Investing in the consumer AI products OpenAI ‘won’t want to kill’

Ready to ship AI that works? Start building at mongodb.com/build. Hello, and welcome back to Equity TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Balan, and this is the episode where we bring on industry experts experts to help us explore a trend in the tech world and dive deep. Today, we're gonna talk about where consumer tech, specifically consumer AI, is heading in 2026 from wearables to stablecoins to what happens when the hype cycles actually meet the real market needs. To sort through it all, I'm joined by Vanessa Larko, a former partner at NEA and current cofounder and partner at her own firm venture that we can't really talk about, but it's called Premise. And, I'll let you take it from there. If there's anything at all you can say about it, Vanessa, please let us know. If not, we can move on to some of your thoughts. Let's talk about what's going on in consumer. Happy New Year. Like, I can say nothing. Yes. Happy New Year. So then tell me, what are some of your top predictions for consumer in 2026? I think this is gonna be your consumer. I have been meeting with founders, you know, repeat founders who built enterprise companies in the last cycle, both PLG and top down sales motions, and they're excited about consumer. And specifically, you know, I was having tea with a founder last week, and he was saying, it feels like selling AI tops down is great, but slow. Really slow. Like, these big enterprises, they know they knew it. They know they wanted it. They have big budgets they'll sign you on. But to see users actually using it takes forever because they don't know where to start. The fun thing about consumer and prosumer is people already have prosumer. Right? Like, people individuals, they're buying it like consumer, but they're using it for work. They're using it for personal life. They're using it for all kinds of things. Right? Kinda like how we use chat g p t and cloud. We use it for work. We use it for personal stuff. We use it for kinda everything. Is that people already have in mind what they wanna use it for, and they purchase it. And if it meets the need, they just keep using it. And they're like, it's so vast. You can get it adopted so quickly. Yeah. And you don't lie to yourself on whether you have product market fit. Because when you're doing top down or you're doing your traditional enterprise company, it's very easy to fool yourself into product market fit when you get these big contracts. But if you're selling to consumers, you'll know very quickly if it's fitting a need or not, and you'll know quickly whether you need to pivot or make some changes to your product or totally scrap it and start something totally different. But you get the feedback right away, and I think …