Marc Manara, OpenAI’s head of startups, says the reality of AI has advanced far beyond ideas and experiments. AI-native companies are hitting $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and product cycles have shrunk from two-week sprints to single days. And OpenAI is helping.
Today on TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Russell Brandom sits down with Manara at TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 to explore how OpenAI is serving the startups building on its platform.
Listen to the full episode to hear about:
- The shift from two-week sprints to one-day development cycles, and what that means for how startups should structure their engineering teams
- Why some startups are customizing models for specific tasks in healthcare, finance, and other verticals that seemed out of reach
- Where AI still hasn’t fully integrated with companies, and why longer-horizon autonomous tasks remain the next frontier for both models and startups
Subscribe to Equity on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
Theresa Loconsolo is an audio producer at TechCrunch focusing on Equity, the network’s flagship podcast. Before joining TechCrunch in 2022, she was one of 2 producers at a four-station conglomerate where she wrote, recorded, voiced and edited content, and engineered live performances and interviews from guests like lovelytheband. Theresa is based in New Jersey and holds a bachelors degree in Communication from Monmouth University.
You can contact or verify outreach from Theresa by emailing theresa.loconsolo@techcrunch.com.
Russell Brandom has been covering the tech industry since 2012, with a focus on platform policy and emerging technologies. He previously worked at The Verge and Rest of World, and has written for Wired, The Awl and MIT’s Technology Review. He can be reached at russell.brandom@techcrunch.com or on Signal at 412-401-5489.
