Down Round

Apr 03 2025 232 ep. 26 mins 237

Down Round Podcast artwork

The number one podcast about tech business and culture, from James "JR" Hennessy and Raph Dixon.

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Studio Ghibli, But Make It Slop Pt. 1

Apr 03 2025 44 mins

We talked about the new OpenAI image generation platform last week briefly, but we recorded on the day it released and therefore missed the massive amounts of discourse it generated. We're sorry. We'll never miss the discourse again. But it was a great opportunity to take stock of the AI art conversation, which has only become more heated and baroque over the past three to six mont

Spitting In A Tube And Selling It To Private Equity

Mar 27 2025 42 mins

The chickens have come home to roost for 23andme, the consumer genetic testing company which has gone from making people feel nice about being 4% Italian to languishing in bankruptcy. With the vultures circling the carcass, we reflect on its very weird business model and why it should never have gone public. Then we talk about Google, which has been cooking on the AI front recently

Rippling vs Deel

Mar 20 2025 31 mins

HR SaaS is probably the least sexy topic in the world, but fortunately two of the bigger players have made it interesting through bizarre corporate warfare. Rippling has launched a lawsuit against competitor Deel alleging that they placed a spy deep within. The saga contains a honey-pot Slack channel, a mole in the top ranks, and trying to flush a phone down a toilet. It’s go

One Weird Trick That Payments Processors HATE!

Mar 13 2025 54 mins

We're back with podcast content after a regrettable interruption last week. This ep we've got a stacked deck. First, we are forced by fate to talk about Trump, Elon and Tesla briefly. Then we get into the lawsuit against creator economy platform and OnlyFans lite platform Passes. This gives us an excuse to go on a whirlwind tour of a few things: Scale AI, the AI infrastructure com

Content Note

Unfortunately due to circumstances within our control we are unable to record an episode this week. We promise we'll record a really really extra good one next week. Thank you for your patience. Enjoy this AI generated James reading a text message from James.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

No Such Thing As A Market Correction

Feb 27 2025 40 mins

Tech stocks have been having a rough time since December. The Magnificent Seven, the undisputed kings of the market, have slipped 10% since then — even before the DeepSeek moment. But not all are made equal. Meta, for example, is doing basically fine. Apple isn't too terrible. Tesla, on the other hand, has lost 37% of its value since then. In this ep, we discuss the mar

Do You Grok Me?

Feb 20 2025 35 mins

Plenty of tech industry nonsense to chat about this week, folks. Elon Musk is fathering his 13th child (and a new Grok model) and trying to destroy OpenAI. Everyone is trying to match OpenAI's Deep Research with similar products of their own. The markets are back. As always, Down Round is here to guide you.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Going Deep

Feb 13 2025 30 mins

We got a few requests last week to talk more about OpenAI's Deep Research feature that everyone's been going wild about. We thought it was a good opportunity to return to a topic that we've touched a few times over the past couple of years — what sort of work is being threatened with change by new systems like this? In this two parter, we look at Deep Research and the current

Apple – Charlie XCX (official lyric video)

Feb 06 2025 32 mins

Apple is worth $3.5 trillion. Trillion with a T. But all is not necessarily well in Tim Cook's kingdom. iPhone sales are slowing and the Apple Intelligence rollout was unimpressive and underwhelming. Now rumours abound that they are abandoning their rescue mission for their VR and AR ambitions. Are Apple floundering? Or just doing things The Apple Way? Who better to discuss th

DeepSeek Freakout

Jan 30 2025 34 mins

It's fair to say things have been a little crazy this week. Thanks to the drop of Chinese AI lab DeepSeek's beautiful, powerful AI reasoning model, tech stocks took an absolute pounding — producing, in no small part because of Nvidia, the largest individual loss of share market value in American history. The freakout wasn't just in markets. AI developers in the US were also g