Equity

Instead of our usual news rundown, Equity is sending you off into the 4th of July weekend with a special episode of our sister podcast Build Mode.

Season 3 launches July 9th, but before it does, Build Mode is revisiting some of the best fundraising and startup advice from the investors featured in last season.

From choosing the right investors to building a differentiated go-to-market strategy, these venture capitalists and founder-turned-investors share hard-earned lessons on fundraising, portfolio dynamics, investor-founder relationships, and what separates the companies that successfully raise their next round from those that don't.

In this episode, you'll hear from:


⁠⁠Yuri Sagalov, managing director at General Catalyst⁠⁠


⁠⁠Ross Fubini, managing partner at XYZ Venture Capital⁠ and Leslie Feinzaig, founder and general partner at Graham & Walker⁠⁠


⁠⁠Paul Irving, partner at GTMfund⁠⁠


⁠⁠Leah Solivan, founder of TaskRabbit and founder of Precedent VC⁠⁠

Chapters:

00:00 Intro

01:19 Yuri Sagalov (General Catalyst): The three types of investors and who founders should avoid

03:29 Ross Fubini (XYZ VC) & Leslie Feinzaig (Graham & Walker): What great investors actually bring to the table

08:36 Paul Irving (GTMfund): The go-to-market signals investors look for

12:30 Leah Solivan (TaskRabbit / Precedent VC): Understanding the competition inside your investors' portfolios

14:30 Outro

Subscribe to Build Mode on⁠⁠ ⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠,⁠⁠ ⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠, or⁠⁠ ⁠wherever you like to listen⁠⁠⁠. And watch the full videos on⁠⁠ ⁠YouTube⁠⁠⁠.
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We've said it before, and we'll say it again: the autonomous vehicle space is starting to feel like a repeat of the 2016 hype cycle. Travis Kalanick is back building a robotics company, and the talent wars and capital are heating up the same way they did the first time around. The money's flowing back, and it's the people who lived through that first wave who are building the next one. 

Humble Robotics founder and CEO Eyal Cohen is one of them. Cohen was at Otto when Uber came calling, later followed Anthony Levandowski to Pronto, and after two decades bouncing between deep tech bets in the Bay Area, his new company came out of stealth in April with $24 million to build a fully autonomous, cabless electric hauler for freight. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Cohen joins Kirsten Korosec to talk about AV déjà vu and what he's learned from 15 years of building startups across electrification, solar, and robotics.  

 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 


The bet behind Humble's cabless design and why "the simplest possible robotics platform" was the starting point 


How vision models are replacing months of hand-built engineering work that used to go into recognizing things like traffic cones and stop signs 


Why Cohen thinks culture beats out compensation when it comes to securing talent in robotics these days 

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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Nvidia has dominated the AI chip market for years, but the era of total dependence might be ending.  

OpenAI just shared its plans to spice things up with Jalapeño, its custom inference chip built with Broadcom, joining Google, Apple, and SpaceX in a growing list of companies building their way out of single-supplier risk. The goal isn't a clean break so much as a hedge. Custom silicon means more control, hardware tuned to specific needs, and the kind of performance gains Apple unlocked when it ditched Intel. 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O'Kane dig into what the custom chip trend means for the industry and a few deals of the week worth watching. Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 


How Groq’s $650M raise after Nvidia swept away its top talent might be the comeback story of the year 


AI agents getting loopy and why Claude Code creator Boris Cherny thinks these loops are “just as important and as big a step” as the leap from source code to agents 


Whether the public markets are warming up to humanoid robots as Agility Robotics plans to go public via SPAC 


A24 taking investment from Google DeepMind to develop a new AI toolkit for filmmakers 

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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In this episode, TechCrunch Editor in Chief Connie Loizos talks with Goodwater Capital co-founder Chi-Hua Chien, whose career spans some of Silicon Valley’s biggest technology shifts, from helping source Accel’s investment in Facebook as a young associate to backing a new generation of consumer and AI startups. While much of the venture world is focused on models, chips, and infrastructure, Chi-Hua argues that history suggests the biggest long-term winners of the AI era may be the application companies built on top of them.

They talk about why AI startups are reaching unprecedented revenue levels with remarkably small teams, what’s driving today’s soaring valuations, and why he believes many infrastructure businesses will eventually face the same commoditization pressures seen in previous technology cycles. He also shares what he’s seeing inside consumer AI, from hyper-personalized entertainment and women’s health platforms to new products built around voice, agents, and individualized experiences. And they discuss the increasingly public tensions between founders and VCs, why some of the most interesting fintech innovation is happening outside the U.S., and why Chi-Hua believes one of the biggest opportunities in consumer technology may be helping people reconnect in the real world.
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Just as last week was ending, the US government forced Anthropic to pull its two newest models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, citing national security concerns after Amazon researchers allegedly found a way to bypass Fable 5's guardrails. 

Cybersecurity researchers have since signed an open letter calling the move dangerous, and Anthropic itself noted the same jailbreaks exist in other models. So is this a genuine security concern, or just the latest chapter in a messy relationship between Anthropic and the Trump administration? 

On this episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, hosts Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, and Rebecca Bellan unpack what the ban means for developers building on Anthropic's platform and for anyone watching the IPO, why it might accidentally be good for the company, and more of the week’s headlines. 

 

Listen to the full episode to hear more about: 


Why the UK's social media ban for users under 16 might be the lesser of two evils 


What the SpaceX-Cursor acquisition tells us about xAI's strategy (and its gaps) 


Jeff Bezos's $12B bet on physical AI with Prometheus, the startup trying to build an "artificial engineer" 

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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