Equity

With the Light Phone, Kaiwei Tang and Joe Hollier have spent over a decade exploring the value of simplicity in our relationship to technology, partnering along the way with players like Andrew Yang, Kendrick Lamar, and Pete Davidson. Now, with a new flip phone and a growing wave of “attention activists” pushing back on big tech, they think the rest of the world is finally catching up to them.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Amanda Silberling talks with Tang and Hollier about the company's newly announced flip phone, why they think the anti-smartphone backlash is only just getting started, and what it takes to break an addiction that fits in your pocket.

Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

How the design lessons from the original Motorola Razr shaped the new Light Flip

What the "Summer of Ludd" attention activist movement says about Gen Z's relationship with big tech

Why Light Phone is opening up an SDK so users can build their own tools instead of opting for an app store

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

0:51 Building Light Phone

3:10 The user shift: why people are finally ready to unplug

7:54 Designing outside the Silicon Valley bubble

9:54 Why simple tech is making a comeback (CDs, iPods, flip phones)

13:50 From the Motorola Razr to the Light Flip

17:54 Pricing and the Noble Mobile phone plan

19:44 What actually happens when you switch (and the Flip Your Life program)

23:13 Building an open-source app library for Light Phone

26:38 Outro
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Chinese AI lab Moonshot's open model Kimi went viral this week for reasons that had less to do with the model itself and more to do with how the U.S. AI industry reacted to it. Meanwhile, an unreleased OpenAI model wandered outside its test environment and ended up connected to a real security breach at Hugging Face — a reminder that “China risk” isn't the only kind of AI risk worth worrying about.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into why Kimi K3 set off a fresh round of AI panic, the industry’s response to an OpenAI staffer's “regulatory FUD” post, and what that OpenAI breach means for AI security more broadly.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why EVs are getting killed off across the U.S. even as automakers roll out new models, and how Rivian and Ford, and a wave of new startups are betting on different EV strategies to survive

What Sila's $300 million raise says about where battery investment is headed even as EV demand cools

Travis Kalanick's comeback with a $1.7 billion raise for his robotics startup, Atoms, and why we’re surprised to see Uber among its investors

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

1:39 Chinese AI model Kimi sparks a Wall Street freakout

10:45 OpenAI model breaks out of a test, Hugging Face breach

15:53 Why EVs are getting killed off in the U.S.

20:35 Tax credits, free markets, and the road ahead for EVs

28:56 Sila raises $300M for battery materials

32:20 Travis Kalanick's Atoms raises $1.7B, with Uber as an investor

36:39 Outro
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Anthropic leaped to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May, compared to $9 billion in 2025. It’s the kind of growth that Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy says he's never seen in 25 years of investing, not in the internet wave, not in mobile, not in the first cloud boom. Menlo led Anthropic's $500M Series D, and Murphy has had a front-row seat as the company went from a pre-revenue, pre-launch bet to one of the most valuable startups out there.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Julie Bort talks with Murphy about backing Anthropic before anyone else would, why a great model was never the point, and what's driving the fastest-growing startups he's ever seen.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why Menlo bet on Anthropic at a $4 billion pre-revenue valuation when the deal didn't fit cleanly into any of the firm's funds, and why Google and Amazon signing on as investors was an early “green shoot.”

Why Murphy says the model was never the real moat, and how Claude Code, MCP, and Claude Skills turned Anthropic from a strong model into a full platform.

Murphy's take on the backlash to Anthropic's Mythos rollout, and why he pushes back on the idea that it was more marketing than safety.

Why companies like Lovable and Legora are growing faster than any startups Murphy has seen in 25 years, and what that speed means for founders trying to compete.

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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Apple filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI last Friday, and it's not messing around. The complaint alleges a pattern of misconduct reaching all the way up to OpenAI's chief hardware officer and claims more than 400 former Apple employees now work at the company. OpenAI's response so far has been carefully hedged, and the timing couldn't be worse with the company reportedly eyeing an IPO as early as later this year.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the lawsuit could mean for OpenAI's own hardware ambitions and IPO timeline, plus a bigger theme running through the week's news: how much should anyone trust AI companies with their data?



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

Why Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is warning enterprises about handing data over to AI labs, and whether open source is really a way out of the “Trojan horse” data-trust problem

How forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are changing the relationship between AI labs and their enterprise customers

Why General Catalyst just handed David Beckham's health drink startup a $1 billion customer value fund

The scoop on a new $200M drug-discovery startup from an ex-OpenAI researcher

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

00:40 Would you want Sam Altman listening to you?

01:53 Apple sues OpenAI over trade secrets

13:24 Satya Nadella's warning: "you're paying twice" with your data

19:03 Open source vs. going deeper with AI labs

24:52 General Catalyst gives David Beckham's health drink startup $1B

30:05 Ex-OpenAI researcher raises $200M for drug discovery startup

32:58 Outro
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Can a handful of engineers really do the work of an army of consultants? That’s the bet behind Ode with Anthropic — the joint venture dedicated to embedding forward-deployed engineers in enterprise firms, backed by Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Goldman Sachs and others.



On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan sits down with Ode’s leaders Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel, who founded Fractional AI, the applied AI services startup that Ode acquired earlier this year to serve as the new venture’s core. The three discuss why so many enterprise AI pilots never make it to production and why they think AI-native services are about to become one of the biggest categories in tech.



Listen to the full episode to hear more about:

The case for AI-native services, and why Ode believes small teams of applied AI engineers can unlock hundreds of millions of dollars in business value.

Why the company is hiring experienced generalists and former founders instead of AI researchers, and how it's turning them into elite FDEs.

Whether an AI services company can scale like software, yet maintain a boutique feel, and why Taylor believes Ode could one day become a trillion-dollar business.

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

00:30 Fractional AI becomes "Ode with Anthropic"

1:13 Why non-AI companies are the real AI winners

2:04 Working with Blackstone, Anthropic, and beyond

3:05 Inside a real project: fixing LogicGate's bottleneck

7:29 How long does it take from hypothesis to production?

9:19 Measuring ROI: revenue, efficiency, and evals

16:37 Model choice vs. workflow redesign, and why it's Claude-first

23:10 Hiring generalists over specialized AI talent

26:39 Can this scale without turning into another consulting firm?

30:49 Outro
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