The new Equity crew on a proposed AI 'kill switch' and why it's rough out there for VCs

Equity

TechCrunch

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

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 24 May 2024

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Say hi to the new Equity crew! To kick off today's show, Mary Ann invited her new co-hosts - Becca Szkutak, Rebecca Bellan, and Haje Kamps - to introduce themselves and shared a bit more about what they do here at TC. The team then jumped right into the news, starting with Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet's announcement that she is leaving the company. For deals of the week, Rebecca wanted to talk about Farcaster, a blockchain-based social protocol that invites developers to build other apps on top of it. The startup raised a $150 million round, news that had the Equity team asking, “Is crypto back?” Mary Ann dug into immigrant banking platform Majority securing $20M in funding after notching an impressive $40 million in ARR as of April. To close out, we riffed on the news that a bunch of tech majors made commitments to the safe development of their AI models, including a potential “kill switch.” While we felt the news was mostly positive, we are also skeptical, too. The team also discussed the challenging environment for emerging fund managers, and our surprise at just how many of them there are.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity Tech Crunch's flagship podcast about the business of
0:15.1	startups. Today is Friday, May 24th, 2024. I'm Marianne Asavado and
0:21.0	joining me today as Senior TC reporter, Hia Comps.
0:24.9	How's it going?
0:25.9	You know what? I'm doing really well. I had so much fun working with an accelerator
0:30.0	this morning and working on a bunch of fundraising stuff.
0:32.8	So it's a really good way to wake up, kids me on my toes.
0:36.2	Well, Haya, you and I are not alone today.
0:38.3	We have not one but two co-host joining us as well.
0:41.8	Senior TC reporter, Becca Scutak, is on. What's new with you?
0:45.6	Hey, not much is new, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I will say dear listeners,
0:52.3	I am only here for a good time today not a long time but you can catch me in a longer format next Tuesday and next Friday on equity and you can always find me over on Found where we interview the founders behind the startups about why they built them.
1:06.5	But thanks as always for having me on.
1:08.9	We'll take what we can get, Becca. We also have Rebecca Balan, a senior reporter at the TC Transportation
1:15.0	Desk. Rebecca, we're so excited you're here. How are you today? Thanks, I'm so
1:19.4	excited to be here. Yeah, I'm doing great. I'm in the middle sorry. No, I'm nearly finished with a deep
1:24.8	investigative scoop that I've been working on for a couple of months. I'm so excited to be done with it. So yeah,
1:30.9	feeling pretty good. Can't wait to read it.
1:33.0	For those of you listening, you've likely heard each of these voices popping up in the
1:37.2	Equity Feed over the past few weeks, and we realized we hadn't really formally
1:41.6	introduced my new co-host to the world or as we like to call them now the new equity crew.
1:47.8	So I want to give everybody a chance to kind of just say hi and tell you a little bit more about themselves so Rebecca
	...

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