody? What a waste of progress. If you want to understand the dynamics here, look up a chart of pedestrian deaths in the US caused by auto collisions over time, and then consider what self-driving cars could do for our world in terms of safety

• 4:34Speaker 00

  once we get the technology right. It's going to be incredibly awesome. It's going to be an economic boom, and also, I think, make our day-to-day lives just that much better. But all that takes work and training time and more data, things that setting fire to a Waymo vehicle literally inhibits. Now, the techno-optimist view that any regulation is evil is just as silly to me as the Luddite view that all progress is bad. This is just such a stupid story. Now, the good news is that Waymo said that no one was in the car at the time, which is a blessing. But the reactionary hatred of tech products that can really improve our lives is just nuts. What the hell, everyone? Moving along, everyone's least favorite story, tech versus politics.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  If the Waymo saga we just talked about doesn't make it plain to you that technology is political today, or that politics is a tech story if you want, well, that should be made extra clear in light of the recent dust-up regarding Starlink and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now, condensing the story to its key bullet points, Defense One recently reported that Russian units are using Starlink connections to access the internet. This was later seemingly confirmed by a social media post from Russian volunteers, according to the FT. And then Ukrainian military intelligence said that it could confirm that Russian forces are, in fact, using Starlink. Then, on Sunday, Starlink boss Elon Musk said that the news was, quote, "categorically false," end quote,

• 6:04Speaker 00

  and went on to add that, and I quote again, "To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia," end quote. Okay, so the truth will out here with more reporting, but what a pickle for Musk. His company Tesla does a lot of business in China, a country that is a key Russian ally. And Russia is itself now increasingly isolated. From global financial and technology markets, which means that most tech from the US is not supposed to be for sale or used there. Musk has gotten into scraps before concerning Ukrainian usage of Starlink in war zones, but now the satellite internet tech might be on both sides of the battlefield, and that could be bad at home.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  The US government runs the country where Tesla is based, along with other Musk companies. And now the tech mogul is stretched in a new way between the two poles of global power. Perhaps the ex-owner can manage this situation, but it's not going to be not messy, is it?

• 7:07Speaker 00

  Next up, the big round for today, and it comes to us via Bugcrowd. What is it? Well, it's a startup that taps into a database of about a half million hackers to help orgs like OpenAI and the US government set up and run bug bounty programs. What are those? They're cash rewards to freelancers who can find bugs and vulnerabilities in third-party code. And that work has been good enough that Bugcrowd just raised $102 million. General Catalyst led the investment, which saw previous backers Rally Ventures and Costa Noa Ventures take part. The company has now raised over $180 million to date. And while it did not share its latest valuation,

• 7:50Speaker 00

  CEO Dave Gary did say in an interview with TechCrunch that its new price was, quote, "significantly up on its last round." TechCrunch's Ingrid London points out that, as a point of comparison, one of the startup's bigger competitors, HackerOne, was last valued at $829 million back in 2022. So this bug bounty work could actually yield, in time, two unicorns. Not bad. How did Bugcrowd raise such a big round in 2024? A year in which we're seeing far fewer mega rounds than before? Well, its CEO did tell us that the company has been growing at over 40% annually and is approaching $100 million in annual revenues.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Raising $100 million, give or take, makes just a lot more sense when it's about one year's revenue. So put Bugcrowd on the IPO watch list in, I don't know, about two years' time.

• 8:44Speaker 00

  Moving towards an end here, I have an interesting one for you. VC-sponsored AI field trips. TechCrunch writes that Peak 15, the venture capital firm that split from Sequoia Capital last year and focuses on India, is taking portfolio companies from the Southeast Asia region on an immersion trip to Silicon Valley this week to meet with a bunch of industry folks. The group is about 60 founders. They're going to talk with OpenAI, Nvidia, and Sequoia partner Doug Lyon. This is all according to TechCrunch reporting. But I gotta say this, talk about a venture capital value add and indication that even with Sequoia now split into several parts, its international breakout organizations

• 9:25Speaker 00

  cannot ignore the centrality of Silicon Valley in the current AI boom. Call it a second, second, second win for the well-known tech hub. Also, a good question to keep in mind is who will the regional AI champion be in Asia, excluding, of course, the closed Chinese market? In the US, there's OpenAI and Anthropic, well-known names amongst a number of mega-cap tech companies that are also investing or building their own foundation models. And then over in Europe, we tend to discuss Mistral AI rather frequently. So will India build the leading AI model company for its region? It does seem that Peak 15 partners certainly hope so. And to close us out, as last week wrapped, TechCrunch reported that Notion acquired

• 10:10Speaker 00

  Skiff, a platform that offers end-to-end encrypted file storage, docs, calendar, events, and email. And this news came after the well-known startup bought Kron, which it used recently to bring calendar functionality to its own service. So is Notion building an entire productivity stack? If so, it could help the company grow into its valuation. Recall that Notion raised $50 million at a $2 billion price tag back in 2020. But if there's one thing I've learned in the recent AI boom, it's that productivity plus AI equals dollar signs. Just ask Google or Microsoft.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  And that is our show for this fine Monday morning. Of course, if you want even more equity between now and Wednesday, when we are back in your podcast feed, we are EquityPod over on X and Threads. And if you need even more of my voice, well, I'm Alex over on X. We have two sister shows, Chain Reaction, focused on all things crypto, and Found, which digs into those founder stories you need to hear. Well, we'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by myself, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch Senior Reporter, Mary Ann Azvedo. 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.