Equity

Latest Episodes:

It's a boom! It's a bubble? It's a correction. Feb 16, 2022

Show notes

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked:

What can startups learn from the rise, and now struggles, of Hopin? For companies that grew like weed, what’s next?

In the show, we talked through Hopin's meteoric rise and why we called them the fastest growth story of the era, comparable or better than what Slack and other well-known growth stories managed during their own ascent. However, with Hopin now cutting staff after raising mountains of cash and buying a half-dozen smaller companies, it's clear that hyper-scaling has limits.

The economy is changing, again, which is also going to shake up which startups have tailwinds, and which have headwinds. Just like it did before. Hopin is perhaps a very visible canary, but it is hardly the only startup that rode COVID-19's economic disruptions to new heights, which means it won't be the only company left to navigate a changed world when the winds shift.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/12/its-not-a-startup-reckoning-its-a-recorrection/

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

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Equity Monday: Welcome to crypto game day Feb 14, 2022

Show notes

Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news, and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week. Today we had were reeling in the wake of the American football championship, and the fact that is once again snowing where Alex lives. Alas.

But snow or not, the news was fascinating:

We chewed on the Just Eat delisting situation, which appears to be a cost-cutting move. Delivery Hero is also struggling, and the value of Deliveroo is in the toilet. So it's not clear that European food delivery will wind up being the business that many expected it to be. What about in America? We get DoorDash earnings in due time, so we'll learn more but the news doesn't augur well.
And shares of Splunk are set to rise sharply this morning in the wake of late Friday news that Cisco is interested in buying Splunk for around $20 billion. Normally such a deal wouldn't excite us much as Splunk hasn't been a startup for a long time, but the deal possibility does say that anti-trust concerns aren't stopping some major firms from pursuing big deals.
From the startup world, two rounds: $20 million for Gaia, which Alex thinks has a brilliant idea, and TripleDot, which raised $116 million for its causal games. Don't sleep on the gaming market. It's just flat huge.

And to close we yammered about crypto ads in the football game, which were expensive, but appear to be having a nice effect for the companies in question. More soon!

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How much is a pitch deck really worth? Feb 11, 2022

Show notes

We had the full crew aboard today for our live taping, headed by our killer production team Grace and Chris, and hosting crew Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex. Overall, it was a success? Our streaming tech took us to various Internet platforms, and people came to Hopin and asked questions. Thank you! It's always a risk to do something new, so thank you for making it a win.

But enough of all that, what did we talk about? Here's the rundown:

Funding rounds from Mos (edtech + fintech), Alchemy (blockchain infra), and Cooks Venture (patented chickens). The last round got the most attention during the recording, leading to questions about the ethics of eating meat.
Peloton's news, and the pandemic effect on companies was up next. Or more specifically, the changing impact of the pandemic on companies. Peloton is suffering in the pandemic's wake (although some argue that is due more to mismanagement than the pandemic), but other companies are coming out of the dip in reasonable form.
From there we dug into the ethics of venture capitalists having side hustles as consultants. Our read is that the setup is possible to be done ethically, and as the investing market grow a cohort of check-writers with smaller AUMs, some additional work to pay the bills can be unavoidable. The drama was illustrative, if more rude than it needed to be.
And we closed with insurtech. After insurtech stocks got hammered, there's some optimism that better days are up ahead.

Whew! We're back with another live show in two weeks. Until then, we're back to normal!

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Crawling toward the metaverse Feb 09, 2022

Show notes

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex crawled through the Metaverse, leaning on Facebook's latest earnings and Microsoft's newest appetite as somewhat of a map.

Our question, after much thinking, gets into the heart of what the Metaverse is built for:

Will the metaverse be for work, or for play?

We’re not picking sides, necessarily, but exploring how two companies within Big Tech are staking bets in the digital world, and how we think those bets will shake out long term for them and the startups that look up to them.

Facebook seems to be taking a work-styled approach, Microsoft is big in games, and startups are trying a host of different methods for building our digital next. Who is right? Who will win? And how will we get here? That's what we wanted to dive into.

The Satya Nadella interview that we mentioned is here, as well as Natasha's piece on virtual HQs.

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Equity Monday: How many times must Spotify step on a rake? Feb 07, 2022

Show notes

Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news, and record notes on what's going on to kick off the week. Today we had a fun mix of news, and things that made us laugh.

The Spotify-Rogan situation continued as last week ended, with more episodes of the show coming down. More apologies. And more of Spotify trying to straddle the difference between platform and publisher, while hoping to reap the rewards of both while not fully owning up to the responsibility.
Wag is going public, and my body is ready.
From the funding round front, we had quick notes on Swing, which raised a $24 million Series B, and Reliance Health, which raised a $40 million Series B.
And to close us out, an analogy about Facebook through the lens of Alphabet's Other Bets line item.

Lots of Equity is coming this week, including our first live show of the year. It's free and you can come hang out, watch us flub, and ask questions! See you Thursday!

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Making sense of the Paypal and Alphabet earnings Feb 05, 2022

Show notes

Hello and happy weekend from the Equity crew! We had a busy week, including a Twitter Space with Natasha and Alex taking to the mics to dig into some tasty public-market news. Naturally our show is more startup-focused than public-market centered. But! We can learn a lot from the world of public companies that have a wide footprint inside particular tech niches that matter for younger companies.

So when we digest PayPal's results and what investors did to its value this week, we are not super interested in PayPal per se, but more what its results can tell us about the fintech world more generally. After all, around a fifth of all venture capital dollars invested last year went to fintech startups. And Alphabet, it has deep ties to the public cloud space, and the advertising market, both places where startups live and play.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/31/come-hang-with-us-for-live-recordings-of-techcrunch-podcasts-equity-and-found/

We do the occasional live taping on Twitter, so make sure you are following us on the Big Blue Bird App. Hugs! We are back Monday morning!

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Taxing crypto only makes it stronger Feb 04, 2022

Show notes

We had the full crew aboard today, headed by our killer production team Grace and Chris, and hosting crew Mary Ann, Natasha and Alex.

Last week we promised Cute Farming Robots, and this week we delivered, along with a lot more. But first, the Equity team along with our sister podcast Found are doing live recordings starting soon. You can find out more here, but Equity will be live-taped on Hopin next Thursday. Come hang out, it should be fun!

https://techcrunch.com/2022/01/31/come-hang-with-us-for-live-recordings-of-techcrunch-podcasts-equity-and-found/

Now, the show rundown:

Funding rounds from Pluto (corporate spend in the Middle East), Free Agency (agents for tech talent), and Metafy (video game coaching) got us started. From a host of rounds this week, we chose the most interesting for your delectation. If you want more on gaming, check out our Wednesday show where we niche down into the universe, or in this case, the metaverse.
The new Seven Seven Six fund got us into the crypto investing beat, which Alex explored here earlier in the week. In short: Expect more crypto deals. We also touched on the Indian crypto tax rule, which is a revelation of a regulation.
From there we dove into the fintech realm through the lens of the Bolt fiasco/drama/truth-telling saga. More tweets, please.
And then, we end with a section on autonomous vehicles, that has nothing to do with cars. Yep, we're talkinig Cute Farming Robots, including rounds from Vecna, Electric Sheep, and MongoDB founder doing this, which reminds us that the AWS of robots isn't too far away.

So far, 2022 is feeling good. Along with our soon to be standing live show circuit, we're working hard on making the show more focused on tension and nuance, while still sticking to our love for numbers and nerdy networks. Let's annoy some people this year, and teach you something in the meantime.

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F*ck creator funds, we need a creator index fund Feb 02, 2022

Show notes

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex brought on the Most Online™ reporter at TechCrunch, Amanda Silberling to talk about one of her recent pieces, "maybe creator funds are bad."

The column, mixed with the recent saga between Spotify and Joe Rogan, helped us ask a bigger question for this week's episode:

What makes a platform economically viable for creators?

It's no small question. Creators are a key plank in every platform's success, from TikTok to YouTube to Instagram to, well, wherever you watch or listen to stuff made outside of major studios. But the financial relationship between platform and provider -- creator, in other words -- is often fraught and broken.

Creator funds are some proposed fix to the situation, but we find the to be more band-aid than holistic solution. Rev splits are good, and seemingly more sustainable, but with YouTube's ad load reaching truly epic proportions, they may not be a fix-all. So we sat down to chew the fat and try to work towards a solution.

Which we mostly did, except for Alex, who decided that a return to feudalism is the only way forward. We're back Friday! Talk soon!

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Equity Monday: If you don't want to be criticized for your editorial choices, don't make editorial choices Jan 31, 2022

Show notes

This Monday show actually felt a bit old-school, in that the weekend controversy in tech has spilled over into the working morning, meaning that we need to talk about it. But first, markets:

After the somewhat punishing start to last week, today's trading is somewhat more staid. Global equities are moving, but nothing suicidal, and cryptos are off a bit in the last 24 hours, but up in the last seven days. Naturally, given what has happened in recent trading sessions, all that could change in a moment but at least we're starting in un-choppy waters.
The Joe Rogan furor continued. After several musicians decided to take their music off the service in protest of Spotify's decision to pay for material that those artists viewed as undercutting public health, Spotify made some of its rules public and said that it will append COVID-19 notes to podcasts that discuss the pandemic. We talk about why.
In startup-land, FTX has raised another huge round, TCV is putting more late-stage money into early-stage rounds, and Bamboo raised.
Closing out, changes are afoot in China's venture capital market.

So yes, there's going to be a lot of Twitter drama this week. But don't worry! You can compensate for that by hating on people posting Wordle scores, as that appears to be the latest way to lose friends online.

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Membership, mentorship or just messy Jan 28, 2022

Show notes

What did we get into? Well, a host of pretty awesome stuff, even if we had to leave Cute Farming Robots in the tank for another few days:

We had funding rounds from Anyplace, which is building a way to make the digital nomad life work in a WFH world, notes on Frost Giant's Series A, which Alex really needs to finish writing up, and Parthean, which Natasha covered and did a great job explaining. Here's to better financial literacy in general. We need it.
Then we chatted through what Mark Cuban is doing with his generic drug play, which we think is at once great (cheaper meds for the folks who need them!) and somewhat sad (how did we get here as a society?). Which of course led us into a conversation about public and private money, and the role that billionaires play in reshaping society.
Next up was a YC credit union DAO that is collecting money from graduates of the accelerator to invest in cyrpto startups. So its a founder rolling fund, right? Kinda.
MENTOR COLLECTIVE

And that's a wrap on another busy week. Good luck in the snow if it's coming your way!

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