Down Round

For decades, technologists have fantasised about the ultimate prize: a humanoid robot, available to consumers and industry, which can perform a range of humanlike tasks. The recent AI moment has reignited those aspirations, with everyone from Tesla to Apple – and a handful of ambitious startups – either openly or secretly working on humanoid robot projects. In this ep we round up the rumour mill,...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . The tech world has been ablaze over the past week or so, both ironically and unironically, about the concept of Founder Mode. Inspired by a short essay by Paul Graham, 'founder mode' vaguely posits that there's a natural point in a startup's existence where it gives up being led by a single...

Brazil has slapped a ban on X , as the culmination of a dispute between the platform and the country’s judiciary over censorship. It’s weird, because Elon Musk’s platform has complied with government requests from other countries, like Turkey and India. So what’s the deal? In this ep, we talk about Musk's free speech crusade, the Brazilification of the web, and the general vibes around the X busin...

Telegram CEO Pavel Durov was arrested over the weekend in France, with prosecutors  accusing him of violations discovered as part of an investigation into child exploitation material, drug trafficking and fraudulent transactions on the platform. It’s more than plausible that stuff like that is happening on Telegram. But there’s certainly something unusual going on here too. Telegram has evolved fr...

Apple's profit from "Services" is set to surpass profits from iPhones within a couple of years, which is pretty crazy, really. Of the ~$80-90b Apple make a year in "Services", around 25% of that comes from Google handing over north of $20 billion per year to be the default search engine in Safari. For years, Google has been freaked out by the prospect of Apple building their own search engine, as...

Nike: The brand of brands. When it comes to brands, they're top dog. When it comes to returning money to shareholders, less so. At least this year. As Nike have pursued the quest to become as close as an apparel company can be to a tech business, their share price has tanked – this year by over 30%. A former executive's LinkedIn post went about as viral as a LinkedIn post can go, lamenting Nike's...

It's quarterly earnings season, and some of our favourite tech companies are looking a bit shaky. Not because they're not making money – they are – but because they're spending it on new data centres and AI research.  In this episode, we take stock of the current earnings reports, and touch on a few interesting tidbits like Amazon's softness in e-commerce and Intel's moment of reckoning. Also, whe...

Meta this week released the latest update to their LLM, Llama 3.1. It is ostensibly a "frontier model" on par with its OpenAI, Anthropic and Google rivals.  The difference i: anyone can download the model and the weights and run it, and build on it wherever and however they want, without paying Meta a cent. Why?  Glowed up Mark Zuckerberg wrote an article to explain his reasoning; the boys dissect...

Recently, the eponymous founders of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz went public in announcing their support for Trump in order to protect what they called "little tech" – as opposed to "big tech" To them, little tech basically means startups, which they believe are under threat from "bad government policies". While big tech is trying to entrench it's advantage with regulatory capture, lit...

You are no doubt aware that the world suffered a fairly significant IT outage at the end of last week, affecting everything from TV broadcasts to supermarkets and airports. Turns out it was because of cybersecurity company CrowdStrike releasing a thoroughly bung update to Windows machines. In this ep, we talk about the incident, how susceptible the world is to single points of IT failure, and othe...

A recent political incident involving the former president provide a stress test of X under Elon Musk. It also provides us with an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison of how it was reported on the various post-twitter clones: Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon.  Additionally, the several loud noises at the Trump rally led to a cascade of Silicon Valley stalwarts to endorse the Republican nomine...

Real estate tech is an underrated part of the broader tech ecosystem. From listing and buying platforms to property management apps and everything in-between, there's a suite of tech solutions for selling, buying, renting, investing and just having a squiz at property. In this ep, we take a little tour through real estate tech, which mostly ends up as a struggle session. See omnystudio.com/listene...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . While the northern hemisphere is on summer holiday, we grind. Given there's not much tech news floating around as a result, we continued the discussion of AI from last episode – this time getting wildly philosophical about legal rights and the art of creation. With a few diversions along the...

Over the past few weeks, several equity reports – from the likes of Goldman Sachs and Barclays – have sounded the alarm on the amount of capital expenditure currently being spent by the tech industry on building out AI capacity. Analysts and investors are asking: how are you going to pay for all this? And how long do we have to wait for that? In this ep, we talk about the current discourse, connec...

Australia's experiment with forcing big tech to pay media companies like Nine and News Corp for content is running into choppy waters, as Meta refuses to play ball and Google seems less keen on news than it once was.  In this episode, we catch up with the media and how it's handling today's dynamics of the internet and – especially – the new era of AI deals. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy...

Nuclear is in the air. (Not literally.) In Australia, politicians are debating it, while a huge range of nuclear startups are ruling it out for funding and attention. In this episode, we chat about nuclear power and how the tech industry is talking about it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nvidia is the engine room of the AI moment, but they are struggling a little right now. The stock underwent a massive correction this week, and founder Jensen Huang is reportedly worried that the gravy train is about to end. We used that as an excuse to dive into a few interesting trends going on in AI, Apple's moves, whether the hype is matching the product, and what it all means. Note: we said i...

Tencent is one of the largest and most valuable companies on earth, with operations that touch just about every part of the digital economy in China and beyond. From WeChat to gaming to film production to payments, Tencent continues to expand far beyond its original station as a Chinese app developer. In this ep, we take a tour through Tencent, including its weird connections to a South African co...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . You thought that because COVID was long over you could stop hearing about GameStop. Wrong! Keith "RoaringKitty" Gill has returned, and the notorious meme stock has been pumping as a result. We took this as an excuse to revisit the GameStop story from the beginning, exploring the factors whic...

This week, Apple held the keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), where it traditionally announces its upcoming software updates. As predicted, the company announced its moves into generative AI – which it is bundling under the name Apple Intelligence – alongside a partnership with OpenAI. In this ep, we dive into the announcements, and what they mean for Apple going forward....

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . A few weeks ago, Microsoft announced its new Surface Laptop with Copilot + PC, which it intends to be a direct competitor with the MacBook Air. On the one hand, it's an interesting attempt to get Windows PCs back into competition. ON the other hand, it's also an attempt by Microsoft to wind...

For a long time, it wasn't a great look for startups and big tech – outside of companies like Microsoft – to openly work with the military-industrial complex. That was for contractors like Raytheon and General Dynamics. Tech generally maintained the sunny disposition that it was better to enable world peace through well targeted digital ads. That has changed, and startups like Anduril are now posi...

In the first part of a two-part episode on Google and OpenAI's tough PR challenges of the past couple of weeks, we dive into Google's launch of AI summaries on the web, which led the venerable search engine to recommend pregnant women blast cigs and amateur chefs to mix glue into their pizza sauce. We chat about the rocky launch, what it means for Google, and how it might affect the web going forw...

It's time for another edition of DOWN ROUND Q&A. We solicited questions from both or premium members in Discord and our followers on X, and today we're answering them for you. We cover everything from macOS to LLMs to Boeing and smart homes. Links Down Round on X Down Round on Instagram Down Round on TikTok Sign up for Down Round Premium See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . The pain for the gaming industry doesn't seem over, with Xbox closing studios, more layoffs, Sony fighting with its fanbase and growth looking sluggish. It raises one big question: has blockbuster game development outrun its ability to actually make money? In this episode, we return to the w...