Analysis
What five years of talking actually shows.
Not what we say happened — what was actually said, year by year, across 218 recorded conversations.
- words spoken
- 1.86M
- conversations
- 218
- years
- 2021–2026
- themes tracked
- 25
The bubble, from the inside
Crypto arrived, vanished, and came back.
Mentions of crypto, blockchain and web3 on Founder Tales. Zero in 2021, a peak in 2022, all but extinct by 2024 — and a 2025 revival that didn't hold. No episode was ever about crypto; this is what surfaced in conversations about something else.
mentions per 100k words
The winter, and what followed
When the money dried up, they started talking about profit.
Funding falls off a cliff in 2024 — the funding winter — while revenue, margin and profitability climb steadily from 2021. The two lines are the same shift in mindset, seen from opposite sides.
mentions per 100k words
The news agenda
On Shutdown, AI ate everything else.
Shutdown started in 2024 and covers what's in the news. In two years, mentions of AI more than doubled — by 2026 it's one word in every two hundred spoken. Note: this is exactly why the two shows are measured separately — pooling them would make it look like the whole ecosystem changed subject.
mentions per 100k words
Who the news is about
The labs overtook Big Tech.
In 2024 the talk was mostly about the giants — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta. Two years later it's OpenAI, Anthropic and their models that occupy the conversation. The two lines cross somewhere in 2025.
mentions per 100k words
Founder Tales
The rest of the builder's arc.
Each panel is on its own scale — the shape of the curve is the point, not the height between panels. Remote work died with the pandemic; regulation rose; product fell as conversations moved from “how do you build it” to “how do you sustain it”.
Funding
183.9 ↓ 110.8
Product
73 ↓ 10.7
Hiring
36.5 ↑ 39.3
AI
31.3 ↓ 29.8
Revenue
1.3 ↑ 14.3
Remote work
11.7 ↓ 0
Regulation / EU
2.6 ↑ 15.5
Failure
7.8 ↓ 7.2
Burnout
1.3 ↑ 6
Shutdown
The subjects the news cycled through.
Shutdown is measured on a different taxonomy — there is no point asking a tech-news show how often it mentions product market fit. This is the agenda: who's in charge, what gets bought, what gets regulated. Social media fading, robotics and jobs arriving, geopolitics peaking in 2025.
AI labs
134 ↑ 490.6
Big Tech
433.1 ↓ 355.3
Geopolitics
207.8 ↓ 106.1
Social media
188.9 ↓ 51.7
Chips
48.8 ↑ 76.9
Energy & data centers
63.4 ↓ 55.7
Markets & M&A
57.7 ↑ 72.9
Electric cars
58.1 ↓ 35.8
Crypto
10 ↓ 0
Space
47.1 ↑ 54.4
Regulation / EU
44.9 ↓ 27.8
Robotics
12.5 ↑ 43.8
Jobs
7.1 ↑ 26.5
Data & privacy
18.9 ↓ 6.6
Health & biotech
13.2 ↓ 8
How this was measured
Every episode is transcribed locally with Whisper, split into passages, and counted by keyword on word boundaries. Values are mentions per 100k words, so a year with more episodes doesn't look louder. The two shows are counted separately because they have different formats and Shutdown only exists from 2024.
It's a word count, not a reading of meaning: “failing” catches both the person who failed and the person afraid of failing. Search inside the conversations to see the context behind any of these numbers.