meta_pixel
Tapesearch Logo
Equity

Silicon Valley's impact on the election and an acquisition making our HeadSpin

Equity

TechCrunch

Founders, Silicon Valley, Finance, Ipo, Vc, Technology, Business News, Startups, Business, Venture Capital, News, Stock Market, Entrepreneurship, Techcrunch

4.2365 Ratings

🗓️ 19 July 2024

⏱️ 33 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

To kick off this week's news roundup, Kirsten walked us through Elon Musk’s recent declaration of his intent to move both SpaceX and X’s headquarters out of California to Texas. Whether or not he’ll see those plans through remains to be seen, but of course, the Equity crew had thoughts. Diving into deals of the week, we talked about Sequoia Capital’s emailing LPs in funds raised between 2009 and 2011 with an offer to buy up to $861 million worth of shares in Stripe. The move is evidence to the crew that LPs are increasingly antsy for liquidity in this dry IPO market. Next up, Rebecca Bellan led a discussion as to how Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an “AI native” education platform. We had a lively discussion on Karpathy’s new initiative and when and how AI is appropriate in the classroom. We closed out the deals segment with Mary Ann’s scoop on PartnerOne’s acquisition of HeadSpin, a company whose founder was sentenced to prison for fraud earlier this year. Employees were upset that they got nothing for their options as part of the buyout, which Marina Temkin this week reported was valued at a mere $28 million. The group then got into an in-depth conversation about Silicon Valley’s involvement in the election this year. Former President Donald Trump this week picked Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, as he runs to reclaim the office he lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Vance, who’s best known for his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” spent years as a venture capitalist before leaving the industry when elected to the U.S. Senate in 2022. We also talked about Andreessen Horowitz’s controversial vocal support of Trump and the startup-related reasons why its leaders are backing the Republican nominee. We wrapped up Equity with a look at Latin America’s startup scene and how it rebounded in funding in the second quarter, boosted by late-stage funding in the fintech sector. Press play and join the conversation!

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:15.6

Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups today is Friday July 19th. I'm Marianne

0:19.6

Azavito and joining me as Tech Crunch senior reporter and editor Kirsten Korsak.

0:24.6

How's it going Kirsten?

0:26.0

I'm great. I'm just keeping very busy, let's just say keeping up with

0:30.9

Elon and all of his movements right now,

0:33.4

including basically his decision to try and move SpaceX

0:38.1

and X out of California and into your home state.

0:41.7

So more Elon businesses are coming your way, Marian. Not so sure how I feel about that, but yeah, been an interesting week to watch in Elon's world indeed and we'll see if that comes to fruition

0:56.6

do you think it's really going to happen? Well if it's anything like what

0:59.7

happened with Tesla the headquarters moved to Austin.

1:02.8

They've put a lot of money into that area,

1:05.1

building quite a large, quote unquote, giga factory.

1:08.1

But they still have a pretty large footprint in California.

1:11.9

The Fremont factory is there that employs

1:14.0

thousands of people. They have offices elsewhere in California. So I

1:18.8

suspect that it'll be probably easier to move X the social media company that's based in San Francisco,

1:25.6

Alta Texas as opposed to SpaceX X in which there's real hardware, literal rocketry,

1:32.0

and design that's going to be happening there. So we'll see. It's probably

1:35.6

going to be a hybrid of what he says is my guess. And we'll see if there's any resistance to that.

1:41.8

Both are privately held companies. So the protests and

1:44.8

opposition that happened and court cases that happened around the Tesla move

1:48.2

likely won't happen with SpaceX and X. Yeah, I guess I guess we'll see. We're also joined today by Senior Tech Country

...

Transcript will be available on the free plan in -212 days. Upgrade to see the full transcript now.

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechCrunch, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechCrunch and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.

Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.