Equity

Latest Episodes:

Three quarters of record-breaking funding for female founders is a win Nov 05, 2021

Show notes

Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. And have fun!

This week our very own Mary Ann was off -- we send her our best, as she is a living saint -- so Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris got together to compile our news roundup. And oh boy was there a lot to corral.

Up top this week, news from Indiegogo that the crowdfunding service is tightening up who gets to post projects on its platform. We view this as a general good, and one that could prove helpful to the long-term viability of crowdfunding.
From the funding round rodeo, we riffed on the musical and potentially exciting Mictic (which raised $2.5 million), female-health focused illumigyn and what it might do for care access (it raised $33 million), and Martie, which wants to prevent food waste and perhaps provide low-cost foodstuffs to folks in need ($3 million in fresh capital).
FEMALE FOUNDERS
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And then we chatted for a minute on alternative investing. Namely what Aqua is building, and why Alex is writing columns on NFTs.

Hugs and love from the team, we will chat with you bright and early Monday morning!

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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The inherent tensions within Venture capital Nov 03, 2021

Show notes

This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? The issue of venture capital expectations in certain sectors where startups may not be the best fit. And what happens when they raise a mountain of capital.

Natasha and Alex had former founder and present-day indie journalist Vincent Woo to come on the show with us. Why? Because he's written extensively about Lambda School, one of our subjects of the day.

We started with Ro, and Natasha's excellent piece on the matter: Employees detail rising tensions at Ro as healthcare unicorn struggles to grow beyond first win.
Next we chatted Lambda School, which has a well-documented history of raising venture capital and attracting controversy. Most recently, Woo published a piece about the coding bootcamp's misleading claims on job placement. The company is perhaps a cautionary tale of how venture-level growth can struggle in certain sectors. Education is hard and may not scale like software.
At the heart of conversation was a question: In this time of high valuations and easy access to large amounts of capital, how can VC incentives lead some startups into a cycle of pain? We didn't land on a single conclusion, and that was kind of the point of the episode. Venture capital isn't inherently bad or good, but the money can come with a list of demands (and pressures) that cause risk-taking founders to make mistakes. A recalibration is necessary, but, as we talk about every week, the "up and to the right" market will take its time getting there.

It was good fun to focus on a single topic, but we're back with our news roundup Friday morning! Chat soon!

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Equity Monday: The beginning of the end of ‘996’ Nov 01, 2021

Show notes

Today we had a goodly bag of things to dig into, including:

The FT finds that major social platforms are taking a bath thanks to Apple’s new privacy rules. But is that such a bad thing?
The Chinese labor standard of ‘996’ is losing its dominance in its domestic market.
The Dell-VMware spinoff has finally happened. At last.
Digital Currency Group raises $700 million, Mosaic Building Group raises $44 million, and When I Work locked down $200 million of its own.
Looking ahead, we have AllBirds and NerdWallet IPOs this week!

Sorry that the show was late! Chat soon!

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The new alchemy is turning gold to crypto Oct 29, 2021

Show notes

This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a host of topics from the public and private markets alike. In our wheelhouse this week:

An IPO rush: Sure, IPOs are still not keeping up with unicorn births, but the current pace of public offerings has us nattering. Paytm is coming. Sweetgreen as well. NerdWallet and Backblaze to boot. It's a crowd!
Alchemy raised $250 million for its blockchain-infra work, reminding us that A16z has all of its eggs in the same ol' crypto basket.
Heart to Heart raised $0.75 million for audio-focused dating. And even though we're not the targeted customer base, we were excited about the founder and his big bet on intention.
Built by a student, Tasseled wants to help college students get their lives, and credits, together.
More on the great Sequoia business model shakeup, building from our comments earlier in the week. We dig into exit timings, and other potential impacts of the change.
And we got to riff on the Midwest startup-boom, which is a region near and dear to Alex's heart. And it turns out that Denver is not a Midwest city.

While we're sad about Danny's exit, it's also edifying to have our new crew in place for 2022. Expect nothing less than more Equity than ever.

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Divining the future of VC, saying goodbye to Danny Oct 27, 2021

Show notes

This is a special, if somewhat bittersweet episode. It marks the final official podcast with our own Danny Crichton, who is off to other pastures in short order. Danny stepped in when we lost a host a few years back, and has been both a staple and a pillar of the show since. We're going to miss the ever-loving heck out of him.

But the show must go on, so we spent this episode discussing issues core to our remit: The venture capital market, startups, and the interplay between each.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Chris got together for this particular Wednesday edition of Equity, the part of the week when we niche down to a single topic and discuss it at length.

This time 'round we tackled the very small of whether today's pace of venture capital investment is sustainable, and whether the current structure of venture capital funds will survive. It was the right time to do so, given that:

Tiger is reloading with even more capital. Danny noted that its rising asset base is a good indicator of just where things are today.
Venture capital is at all-time highs. Natasha and Alex riffed through the numbers, noting just how crazy things have become.
And as we were collecting our notes, Sequoia announced (after Primack scooped them) that they are revolutionizing their firm into a new sort of vehicle.
We also discussed the unicorn traffic jam, which gave Alex a chance to jump atop his favorite hobby horse one more time.

With more money than ever bouncing around startup-land, the question of whether the sums, and their resulting valuations, make any sense is a conversation that we are not done with. But we hope that after this short podcast, you are at least up to speed.

Bon voyage, Danny. We love you. And a regular shoutout to the folks who have helped host Equity in the past: Kate Clark, Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and Connie Loizos. You are very much still in our hearts.

Here's the next few million downloads!

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Trillion dollar Tesla Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

Hark, all ye who pay attention to the stock market, for Elon Musk's wheels-focused company broached the $1 trillion market cap threshold today.

Yeah, it finally happened, so the Equity team quickly scrambled for the microphones. Chris put together the show, allowing Alex and Kirsten to dive into the matter. Kirsten, in case you aren't familiar with her, is TechCrunch's transportation editor -- her crew handles everything that moves under its own power for the team. She's tremendous.

Aside from the obvious market cap point, we got into:

What news drove Tesla higher today, leading to its new valuation record?
How is Tesla's overall financial performance looking?
Has the model mix at the company changed over time?
And, because Alex was curious, why Telsa cars all look the same when will the Cybertruck will come to market?

In short, it was a very fun Twitter shot. Cheers, and Equity is back Wednesday with our regular programming.

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Equity Monday: PayPal punts on Pinterest as Facebook's hell month continues Oct 25, 2021

Show notes

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

Taking a look around the world, stocks were largely higher in Asia and Europe and are looking somewhat mixed in the United States. There are a host of technology earnings coming this week, mind.
Facebook is taking all sorts of incoming fire from media reporting on a trove of documents that a whistleblower leaked. The company is not having a good month, let along quarter from a PR perspective. It reports earnings later today. Here's the NYTimes piece we noted, the Bloomberg article, the CNN piece, and the Verge entry.
The PayPal-Pinterest deals is done for now. PayPal said so this morning. Its shares are up, while Pinterest shares are sharply lower.
And from startup-land: Routine is a new app that looks slick, Billie raised $100 million, Tier raised a huge bloc of cash, and Groww just tripled its valuation.

It's going to be a busy one, so strap in and get hype because it is earnings week.

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Another month, another billion dollars in value appreciation Oct 22, 2021

Show notes

This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more broadly.

We naturally kicked off with news that Facebook intends to rebrand itself. Which we don't think will do much to detract from its various crises. But the news does underscore that Facebook is, in fact, serious about writing its next chapter.
From there it was time to talk funding rounds. This week we picked Vertical Oceans and its fishy plans, Superplastic and its stable of rude digital critters, and Modern Age and its plan to help us all age a bit more gracefully.
Vibe Capital, founded by Teachable's Ankur Nagpal, is a $60 million fund for international, scrappy founders. We spoke about the founder to investor pipeline, and why everyone wants eachother's jobs.
And then Alex ran us through some data from the Chinese venture capital market, information that was far more positive than we anticipated. Given, you know, the country's regulatory crackdown on technology companies.
We closed with a number of major fintech rounds, including new capital for Deel and a funding scoop on Brex.

While we're in a bubble, it's easy to get lost in the same narrative: everything is booming! This week's episode was a good reminder of how diverse, and nuanced, this ever-lasting startup summer truly is.

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PayPal picking Pinterest puts us in a parsing pickle Oct 20, 2021

Show notes

Look, we don't get it either.

Taking some time as a group to sit around and chat through the possibly impending PayPal-Pinterest deal, Natasha and Alex didn't wind up cracking the story. Which makes some sense, as investors sent PayPal stock down 5% on the news, implying that they didn't really get it either.

Recall that PayPal has made a few other deals in recent years, including buying Honey ($4 billion) and Paidy (less than $4 billion).

Regardless, the transaction -- worth potentially dozens of billions -- could scoot the social giant into the welcoming arms of PayPal, an American consumer and business fintech giant. Here's what we tried to sort out:

Does Pinterest have a big enough ecommerce story to make the deal line up with our first expectations?
We talked about Pinterest's historical stock performance, as well as a number of culture controversies it has been embroiled in.
Why doesn't PayPal just buy Etsy instead? Here we dug into why a shop-able, searchable mood-board may satisfy customer demands, thus Pinterest's lag on fintech infrastructure - in comparison to Etsy - has been somewhat surprising.
And if technology is all bundling, and unbundling, does it make some sort of sense for PayPal to join forces with a more e-commerce content focused business, now more than a half-decade removed from its eBay divorce?
We ended with jokes about fintech's expected (and unexpected) consolidation, and we want your best guesses for what's next on Twitter.

Frankly we had a good time. Mary Ann was going to join up but was thwarted by Apple's iPhone headphone design, while Danny was slightly busy trying to figure out why his spouse beat him at Settlers of Catan, his favorite board game. We are back Friday with our regularly scheduled programming!

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NerdWallet, Gen Z, and the value of the written word Oct 20, 2021

Show notes

Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the recent NerdWallet IPO filing, and what it can tell us about how the written word -- in its digital form -- can still be worth quite a lot. Here's an outline of the chat:

NerdWallet shows the financial power of the written word, even if it isn't the precise form of writing that we know and love.
Automattic is a large, startup bet on the written word, amongst other things. Danny had notes for us on the scale of its business, thanks to a new TC-1 all about the publishing empire. Here we talked about the importance of proving value internally, before going external with word power.
And from Kindle Vella to Substack to Memberful from Patreon, there are more and more models for getting paid to write these days. Hell, you can charge for your tweets now.

We were left with questions about if the return of text is inevitable, in an everyone-runs-to-video world. As Natasha notes, distribution is still a bottleneck and human attention is not entirely predisposed to sitting around reading things. But with Gen Z perhaps a little over screentime, perhaps there's good news ahead for writers of all stripes.

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