Down Round

You asked, we answered. We're doing a much-requested episode on "Australian" fintech Airwallex, which has gotten a lot of untoward attention of late — anti-money laundering audits, accusations by American VCs of being a financial backdoor to China. But there's a bigger story here: the proliferation of payments companies doing a big land grab from traditional financial institutions, and quickly learning that regulation and bank policy exists for a reason.
We take a crash course of Airwallex, its current controversies, and where it fits into the bigger payments story.
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As somewhat of a follow up to our Claude Code/Coworker episode last week, today we regroup to evaluate what it could mean for YOUR favourite SaaS products. That's right, folks, AI is coming to take away your precious QuickBooks and you're going to watch and clap as it rips and tears it to pieces. We also touched (if briefly) on the Siri x Gemini announcement.
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New year, new studio, same red hot takes.
This episode covers the typhoon of AI-generated filth created by Grok, Elon Musk's AI venture, currently flooding X. We also touch on the general state of X as a platform.
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We're joined by friend of the pod and Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano for a loose chat covering a swathe of topics from capital-J Journalism, the tech oligopoly and AI in politics. This is our final dispatch from our Christmas recording.

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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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