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Hello and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Rebecca Boulon, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep.

Today, we're going to talk about where consumer tech, specifically consumer AI, is heading

in 2026 from wearables to stable coins to what happens when the hype cycles actually

meet the real market needs.

To sort through it all, I'm joined by Vanessa Larko, a former partner at

NIA, and current co-founder and partner at her own firm venture that we can't really talk about,

but it's called premise. And I'll let you take it from there. If there's anything at all

you can say about it, Vanessa, please let us know. If not, we can move on to some of your

thoughts. Let's talk about what's going, please let us know. If not, we can move on to some of your thoughts.

Let's talk about what's going on in Consumer.

Happy New Year. Like, I can say nothing. Yes, happy New Year. So then tell me, what are some of

your top predictions for consumer in 2026? I think this is going to be your consumer. I've been meeting with

founders, you know, repeat founders who built enterprise companies in the last cycle, both PLG and

top-down sales motions, and they're excited about consumer. And specifically, you know, I was having

to see with a founder last week and he was saying,

it feels like selling AI tops down is great, but slow, really slow. Like these big enterprises,

they know they need it, they know they want it, they have big budgets, they'll sign you on.

But to see users actually using it takes forever because they don't know where to start. The fun thing about consumer and prosumer is people already have prosumer, right? Like people, individuals, they're buying it like a consumer, but they're using it for work. They're using it for personal life. They're using it for all kinds of things, right? Kind of like how we use chat GPT and cloud. We use it for work.

We use it for personal stuff.

We use it for kind of everything. Is that people already have in mind what they want to use it for. And they purchase it. And if it meets the need, they just keep using it. And they're like, it's so vast. You can get it adopted so quickly. Yeah. And you don't lie to yourself on whether you have product market fit.

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