Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we

unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. Today is January 26th,

2024. My name is Alex. I am joined today by two of my besties. On one hand, I have Mary Ann Asaveto.

Mary Ann, all I can say is hashtag Forbes Strike. Let's go.

Oh yeah, man, Brutal Week in the media world, for sure.

Yeah, we also have Kirsten Corosik, though.

And in Kirsten, I hear there's no bad news whatsoever

in the world of automotive, especially if you're Elon Musk.

Yeah, absolutely zero bad news at all including shares

being down something like 12.5% today following the big earnings day, which shows maybe sales growth is slowing in 2024.

It turns out that if you keep cutting your prices, if you sell more cars, your revenue doesn't go up.

Yeah, that whole margin thing is tricky.

Yeah, I will say watching Tesla maybe get treated as a car company for once is interesting.

We'll have to see how that all works out. But on the

show today we're not talking about Tesla because we have too much startup stuff

to get to. Deals of the week including Plural, Vroom and Van Tuan. Then the first theme is we're talking about what happened to Brex.

This is essentially a FinTech conversation,

looking backwards, looking forwards.

And then we're going to do something

we haven't done in a very long time.

An Ed Tech check-in.

Yes, we do miss Natasha here on the show,

...