Equity

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. 

This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 


What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend. 


Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption. 


How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider. 


Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer. 

 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

 

Chapters: 

00:00 Intro 

00:51 Tiffany Luck's path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC 

3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents 

7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life 

10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets 

13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits 

15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing? 

27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’ 

32:49 Outro 
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Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard. 

This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend.  

Listen to the full episode to hear: 


What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend. 


Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption. 


How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider. 


Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The biggest IPO in history dropped this morning on the Nasdaq — a debut so big, our team thought it deserved its own bonus Equity podcast episode.  

On this special bonus episode, Senior Reporter Sean O'Kane called up our AI Editor Russell Brandom to help him break down the $2 trillion valuation, Elon Musk becoming the world's first trillionaire, and what it all means for Anthropic and OpenAI still waiting in the wings. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You can also follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
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The IPO market is back, and it's not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public markets in the same window, and it's a stress test for investors, for valuations, and for what we can even expect from a public tech company in 2026. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane break down what this IPO moment actually means beyond the headline numbers, and who stands to benefit. 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 


Why Apple's biggest WWDC announcement might matter less than how they showed it, and what a $250M settlement had to do with the change 


How Waymo just turned Apple's abandoned self-driving dream into its next big proving ground 


What a $920 million-per-month compute deal between Google and SpaceX says about who's leading the AI infrastructure race 


How Sam Bankman-Fried's pardon request and a new Zuckerberg biopic somehow ended with the Equity team getting cast by ChatGPT 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
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Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are all saying versions of the same thing. 

An entrepreneur at heart, Yang has found a new way to put money back into the hands of the people — one phone bill at a time. On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan talks to Yang about his startup Noble Mobile, which pays you to use your phone less, ways to combat the “attention economy,” and what startups can do when the government won't move. 

Listen to the full episode to hear: 


Why Yang thinks the $100 billion gap between what Americans and Europeans pay for wireless is a startup opportunity. 


How a partnership with the Light Phone fits into the growing "together tech" movement, and why Yang has been throwing no-phone parties in LA and NYC. 


What he actually thinks of Bernie Sanders' proposed AI sovereign wealth fund, and why he's skeptical the money should flow through government at all. 


Why UBI isn't a salary replacement but a "landing pad,” and what Noble Mobile's $600-a-year savings has to do with it. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 
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