The countdown to TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 is on, and so are rebooted ticket prices! Save up to $600 on individual ticket types before September 27. Take advantage of these huge last-minute discounts while you still can.
Disrupt 2024 is where the startup ecosystem converges. Taking place at Moscone West in San Francisco from October 28-30, you’ll join 10,000 tech, startup, and VC leaders for 200+ powerful sessions and discussions, 250+ industry expert speakers, and valuable networking.
Lock in your ticket savings by registering now.
Learn from industry heavyweights
With a powerful roster of top tech leaders speaking across six specialized stages, Disrupt 2024 promises three days of insightful discussions. You’ll walk away with valuable knowledge and perspectives to help fuel your next big move.
Alex Pall and Drew Taggart from The Chainsmokers, Partners and Co-Founders, MANTIS Venture CapitalAli Ghodsi, Co-Founder and CEO, DatabricksAssaf Rappaport, Co-founder and CEO, WizBridgit Mendler, CEO, Northwood SpaceColin Kaepernick, Founder and CEO, LumiDenise Dresser, CEO, Slack from SalesforceErin and Sara Foster, Co-Founders and General Partners, Oversubscribed VenturesPeter Beck, Founder and CEO, Rocket LabMary Barra, Chair and CEO, General MotorsVinod Khosla, Founder and Partner, Khosla Ventures
Meet the rest of our speakers.
Networking galore
Disrupt 2024 is packed with a plethora of networking opportunities. Whether you’re a first-time founder, an experienced entrepreneur, a recent graduate seeking your first tech role, or navigating a career transition, you’ll find the connections you need.
Participate in 1:1 or small-group Braindates, attend Side Events and receptions, or explore the Expo Hall — discover numerous ways to expand your network and elevate your brand presence.
Deep-dive sessions
Engage in 200+ Roundtable and Breakout Sessions led by industry experts, designed to spark meaningful discussions on key issues facing today’s entrepreneurs and professionals.
Witness the startup battle
Don’t miss your chance to be front and center at one of Disrupt’s highlight events: Startup Battlefield 200. Watch as the hand-picked 200 pre-Series A startups pitch their innovative concepts to a panel of elite VC judges for a chance to win a $100,000 equity-free prize and the sought-after Disrupt Cup.
Get an insider’s view as leading VCs provide expert feedback, revealing the key factors they consider when evaluating a startup’s viability.
Catch the final sale before Disrupt 2024
Don’t miss your chance to save up to $600 before the countdown to Disrupt 2024 begins! This limited-time offer expires on September 27 at 11:59 p.m. PT.
Grab these ticket savings — click here to secure your spot!
It was an eventful week for the Silicon Valley moguls who have vowed to support Donald Trump in his bid to return to the presidency.
Given the collision course of tech and Trump, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I’d care to buy an extra ticket to the Republican National Convention from her, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, I saw the Valley’s presence everywhere: Jacob Helberg — venture capitalist Keith Rabois’ husband and former president Donald Trump’s evangelist — watched the Republican National Convention from his own private box that overlooked the floor, donning a red yarmulke with “Trump” stamped on the edge. Investor David Sacks took the stage, orating to the hundreds of delegates decked out in red. Peter Thiel’s protégé and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance sat beaming by Trump’s side.
In the brightly lit hallway, flooded with Texas delegates donned in cowboy hats and jeans, Trump superfans in American-flag suits and the occasional woman in a red ball gown, I found Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé running for office in Arizona. He demurred when I asked if he, Vance and Thiel have a group text chat. But he did smile and say, “Peter is very, very pleased,” referring to Vance’s veep nomination.
All week at the RNC, I saw an event defined by Silicon Valley. But I also saw the tech elite experience flashes of discordance between their dreamed-of outcomes and those of the working-class MAGA supporters overflowing the halls. Take Sacks, who has been critical of unions, speaking at 9 p.m. — only for Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in America, to close out the night a few hours later.
On the first day of the convention, I met Campbell at the Pfister Hotel, where Trump was reportedly staying. Secret Service agents lined the doors, and a procession of armored vans continuously pulled up to drop off congressmen. (I passed Alabama senator Katie Boyd Britt as I walked in.) Every night, delegates and lobbyists sipped espresso martinis at the hotel bar and talked shop beneath the oil-painted mural sky.
Campbell, whose company creates at-home evidence-collection kits for rape and sexual assault victims, filled me in on her own political journey. She’s a libertarian (and famously dated infamous former hedge fund libertarian Martin Shkreli) who recently doubled down on her hometown of Pittsburgh. She won the Miss Pittsburgh pageant last year and then began working closely with local conservatives. Recently, she’s opened her mind to a spot in the Trump administration, interviewing to be in Project 2025’s Presidential Personnel Database, an effort by the Heritage Foundation to centralize potential Trump administration personnel.
Campbell, who had been selected last minute as an alternate Pennsylvania delegate, told me she’s not a die-hard Trump supporter. Rather, she thinks he’ll be beneficial for businesses like her own. “Even if I agree with some of the policies of Trump, I don’t think I necessarily agree with him as a person. And now it looks like, you know, it’s Trump for president,” she said. “So here we are.”
RNC security on boats.
Tense contradictions
To get to the convention center from the hotel, we passed hordes of cops on boats floating in the Milwaukee River, on bikes in the street, on horses milling around the security perimeter. We weaved around a crowd of protestors waving Palestinian flags.
After we arrived, I pushed through a crowd of reporters to ask Vivek Ramaswamy — former presidential candidate, investor and founder of biotech company Roivant Sciences — what he thought of Silicon Valley’s support for Trump. He noted the announcements of Trump support from Silicon Valley. He said he speaks with Musk “frequently about our shared passions for reviving this country.” (The WSJ reported this week that Musk is donating heavily to the Trump Super PAC, although Musk has publicly disputed the report). He said that other tech elites have expressed to him that they “are gonna come around this year” and predicted “a tidal wave this summer,” he said.
There’s good reason for Ramaswamy’s optimism. While many Trump supporters among the tech elite have always traditionally leaned right, there have been surprise endorsements. For example, Ben Horowitz and his a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen publicly announced this week that they would be supporting Trump, rather than quietly donating.
The GOP hasn’t exactly been subtle about courting Silicon Valley, either. Earlier this month, the party released its platform, highlighting support for crypto development “free from Government Surveillance and Control.” Trump is also scheduled to speak at Nashville’s Bitcoin Conference later this month — prompting investor Mark Cuban to offer a cynical take on why techies are turning to Trump. “It’s a Bitcoin play,” he tweeted, explaining that it’s all about driving Bitcoin prices higher.
The platform also supports “AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Of course, politicians at the RNC had a more classic down-with-regulation rationale. “Just like with Elon Musk and the rest, [Trump] supports free speech, he supports the free market,” Florida Rep. Cory Mills told me, “not the ideas of having policy drive our private sector.”
Still, Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump is filled with tense contradictions: Trump’s administration was actually fairly tough on crypto (he even banned Venezuela’s crypto coin), and Trump himself has derided subsidies for electric vehicles. Even Vance’s record is questionable in terms of being pro-tech, and he’s campaigned on being anti-Big Tech. “I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said in February. Khan’s time at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been marked by aggressive pursuit of antitrust cases blocking acquisitions.
Despite all that, Daniel Castro, vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told me that Biden’s antitrust streak and advocacy for AI regulation has pushed the already-libertarian-leaning parts of Silicon further and further away.
“The Biden administration should be careful not to kind of demonize Silicon Valley,” he said.
It might be too late.
RNC VIP party invite.Image Credits: Margaux MacColl
Inside the VIP party
Everywhere Campbell and I went, we could see Silicon Valley in the MAGA-verse. Outside the convention center, we ran into Conor Sweeney, a Snapchat software engineer, wearing a snakeskin belt. We chatted with him shortly after Vance was announced as the vice presidential pick. “Anything with Peter Thiel turns to gold,” he said.
At night, in the Pfister’s mahogany-lined bar, Campbell struck up a conversation with Jeff Miller, a powerful political strategist and close confidant of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy. Campbell gave Miller the pitch for her home rape-kit evidence company, and he steered the conversation to his stance on abortion. (He was opposed to it but did agree that there should be exceptions in the case of “rape, incest, and life of the mother”). That conversation ended with a tantalizing promise to get her passes to the VIP after-party. Later, I noticed that Miller had liked an Instagram photo of Campbell during the swimsuit competition of the Miss Pittsburgh competition.
The next night, Miller sought Campbell out in the Pfister bar and handed her a glossy party invitation, complete with a drawing of a grinning ringleader. Campbell and I took an Uber to a rooftop birthday party for Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, where we were held up by Secret Service agents sending their search dogs to sniff each vehicle. The line of cars was backed up after the officers found a bag of white powder in the car in front of us. (We had a raucous debate over the fate of the powder while we waited but never found out more).
The party was a dull assembly of mostly staffers in suits sipping their beers. But at 1 a.m., we took a car over to the main attraction: a warehouse decked out in pink lights on the outskirts of town, where the big GOP donors and power players went every night to unwind. We ran into Miller again, surrounded by women, and then hung out with CJ Pearson, a 21-year-old conservative influencer, one of about 70 such influencers at the RNC.
Ironically, given the Trump administration’s anti-China stance and his attempt to ban TikTok, he’s now on the popular app as a candidate, as are the young influencers.
“If we’re in the business of truly winning elections, then we have to go to where young people are, and young people are on TikTok and young people are on Instagram,” Pearson said. “I’m not a fan of the Chinese Communist Party. But what I am a fan of is changing the hearts and minds of America’s young people.”
Throughout the night, I also heard Campbell offering slightly different political advice to fellow partygoers. Despite thousands of attendees yelling, “Drill, baby, drill!” as they watched speakers during the day, a call for increased U.S. oil production, she lightly chastised Pennsylvania conservative candidates for chasing the oil and gas donors of Pittsburgh’s past. She wanted them to embrace tech as the new GOP kingpins.
“The only new money that I can see is like Elon Musk, right? Or you have the Thiel money,” Campbell said. “If you’re looking for oil and gas money from people who used to be big Republican donors in the 1980s, you’re looking at the wrong type of people. Because the new money is all in technology.”
To me, these conversations captured the tenuous thread between Silicon Valley and Trump — an imperfect yet lucrative match, one that requires each side to tuck away moral misgivings.
A nod to the Myspace era, Instagram just launched a new feature that allows you to add music to your profile. The feature is in collaboration with singer Sabrina Carpenter, who released a teaser of her new song “Taste” on her Instagram profile ahead of her album release on Friday.
To add a song to your profile, go to “edit profile” and search titles from Instagram’s music library. Just like when you’re picking a song for Instagram Reels or Stories, you can select up to a 30-second-long segment of the tune by sliding left or right. Unlike Myspace, however, the song doesn’t play automatically when you visit someone’s profile; instead, you need to click on the play button first.
You can also change or remove the song at any time by going back into “edit profile” or by tapping on the song on your profile.
🎵You can now add music to your @instagram profile (karaoke skills not included) 🎤 pic.twitter.com/H1tJ9PiwWS
— Meta Newsroom (@MetaNewsroom) August 22, 2024
Instagram reportedly began experimenting with music on profiles in 2022. The new feature aims to enhance user profiles by enabling them to express their song tastes and enhance their creative expression on the platform. The app first added the ability to add music to Stories way back in 2018. Last year, it rolled out a way for users to add music to Notes and photo carousels.
The new feature is being introduced at a time when users feel nostalgic about the “good ol’ days” of social networking. New apps are vying to be the modern-day Myspace, such as Noplace, a text-based social app with Gen Z-focused features like customizable profiles with fun, bright colors.
Instagram is likely attempting to compete with new alternative social media platforms that are trying to become the next big thing, as users are becoming tired of the social media giant. Some examples include BeReal, Daylyy, Palmsy, Lapse, Whee and others.
It was an eventful week for the Silicon Valley moguls who have vowed to support Donald Trump in his bid to return to the presidency.
Given the collision course of tech and Trump, when Leda Health founder Madison Campbell asked me if I’d care to buy an extra ticket to the Republican National Convention from her, I agreed. During the four days I attended the event in Milwaukee, I saw the Valley’s presence everywhere: Jacob Helberg — venture capitalist Keith Rabois’ husband and former president Donald Trump’s evangelist — watched the Republican National Convention from his own private box that overlooked the floor, donning a red yarmulke with “Trump” stamped on the edge. Investor David Sacks took the stage, orating to the hundreds of delegates decked out in red. Peter Thiel’s protégé and former venture capitalist J.D. Vance sat beaming by Trump’s side.
In the brightly lit hallway, flooded with Texas delegates donned in cowboy hats and jeans, Trump superfans in American-flag suits and the occasional woman in a red ball gown, I found Blake Masters, another Thiel protégé running for office in Arizona. He demurred when I asked if he, Vance and Thiel have a group text chat. But he did smile and say, “Peter is very, very pleased,” referring to Vance’s veep nomination.
All week at the RNC, I saw an event defined by Silicon Valley. But I also saw the tech elite experience flashes of discordance between their dreamed-of outcomes and those of the working-class MAGA supporters overflowing the halls. Take Sacks, who has been critical of unions, speaking at 9 p.m. — only for Sean O’Brien, general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in America, to close out the night a few hours later.
On the first day of the convention, I met Campbell at the Pfister Hotel, where Trump was reportedly staying. Secret Service agents lined the doors, and a procession of armored vans continuously pulled up to drop off congressmen. (I passed Alabama senator Katie Boyd Britt as I walked in.) Every night, delegates and lobbyists sipped espresso martinis at the hotel bar and talked shop beneath the oil-painted mural sky.
Campbell, whose company creates at-home evidence-collection kits for rape and sexual assault victims, filled me in on her own political journey. She’s a libertarian (and famously dated infamous former hedge fund libertarian Martin Shkreli) who recently doubled down on her hometown of Pittsburgh. She won the Miss Pittsburgh pageant last year and then began working closely with local conservatives. Recently, she’s opened her mind to a spot in the Trump administration, interviewing to be in Project 2025’s Presidential Personnel Database, an effort by the Heritage Foundation to centralize potential Trump administration personnel.
Campbell, who had been selected last minute as an alternate Pennsylvania delegate, told me she’s not a die-hard Trump supporter. Rather, she thinks he’ll be beneficial for businesses like her own. “Even if I agree with some of the policies of Trump, I don’t think I necessarily agree with him as a person. And now it looks like, you know, it’s Trump for president,” she said. “So here we are.”
RNC security on boats.
Tense contradictions
To get to the convention center from the hotel, we passed hordes of cops on boats floating in the Milwaukee River, on bikes in the street, on horses milling around the security perimeter. We weaved around a crowd of protestors waving Palestinian flags.
After we arrived, I pushed through a crowd of reporters to ask Vivek Ramaswamy — former presidential candidate, investor and founder of biotech company Roivant Sciences — what he thought of Silicon Valley’s support for Trump. He noted the announcements of Trump support from Silicon Valley. He said he speaks with Musk “frequently about our shared passions for reviving this country.” (The WSJ reported this week that Musk is donating heavily to the Trump Super PAC, although Musk has publicly disputed the report). He said that other tech elites have expressed to him that they “are gonna come around this year” and predicted “a tidal wave this summer,” he said.
There’s good reason for Ramaswamy’s optimism. While many Trump supporters among the tech elite have always traditionally leaned right, there have been surprise endorsements. For example, Ben Horowitz and his a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen publicly announced this week that they would be supporting Trump, rather than quietly donating.
The GOP hasn’t exactly been subtle about courting Silicon Valley, either. Earlier this month, the party released its platform, highlighting support for crypto development “free from Government Surveillance and Control.” Trump is also scheduled to speak at Nashville’s Bitcoin Conference later this month — prompting investor Mark Cuban to offer a cynical take on why techies are turning to Trump. “It’s a Bitcoin play,” he tweeted, explaining that it’s all about driving Bitcoin prices higher.
The platform also supports “AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.”
Of course, politicians at the RNC had a more classic down-with-regulation rationale. “Just like with Elon Musk and the rest, [Trump] supports free speech, he supports the free market,” Florida Rep. Cory Mills told me, “not the ideas of having policy drive our private sector.”
Still, Silicon Valley’s embrace of Trump is filled with tense contradictions: Trump’s administration was actually fairly tough on crypto (he even banned Venezuela’s crypto coin), and Trump himself has derided subsidies for electric vehicles. Even Vance’s record is questionable in terms of being pro-tech, and he’s campaigned on being anti-Big Tech. “I guess I look at Lina Khan as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job,” Vance said in February. Khan’s time at the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has been marked by aggressive pursuit of antitrust cases blocking acquisitions.
Despite all that, Daniel Castro, vice president at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, told me that Biden’s antitrust streak and advocacy for AI regulation has pushed the already-libertarian-leaning parts of Silicon further and further away.
“The Biden administration should be careful not to kind of demonize Silicon Valley,” he said.
It might be too late.
RNC VIP party invite.Image Credits: Margaux MacColl
Inside the VIP party
Everywhere Campbell and I went, we could see Silicon Valley in the MAGA-verse. Outside the convention center, we ran into Conor Sweeney, a Snapchat software engineer, wearing a snakeskin belt. We chatted with him shortly after Vance was announced as the vice presidential pick. “Anything with Peter Thiel turns to gold,” he said.
At night, in the Pfister’s mahogany-lined bar, Campbell struck up a conversation with Jeff Miller, a powerful political strategist and close confidant of former House speaker Kevin McCarthy. Campbell gave Miller the pitch for her home rape-kit evidence company, and he steered the conversation to his stance on abortion. (He was opposed to it but did agree that there should be exceptions in the case of “rape, incest, and life of the mother”). That conversation ended with a tantalizing promise to get her passes to the VIP after-party. Later, I noticed that Miller had liked an Instagram photo of Campbell during the swimsuit competition of the Miss Pittsburgh competition.
The next night, Miller sought Campbell out in the Pfister bar and handed her a glossy party invitation, complete with a drawing of a grinning ringleader. Campbell and I took an Uber to a rooftop birthday party for Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, where we were held up by Secret Service agents sending their search dogs to sniff each vehicle. The line of cars was backed up after the officers found a bag of white powder in the car in front of us. (We had a raucous debate over the fate of the powder while we waited but never found out more).
The party was a dull assembly of mostly staffers in suits sipping their beers. But at 1 a.m., we took a car over to the main attraction: a warehouse decked out in pink lights on the outskirts of town, where the big GOP donors and power players went every night to unwind. We ran into Miller again, surrounded by women, and then hung out with CJ Pearson, a 21-year-old conservative influencer, one of about 70 such influencers at the RNC.
Ironically, given the Trump administration’s anti-China stance and his attempt to ban TikTok, he’s now on the popular app as a candidate, as are the young influencers.
“If we’re in the business of truly winning elections, then we have to go to where young people are, and young people are on TikTok and young people are on Instagram,” Pearson said. “I’m not a fan of the Chinese Communist Party. But what I am a fan of is changing the hearts and minds of America’s young people.”
Throughout the night, I also heard Campbell offering slightly different political advice to fellow partygoers. Despite thousands of attendees yelling, “Drill, baby, drill!” as they watched speakers during the day, a call for increased U.S. oil production, she lightly chastised Pennsylvania conservative candidates for chasing the oil and gas donors of Pittsburgh’s past. She wanted them to embrace tech as the new GOP kingpins.
“The only new money that I can see is like Elon Musk, right? Or you have the Thiel money,” Campbell said. “If you’re looking for oil and gas money from people who used to be big Republican donors in the 1980s, you’re looking at the wrong type of people. Because the new money is all in technology.”
To me, these conversations captured the tenuous thread between Silicon Valley and Trump — an imperfect yet lucrative match, one that requires each side to tuck away moral misgivings.
Ivanti warned on Wednesday that hackers are exploiting another previously undisclosed zero-day vulnerability affecting its widely used corporate VPN appliance.
Since early December, Chinese state-backed hackers have been exploiting Ivanti Connect Secure’s flaws — tracked as CVE-2023-46805 and CVE-2024-21887 — to break into customer networks and steal information.
Ivanti is now warning that it has discovered two additional flaws — tracked as CVE-2024-21888 and CVE-2024-21893 — affecting its Connect Secure VPN product. The former is described as a privilege escalation vulnerability, while the latter — known as a zero-day because Ivanti had no time to fix the bug before hackers began exploiting it — is a server-side bug that allows an attacker access to certain restricted resources without authentication.
In its updated disclosure, Ivanti said it has observed “targeted” exploitation of the server-side bug. Germany’s Federal Office for Information Security, known as the BSI, said in a translated advisory on Wednesday that it has knowledge of “multiple compromised systems.”
The BSI added that the newly discovered vulnerabilities, particularly the server-side bug, “put all previously mitigated systems at risk again.” Ivanti confirmed it expects “a sharp increase in exploitation” once specifics of the vulnerability are made public.
Ivanti has not attributed these intrusions to a particular threat group. Cybersecurity companies Volexity and Mandiant previously attributed the exploitation of the initial round of Connect Secure bugs to a China government-backed hacking group motivated by espionage. Volexity also said it had observed additional hacking groups actively exploiting the bugs.
Ivanti updated its count of affected customers to “less than 20.” When reached by TechCrunch on Wednesday, Kareena Garg, an agency spokesperson representing Ivanti, would not say how many customers are affected by the new vulnerabilities.
However, Volexity said earlier this month that at least 1,700 Ivanti Connect Secure appliances worldwide had been exploited by the first round of flaws, affecting organizations in the aerospace, banking, defense, government and telecommunications industries, though the number was likely to be far higher.
This is particularly true in light of a CISA advisory released on Tuesday, which warned that attackers had bypassed workarounds for current mitigations and detection methods.
Ivanti’s disclosure of the new zero-day comes on the same day that the company released a patch to protect against the previously disclosed — and subsequently widely exploited — Connect Secure vulnerabilities, albeit a week later than the company had originally planned. Ivanti spokesperson Garg told TechCrunch that the patches also protect against the two new vulnerabilities disclosed on Wednesday.
It’s unclear whether the patch is available to all Ivanti Connect Secure users, as the company previously said that it planned to release the patch on a “staggered” basis starting January 22. Ivanti is now advising that customers “factory reset their appliance before applying the patch to prevent the threat actor from gaining upgrade persistence in your environment.”
State-backed hackers are exploiting new Ivanti VPN zero-days — but no patches yet
Image Credits: composite: Vivian Zink/Syfy/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal and TORU YAMANAKA/AFP via Getty Images
Controversies and PR headaches weren’t enough to dissuade Spotify from re-upping its agreement with podcaster Joe Rogan, whose show over the past couple of years drove divisions among music fans and artists alike and even prompted some big names, like Neil Young, to pull their catalogs from the streaming service. Regardless, the show remained popular enough to earn the top spot as users’ most-listened-to podcast every year since coming to Spotify in 2020. Now, Spotify’s relationship with the podcaster continues, as the company announced a new, multiyear agreement with Rogan, estimated at $250 million over its term, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The deal will offer Rogan a minimum guarantee upfront along with a cut of the ad sales, the Journal said. (Spotify told us the number being reported is incorrect, however.)
Critically, Rogan’s show will no longer be exclusive to Spotify.
Rogan’s deal with Spotify came about at a time when the company’s strategy was focused on building a set of exclusive and original programs to make its service more competitive with Apple Podcasts and others. The company invested billions to build its podcast business, investing in studio and IP acquisitions as well as new technologies, including ad tech, before shifting course last year. Spotify’s head of its podcast business, Dawn Ostroff, resigned, and the company conducted layoffs. Under Ostroff’s lead, Spotify had snatched up studios like Parcast, The Ringer and Gimlet Media, and signed exclusive deals with Rogan, Alex Cooper (“Call Her Daddy”) and Dax Shepard.
This week, news broke that Cooper’s show would no longer be limited to Spotify, and would launch on other audio platforms, like Apple. Video of the show, however, would remain on Spotify. The move follows others that had seen Spotify loosening its grip on its exclusives, like last year’s news that Gimlet would expand its shows to other platforms. Shepard’s “Armchair Expert” and “anything goes with emma chamberlain” had also rolled out more broadly, leaving Rogan’s show as Spotify’s remaining exclusive. And now it is no more.
Spotify’s change in direction comes as the company continues to struggle to regularly turn a profit, having reported its first quarterly profit in a year and a half back in October. By making the former exclusives available across more platforms, Spotify will have the ability to grow the ad dollars those shows deliver. That may now be more desirable than keeping them locked up as an incentive for new subscribers.
It could also take some of the heat off Spotify when Rogan wades into controversial territory. In 2022, the streamer faced backlash after Rogan was accused of using his platform to spread misinformation. That led Spotify to adjust its policies and include content advisories, but ultimately the artist departures, the #cancelspotify campaign and the negative headlines did not impact Spotify’s paid subscriber numbers at the time, nor give a boost to Spotify’s streaming rivals.
“JRE remains podcasting’s king, consistently ranking as the most-listened-to podcast globally and our users have ranked the show as Spotify’s Wrapped top podcast each year since 2020,” noted Spotify in today’s blog post. The company said JRE now has more than 2,200 episodes available, and that the podcast is the No. 2 most-listened-to show for women over 13 in the U.S., per Edison, as well as the No. 1 show overall as of Q3 2023.
Since joining Spotify, overall podcast consumption has grown 232% and ad revenue grew 80% from 2021 to 2023. JRE ad revenue grew 45% in 2023.
Updated, 2/2/24, 2:10 PM ET Updated to note that Spotify disputes the figure being shared by the Journal. However, it declined to comment on deal terms.
Spotify, Joe Rogan address COVID-19 content backlash
Spotify removes Neil Young’s music after falling out over Joe Rogan
March 29 is the final day to grab your early-bird savings for TechCrunch Early Stage 2024. With only 3 days left to secure your tickets, don’t miss out on this opportunity to join us for a transformative event dedicated to startup success.
TechCrunch Early Stage 2024 is set to take place in Boston, offering invaluable resources and insights for founders at every stage of their journey. On April 25, immerse yourself in a dynamic environment filled with roundtable sessions, expert-led discussions, 1:1 meetings, Side Events, and more.
Here’s what awaits you at TechCrunch Early Stage
Roundtable sessions: Engage in collaborative conversations with experts in small-group settings.The Foundations Stage: Gain essential resources for startup inception, transforming visions into viable businesses.The Growth Stage: Access guidance for scaling operations, strategic planning, fundraising, and more.1:1 meetings: Schedule meetings with fellow founders and potential investors.Side Events: Join partner-hosted events, including meetups, workshops, and happy hours.Transcripts and slides: Access session materials for ongoing reference and learning.Partners and service providers: Connect with startup service providers and sponsors for valuable tools and resources.
Don’t wait until it’s too late — secure your tickets now and accelerate your startup journey at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024!
Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TechCrunch Early Stage 2024? Reach out to our sponsorship sales team by completing this form.
TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 isn’t just an event for innovation; it’s a platform where your voice matters. With the Disrupt 2024 Audience Choice Program, you have the power to shape the future of tech by voting for your favorite thought leaders and sessions. But with just 48 hours left until the May 24 deadline, now is the time to make your vote count!
P.S. Don’t forget to book your early-bird tickets by next Friday for maximum savings!
Meet the Audience Choice finalists
Redefining Success Beyond Growth-at-All-CostAlyson Watson, Founder and CEO at Modern HealthMamoon Hamid, Venture Capitalist and Partner, Kleiner PerkinsHow to Build the Next Phase of the Internet for ConsumersAmber Atherton, Partner at PatronBringing the Outside In: Connecting Startups with Large Banks to Power the Future of FinanceArvind Purushotham, Head of Citi Ventures at CitiAri Tuchman, Co-Founder and CEO – QuantifindKartik Mani, Head of Citi Retail Services and Global Head of Consumer Connected Commerce – CitiThe Age of Technical, Engineering Founders: How They Are Driving AI InnovationChristine Yen, CEO and Co-founder at HoneycombAnand Babu (AB) Periasamy, Co-CEO and Co-founder at MinIOPrukalpa Sankar, Co-founder at AtlanTom Carter, CEO and Co-founder at UltraleapGrowing a City’s Tech Ecosystem Through Immersive Accelerator Models and Diverse Portfolio CompaniesColleen Heidinger, President at 43NorthHow AI Is Supercharging Tools for Knowledge WorkersHarpinder Singh, Partner at Innovation EndeavorsTanguy Chau, Co-Founder and CEO at Paxton AIScott Dietzen, CEO at AugmentLuke McGartland, Founder and CEO at SequenceNext-Gen Medicine: AI Simulation Generating New Data to Accelerate Drug DiscoveryJack Hidary, CEO at SandboxAQNavigating the Regulatory Maze: Pathways to Innovation and Access in HealthcareJordan Nof, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Tusk Venture PartnersWinning at Startup PR Without Paying for an Agency, with Ex-TechCrunch Editor Josh ConstineJosh Constine, Venture Partner at SignalFireAI Outlook: Where VCs Are Placing Their Bets in AI Today — and Where We Go NextKevin Dunlap, Managing Partner and Co-Founder at Calibrate VenturesShoppertainment 2024: The Future of Consumer And CommerceKhanh Ngo, Monetization Strategy and Operations, APAC and MEA at TikTokBuilding Businesses That Endure: Keys to Long-Term TransformationNmachi Jidenma, Partner at General CatalystScams and Solutions: Financial Security in the Digital AgePhilip Martin, Chief Security Officer (CSO) at CoinbaseThe Future Is EMFIPhilipp Reichardt, VP of Enterprise, North America at AirwallexNik Milanović, Founder at This Week in FintechIs There Such a Thing as ‘Startup Within a Big Company’?Prerit Uppal, Group Product Leader at Adobe Inc.Generative AI: Beyond the Hype — Building Real-World ApplicationsPriyanka Vergadia, Head of Developer Relations North America at GoogleHow to Stand Out Amongst the AI Wave: Strategies for Success in Enterprise SalesRudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner at Glasswing VenturesMarc Boroditsky, Former President of Revenue at CloudflareEnterprise GTM Is Broken — Here’s How to Fix ItSC Moatti, Founding Managing Partner at Mighty CapitalAsk Sophie LIVE: Your Startup Immigration Questions Answered!Sophie Alcorn, Founding Attorney and Author at Alcorn Immigration Law
