NEA's Tiffany Luck on AI IPOs, personal agents, and the ROI reckoning

Tokenmaxxing (techcrunch.com/2026/04/17/tokenmaxxing-is-maki…) was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due (techcrunch.com/2026/06/05/the-token-bill-comes…). Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.

This tension between hype and ROI is exactly where NEA partner Tiffany Luck (nea.com/team/tiffany-luck) lives these days. She got her start convincing companies that e-commerce was the future, and now she's all in on AI, especially when it comes to the possibilities for "magic moments" in the consumer business.

On this episode of TechCrunch'sEquity (techcrunch.com/podcasts/equity) podcast, Luck joins Rebecca Bellan to talk about the future of personal agents, her thoughts on this year's AI IPOs, and how startups are stepping in to help enterprises track return on AI spend.

Listen to the full episode to hear:

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What the tokenmaxxing-to-ROI shift means for how companies measure AI spend.

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Why forward deployed engineers are becoming a "Trojan horse" for AI adoption.

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How enterprises are mixing and matching models instead of committing to one provider.

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Why Tiffany thinks value is being created at every layer of the AI stack, not just at the model layer.

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Chapters:

00:00 Intro

00:51 Tiffany Luck's path from Lot18 to Amazon to VC

3:45 Magic moments: Waymo, healthcare, and the gap in personal agents

7:36 Privacy, security, and trusting AI with your life

10:39 IPO outlook: Anthropic vs. OpenAI on public markets

13:58 Compute, infrastructure, and where the value sits

15:41 What’s the ROI on tokenmaxxing?

27:07 Forward deployed engineers as a ‘Trojan horse’

32:49 Outro

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