Beanie Babies for the brainrot era

Equity

TechCrunch

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

4.2 • 365 Ratings

🗓️ 22 August 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode of the Equity podcast, your hosts Kirsten Korosec, Max Zeff, and Anthony Ha try to understand why Labubu has become so popular and what it says about the collapsing divide between the internet and the real world. Are Labubus more than just the latest iteration of ‘90s Beanie Babies? And listen to the full episode to hear more about: Google’s cringey, celebrity-filled Pixel event Self-driving startup Nuro’s $203 million Series A, with Nvidia joining as an investor OpenAI’s attempt to woo the media after a rocky launch for GPT-5 A fresh $1 billion funding for AI startup Databricks Why VCs are excited about robotic startups like FieldAI As always, Equity will be back for you next week, so don’t miss it! Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. We’d also like to thank TechCrunch’s audience development team. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a paid ad by Fidelity Private Shares.
0:03.2	A messy or missing cap table might not just slow you down.
0:05.8	It could cost you your next fundraising round.
0:08.6	Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's podcast about the business of startups.
0:14.5	Today is Friday, August 22nd.
0:16.8	I'm Kirsten Koresk, Transportation Editor at TechCrunch.
0:20.4	And I'm joined today, as always, by
0:22.8	our senior AI reporter Max Zeth and weekend editor Anthony Ha. And I have an important question
0:29.3	for you, Max. And I'm wondering how you define cringe. Well, this week I would define cringe as
0:36.1	Google's pixel event, which was incredibly
0:38.7	cringy. I couldn't keep looking at it for more than about 10 minutes before just viscerally
0:45.2	cringing and my body shuddered away. They had hosts like Jimmy Fallon and Steph Curry was there
0:51.5	and podcaster Alex Cooper was at the event as well. And it's really shocking
0:56.2	because they kind of go for all these like very consumer facing people. They try to make it very
1:01.6	approachable. But what they actually do is alienate the real people who want to learn about
1:06.0	AI models and smartphones. And it's shocking because Google is like ahead here.
1:11.6	Like they're doing so much better than Apple in terms of putting AI in their phones,
1:15.6	and somehow they just can't communicate it for the life of them.
1:18.6	So as somebody who's watched quite a few cringe tech launches,
1:22.6	tech companies often rely on throwing money at celebrities,
1:25.6	dragging them out on stage and having
1:27.6	them read a teleprompter. What made this worse than sort of your average celebrity-filled launch?
	...

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