Down Round

We're joined by Rowan "Joyride" Dix and Becky "Becky Lucas" Lucas for another round of our annual community shark tank, where we listen to our listeners pitch their startup ideas and decide whether we're going to invest.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM to hear the other 45 minutes of Shark Tank, get ad-free listening PLUS an extra episode every week.

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A highly requested topic in the Down Round Discord is mental health and mindfulness apps — from meditation platforms like Calm to therapist marketplaces like BetterHelp. That's the topic of today, discussing the boom during the ZIRP era, the peak during COVID, and how it all relates to other engagement platforms like Duolingo.

Go to https://www.downround.net/ to sign up for PREMIUM and get ad-free listening PLUS a...

Netflix wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Skydance wants to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. Both for many billions of dollars. Why? We break down the $70 – 100 billion bids, the Ellison–Trump court politics, and why this could mark the final enclosure of the film industry by tech.

Also: James chronicles the history of film industry disruption, and Raph reveals his long-awaited top ten movies of 2025 list.

We al...

This week we're going deep on the rise of prediction markets — the hybrid of futures trading, sports gambling, and economic theology that suddenly seems to have eaten the world. Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi are booming and an increasingly big part of both tech culture and also gambling culture.

We trace the whole arc: from Hayekian fantasies about prices revealing truth, to the far bigger truth: people just really, re...

This week, we open with the final chapter of Frank, the student finance startup that sold JP Morgan a fake email list. Founder Charlie Javice is in prison for fraud, but the bank is still footing a $115 million legal bill that includes everything from luxury hotels to cellulite butter.

Then we move onto Nvidia, which posted another absurd quarter with revenue up 60% year-on-year.

Then finally X’s new location feature, wh...

This week we unpack a growing split inside the AI world, centred on Yann LeCun — Meta’s AI pioneer who thinks LLMs are a dead end.

Reports suggest he’s preparing to walk, after being quietly sidelined under Meta’s “superintelligence” push and made subordinate to a 28-year-old ex-data-labelling kingpin, Alexander Wang. His alternative is the “world model” approach: systems grounded in ...

Down Round hasn't checked in on Cupertino in a little while. This week, we take stock of Apple’s strange position in the AI boom — not really innovating very much, but quietly raking in billions as everyone else builds data centres. 

From Siri’s long road to Gemini, to the cult of thinness and the ghost of Johnny Ive, we talk about how Apple keeps winning by doing less. Plus: the Vision Pro flop, new MacBook ...

We realised that we've been talking a lot about data centres but have gotten pretty pointy headed about it, without bringing our beautiful listeners along for the ride. We apologise.

This episode is us pumping the brakes, going back to first principles and explaining the current data centre situation — from where they started, all the way to the current massive buildout due to the AI boom.

If you or someone you know woul...

Today's episode is on the back of a curious report from The Information that Suno, the AI music generation app, now brings in $150 million in annual recurring revenue. That's not Meta level, but it's not bad either.

It opens up a discussion of how the world of AI generated content is progressing, including chat about OpenAI's Sora colonising TikTok and Reels with meme videos. 

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made an interesting little announcement this week: the company has mitigated mental health concerns on its platform... and it's ready to let its users generate erotica.

Now that might seem a little strange to you. Most of the internet had a similar response, actually. In this episode, we talk more about one of our favourite pet topics — weird parasocial relationships with the computer, and how the variou...

This week, Down Round is diving into the world of parenting and technology — everything from the various devices and gizmos targeted at parents, through to the algorithm that swamps your feed the moment you become a new parent. 

Joining us to help us understand the deep mysteries of the mumgorithm is Humyara Mahbub of the Baby Shoes podcast, who is a world-renowned expert in ads on Instagram for crap you don't need....

Vibes are up this week.

Alexandr Wang, the former Scale AI CEO who now runs Meta's new multi-billion dollar Superintelligence unit, has announced one of their first products: What if TikTok but only AI slop?

Vibes is a feed full of AI videos. That sounds like an idiotic thing to put the greatest and highest paid minds of our generation onto. Unless?

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Oracle. Unless you're a big database guy, it's probably not a company you're going to be all that interested in. But it is one of the biggest companies on Earth, and its stock just pumped 40% — not something you often see for an outfit which started in the 1970s.

Why? Because it just signed a $300 billion multiyear deal with OpenAI to provide compute. In this ep, we dive into the big question on literally eveeryone's lips: wh...