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

unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and I'm

joined today by Senior Techowants reporter and Early Stage, MAVEN,

it's Natasha Lasascarenas.

Natasha, you had the best drink in the world just a minute ago.

Tell us what it was and why it's the best.

Oh my God, it is the best.

It's an Iced Americano and I will go on the record to apologize to Alex Wilhelm for judging him

for so many years on this Americano habit he had. I finally had to do it when I went to

Italy last summer and now I'm in love with them. So yeah, best drink.

Apology accepted. We're also joined today by Marianne Asavito, another one of our fine senior

Tech Ranch reporters. Marianne Spring has been here for a couple of days now and you also have an ice beverage.

Tell us why and tell us what it is.

Yes indeed I do. It's an iced coffee with vanilla flavor from Chick-fil-A probably full of sugar, but still so, so good, and I'm really enjoying it.

And the reason why I went through all of this before the show started is that we have been blissfully inundated

with a pile of news in the last couple of weeks so we have all reverted even more heavily to our coffee habits because we have needed the energy to power through.

For example, we got the script together last night and then of course the Tik-Tok hearings happened so quite a lot to talk about

we're gonna do Tik-Tok then we're gonna do a lingo eatoro dows what's going on with

HR unicorns and then talk about AI it is going to be absolutely packed.

But before we get into any of that, the breaking news kind of at the end of this week was that

TikTok went before Congress.

Natasha, 150 million Americans now use TikTok.oc I was shocked by that number I'm

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