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

unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. I'm Natasha Masqueriness and

this is our Wednesday show where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and

unpack the rest.

This week we're asking, how do we balance community and capitalism?

Community is a topic we've been talking about on equity forever.

I think one of our past

show titles was actually community is the new AI. So you all know it, you know it's a

buzzword, and I've brought Alex Wilhelm on to kind of grow the conversation.

We all get community,

how do we actually balance it?

Well, it's funny you bring up the AI subject line

because the gist there, if I can think back that far,

was that AI was this hot thing everyone talked about.

Everyone wanted to have an AI component to their product have an AI TLD and then suddenly it seemed like overnight there was this vibe shift if you will and

Suddenly everyone was riffing about how community was the new thing the new

hotness and so we've kind of seen that wave come Natasha and then today where we

are is how much of that was a little bit too much who needs a community can you it with capitalism? So this is kind of like the aftermath, if you will, the party and we're looking around the Detroit is trying to figure out what's worked and what hasn't?

Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Perfectly said. The natural arc of something that becomes an obvious or at least becomes the big thing

is to see what we can actually learn from it even if it kind of fades into everyone's strategy a year from now or

maybe looking back has always been part of their strategy. So today

we're going to start with a news peg which is great we have epic games buying band camp.

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