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TechCrunch podcasts this week: Layoffs, the crypto downturn, investor offense and Columbus, Ohio

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TechCrunch is more than just a site with words. We’re also building a growing stable of podcasts focused on the most critical topics relating to the startup and venture capital worlds. To help you find the right show for your interests, we’ve compiled our audio output from the week.

Embedded below is the latest from Chain Reaction, our new and stellar crypto-focused podcast hosted by Lucas and Anita. You will also find Found, a long-form bit of work that goes deep on the real saga of company formation, from Jordan and Darrell. There’s an audio-only version of TechCrunch Live hosted by Matt that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Finally, there’s Equity, TechCrunch’s long-running, Webby-award-winning podcast focused on venture capital and the latest startup news, hosted by Natasha, Mary Ann and Alex.

And if you are more into the written over the spoken word, well we have newsletters on the above topics as well.

The TechCrunch Podcast

Episode 3: Why do people keep giving Adam Neumann money? And other TechCrunch news

Welcome back to The TechCrunch Podcast, where you’ll hear everything you need to know about the week’s top stories in tech from the people who wrote them. This week our host, Managing Editor Darrell Etherington, talks with Natasha Mascarenhas about the ongoing tech layoffs, Anita Ramaswamy about WeWork founder Adam Neumann moving into the crypto space with backing from a16z, and Devin Coldewey about AI-generated images. Plus a rundown of the week’s top news on TechCrunch.

Articles from the episode:

Other news from the week:

Extras:


The TechCrunch Live Podcast

Episode 6: How Olive pivoted 27 times on its way to be worth $4 billion

Olive is a homegrown Columbus, Ohio unicorn; hear from the CEO and lead investor how the company was founded and grew into an industry leader.

Sean Lane co-founded Olive in 2012, and signed on Chris Olsen from Drive Capital as the company’s first investors. Now, nearly 10 years later, Olive has raised $856.3 million on its way to being a driving force in using artificial intelligence in the healthcare industry. But the company’s path to success wasn’t a straight line. As CEO Sean Lane explains on this special TechCrunch Live event, the company pivoted 27 times before finding its current product market fit.

Lane explains the strategy behind changing a company’s direction and the emotional toil it takes on everyone involved — from employees to executives to the investors.

Want to watch the panel: Here’s the YouTube video.


Chain Reaction

Episode 8: Outdoor Voices’ founder on scaling a new crypto startup in a downturn (with Ty Haney)

Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita argue about Coinbase’s latest management strategies, whether Do Kwon being called the new Bernie Madoff is a fair comparison, and why the OnlyFans founder is the latest web2 entrepreneur pivoting to crypto.

In their interview this week, Anita and Lucas chat with Ty Haney. Haney is the founder of athleisure empire Outdoor Voices, though she’s recently departed the company to start a new effort around getting brands to embrace NFTs. We chatted with her about founding a crypto startup in a downturn, keeping her company well-capitalized and how she pivoted from yoga pants to non-fungible tokens.

Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper: https://techcrunch.com/newsletters

Helpful links:


Found

Episode 60: Claire Coder, Aunt Flow

Claire Coder, founder and CEO of Aunt Flow joined us on Found Live. Darrell, Jordan and Claire got into how she landed on a B2B model for Aunt Flow and the importance of free, accessible period products — which is something she often has to educate prospective investors or customers on. Claire also opened up about how she has grown as a leader, learned to listen to feedback from her team, and improved the culture at Aunt Flow.  And don’t forget to hear from more founders from Columbus, Ohio.

Up next on Found Live is WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg.

Connect with us:

  • On Twitter
  • On Instagram
  • Via email: found@techcrunch.com
  • Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618

Equity

Episode 524: Sheryl Sandberg, Substack and the art of still raising money for groceries

This was another live week from the Equity crew, meaning that the towering Mary Ann, the inimitable Natasha and the somewhat fungible Alex were all chatting in real time, thanks to Grace and Julio having the script and tech in place to allow for it. And as we were live, we also wound up taking a little bit more time per story than usual, which was good fun.

What did we get into? A lot:

  • The end of an era: Sandberg steps down from Meta COO role.
  • Deals of the Week: Affirm ties up with Stripe, Felt raises $15 million for maps, and Astro proves that quick grocery delivery is still a thing.
  • new fund is coming from an alum of Precursor Ventures, a firm that we have covered extensively on the podcast.
  • The latest from Substack, a startup that we nearly all use, but wonder about from a valuations perspective.
  • And we wrapped with notes from our recent spotlight on Columbus, Ohio!

Equity is mostly off next week, meaning no Monday show, and some pre-taped stuff the rest of the week. We’re going to breathe, and come back recharged. Hugs, and chat soon!

Episode 523: How investors are playing offense right now (their words, our two cents)

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, we’re trying something new. Natasha spent a good chunk of last week at the All Raise VC summit, an annual off-the-record event that brings together some of the best and brightest in the investment community. After the summit, she sat down with Mandela SH Dixon — All Raise’s new CEO — to unpack what happened, and discuss how today’s changing venture capital market will impact diverse founders.

The first half of this episode is a conversation between Natasha and Mandela, and then we’ll bring on Alex and turn to some on-the-ground clips from the summit. Sound bytes from Freestyle’s Jenny LefcourtJanuary Ventures’ Jennifer NeundorferRethink Impact’s Heidi Patel and Union Square Ventures’ Rebecca Kaden will get the classic Equity treatment. Or, put differently, Alex and Natasha will react to top investors talking about their game plans for the next market cycle. It’s fun!

Episode 522: Faster ML models, crypto M&A, and what’s ahead for on-demand pricing

It’s Monday, which means that Alex and Grace were back as a team to cover the biggest, boldest and baddest technology news. We are once again back with your weekly kickoff! Here’s what we got into:

  • More on the potential M&A boom this week, in light of this recent CNBC piece that got my mind turning. Sure, this is kinda like the CVC story we’ve been tracking but a bit more focused.
  • China’s venture capital market is taking body-blows, albeit from recent highs. Still, it is more than easy to track the country’s regulatory crackdown to falling venture capital activity.
  • Strong Compute raised money, highlighting the fact that early-stage companies can still raise, and that there could be huge unlocks coming in ML model training. Which would be good for all of us.
  • And is on-demand pricing on the way out? Things aren’t looking good for the model that once challenged the incumbency of SaaS.

 

More TechCrunch

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Restaurant365, which offers a restaurant management suite, has raised a hot $175M from ICONIQ Growth, KKR and L Catterton.

Restaurant365 orders in $175M at $1B+ valuation to supersize its food service software stack 

Venture firm Shilling has launched a €50M fund to support growth-stage startups in its own portfolio and to invest in startups everywhere else. 

Portuguese VC firm Shilling launches €50M opportunity fund to back growth-stage startups

Chang She, previously the VP of engineering at Tubi and a Cloudera veteran, has years of experience building data tooling and infrastructure. But when She began working in the AI…

LanceDB, which counts Midjourney as a customer, is building databases for multimodal AI

Trawa simplifies energy purchasing and management for SMEs by leveraging an AI-powered platform and downstream data from customers. 

Berlin-based trawa raises €10M to use AI to make buying renewable energy easier for SMEs

Lydia is splitting itself into two apps — Lydia for P2P payments and Sumeria for those looking for a mobile-first bank account.

Lydia, the French payments app with 8 million users, launches mobile banking app Sumeria

Cargo ships docking at a commercial port incur costs called “disbursements” and “port call expenses.” This might be port dues, towage, and pilotage fees. It’s a complex patchwork and all…

Shipping logistics startup Harbor Lab raises $16M Series A led by Atomico

AWS has confirmed its European “sovereign cloud” will go live by the end of 2025, enabling greater data residency for the region.

AWS confirms will launch European ‘sovereign cloud’ in Germany by 2025, plans €7.8B investment over 15 years

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads, is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months.

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

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Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

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This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024