Equity

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Tune in, SPAC on, drop LSD Jul 07, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha and Danny decided that it was time to talk about drugs. No, not like drugs for fun, but instead drugs that you might have considered fun, but are now being redirected to help bolster your health.

Yep, that's our theme today. As it turns out, there are a number of startups and even nascently public companies that are pursing using drugs that we might consider recreational for serious health purposes. Which is neat, as our habit of decrying any drug that makes you feel better as immoral has likely held us back from learning quite a lot about them.

Venture capital investment in psychedelic start-ups, per CB Insights, rose from sub-$100 million results in 2018 and 2019 to $346 million last year.
Vice clauses, however, can pause a legitimate issue for investors who might want to cut a check in the space.
From the startup angle, NUE Life Health recently raised $3.3 million, and Osmind is up to some neat stuff regarding mental health.
From the public markets, Atai Life Sciences, Compass Pathways, and MindMed are the companies worth watching.

Frankly this was a fun one to record, even if the topic at hand is actually rather serious. Chat Friday 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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Didi gets hit by Chinese government, and Pelo raises $150M Jul 06, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Tuesday, 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 and myself here.

What a busy weekend we missed while mostly hearing distant explosions and hugging our dogs close. Here's a sampling of what we tried to recap on the show:

Didi vs. China: The Chinese government's crackdown on Didi continued over the weekend, after announcing a cybersecurity review of the company on Friday. That decision blocked new user signups. Now Didi has had its app removed from pertinent app marketplaces. That's going to hit revenue. Shares of the company are sharply lower in pre-marketing trading here in the United States. The company went public last week.
Twitter vs. India: India's attempts to cow Twitter into not enacting its own content moderation policies continues. Now India has taken away legal protections from the well-known American company. It's not great news for India's growing technology sector, or the investors backing the upstarts.
Funding rounds: Lots of companies raised money, including Byrd, with $19 million in a Series B, Pleo with a huge $150 million unicorn round, and Obviously AI, which just extended its Seed round.

It's going to be a busy week! Chat tomorrow.

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California has no water and lots of liquidity Jul 02, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Danny, Natasha, and Alex were on-deck this week, with Grace on the recording and edit. But, if you want to hear more about Robinhood, this is not the episode for you. If you want to learn more about the consumer fintech company's IPO filing this is the episode you want. Basically, Robinhood filed after we had wrapped taping, so we had to do a special pod for the news.

So, this is the everything-but-Robinhood episode. And here's what's inside of it:

Startup and investor tensions at Bessemer and Hinge Health. Natasha has the latest.
Didi's IPO, and what's going on with Chinese IPOs more generally. Also SentinelOne's expensive and notable debut.
And then all things Duolingo, including TechCrunch's overview and more in-depth look.
From the venture capital side of things, Zipline raised $250 million, Daylight raised $5 million, Articulate raised $1.5 billion, Acceleprise rebranded to Forum Ventures, and Peanut put together a micro-fund.
We closed with Neeva, Brave, and other alternative search tools. Alex has a piece coming on the subject, once he gets around to finishing it.

A four-episode week! With only Grace handling production! She's amazing.

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Robinhood is going public and we're very excited Jul 01, 2021

Show notes

It's a sweltering day here in New York City, and that means Wall Street is on fire, and so is Robinhood, apparently. The popular stock trading app officially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few hours ago to go public, where it will trade under the ticker "HOOD."

The Equity crew has been yammering about Robinhood for years now, and we have been chomping on the bit to see those S-1 results for what feels like ages. Well, we finally got the numbers, we chomped that bit (or at least Alex and Danny did, since Natasha went on vacation about 15 minutes before the IPO hit the wires), and so here's a special Equity Shot to talk about all the highlights.

We talked about so much in an itsy-bitsy 15-minute episode: crazy revenue growth, crazy revenue concentration from two major sources, regulatory hurdles that the company has been clearing up, better financials with a bit of nuance on the company's Q1 finances, and the company's special plan for its IPO.

Wowza.

Here's what we got up to:

Historical growth and profitability.
Revenue mix and revenue concentration, along with constituent concerns.
The importance of options-related incomes for the company.
Dogecoin.
Why the company's adjusted income may help it assuage investors who have their eyes pop out of their skulls when they see its GAAP Q1 2021 results.

And a lot more. Of course, if you hate Robinhood, we will be back with our normally-scheduled Friday episode of Equity tomorrow.

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Dear economy, creators aren't fragile plants Jun 30, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha brought on Alexis Gay, a former operator at Patreon who now makes her living as comedian and podcast host, to talk about the creator economy - including our disdain for that horrid phrasing. You may know her from her cheeky, on point shorts about tech culture (and tech Twitter).

https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1369346460911734784

Gay gave us an honest look into the life of creator helper turned creator actual, admitting that her current job path wasn't possible in 2018. Somewhere, somehow, a VC in the distance heard that admittance as an opportunity to back a creator economy startup.

Here's what we got into:

Gay's experience at Patreon, and why she left. Alex had some thoughts on the theme. It appears that growing list of creator-focused tools could increase the vapor pressure of folks who write, talk, art, and otherwise create, regarding their present-day employment.
Why one size doesn't fit all when it comes to the diverse world of folks engaged in creative work. We also dipped our toes into the issue of indie creators needing to be CEOs as well as artists.
We chatted on Vibely, a startup that wants to make interactions with creators ~ multi-directional~ and what it says about scaling time.
We also got into what an average day looks like for a full-time creator-comedian-podcaster, why she's annoyed with how creators are discussed by founders and investors, and the tooling she hopes to see in the future.
And, well, we had to ask her if she's starting a rolling fund too.

All told, if you care about the economics of the creative world and want to add some nuance to your theories about it, it's a fun episode.

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Equity Monday: Big iPads, and Ballmer-era Google Jun 28, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

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 and myself here.

First, happy belated birthday to Chris Gates, one of the founding members of the show. His birthday was yesterday, and while he's on vacation for two weeks, we still wanted to give him a shoutout. Chris is a very good person, a good friend, a good father, a good partner. He's kind, supportive, and hilarious. And he has a very good beard.

But Equity waits for no single person, regardless of their merit, so on we went! Here's today's show:

Stocks are a bit blah this morning, though set to rise in the United States. Cryptos are up a little.
From the weekend, Venmo is getting into ecommerce, and Apple loves Surface.
From this morning: Binance is beefing with the United Kingdom, and appears to be winning, which is somewhat humorous.
On the funding round beat, Slice raised $20 million, Botrista raised $10 million, and Thursday raised $3.5 million.
We wrapped with this.

The Equity crew is back on Wednesday for our deep-dive, this week focusing on the creator economy which should be good fun. Chat then!

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Equity Extras: Q&A from the live show Jun 26, 2021

Show notes

Hey Equity fam, we have a small clip of extra for you today. After our live show - listen to the recording here, it was good fun - we got to take a few questions from the audience, audio that was not included in the main episode as we didn't have the time. But we've cut it out, given it a short polish, and have it for you today.

If you wanted even more Equity, here you go!

As a small note from the team, we know that this week's Wednesday episode didn't have the best audio quality. And to do a Twitter Spaces experiment the same week as a live show might have felt like a lot of change. Don't worry, it just worked out that way. Equity will keep tinkering and having fun, but we're back to normal next week.

Enjoy the Q&A, and we'll see you at our next live show!

- Grace, Chris, Natasha, Danny, and Alex

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Equity Live: This is what leadership smells like Jun 25, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week we did something fun and different and good: a live show! A good number of people came, and asked questions, and altogether, it was a blast.

Danny, Natasha, and Alex had a lovely time with the regular work, while Grace and Chris and Kevin made the whole operation function. We'll likely post a bonus episode of the Q&A on Saturday if people are interested in Equity After Hours.

That aside, what did we talk about in a longer-than-usual episode? Here's the rundown:

Buzzfeed is going public! Alex wrote about the news here, but the gist is that the media company is merging with a SPAC, buying Complex, and raising some capital at the same time. We have thoughts about it.
Maybe neobanks will break even? We dug into some fintech news through the perspective of some recent news from the neobank market.
MAJORITY raised MONEY for migrants to the United States, while MFast, a Vietnamese financial services app, got some funding of its own amid the neobank boom.
Alex interviewed a leading venture capitalist. So, we talked about that.
What's going on with the early-stage venture capital market? That's something we tried to parse. The gist is that the rapidly-evolving world of investing in startups is in the midst of a few trends that are worth understanding. Even if they are slightly contradictory.
A16z tripled down on crypto with a new $2.2 billion fund, giving it a total of $18.8 billion in assets under management.
Edtech leaders rallied around a memo of their own this past week.
And then to close, we raced through some of our recent reporting on a new fund that will invest in American military institute graduates, Figma's huge new round of capital, and WaitWhat?

It's always fun to play around with our show, and thank you to everyone who came out and supported us in our first-ever, but probably not last-ever, virtual live show. We are back to regular, however, starting Monday.

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How many lives does bitcoin have? Jun 23, 2021

Show notes

For this week’s deep dive Danny, Alex, and a bunch of the TechCrunch crew took on the recent happenings in the world of bitcoin. In a break from our regular format, we recorded live from a Twitter Space -- it's like a Clubhouse, but closer to where your social network is -- so the audio quality is not going to be Utterly Perfect. But we think the conversation will more than make up for it!

Before we get into the show notes, do not forget that we're recording Equity live on Hopin Thursday the 24th. Come hang with us and have some fun. It's free, of course, and should be a good time. Details here, sign up here!

So what did we get into? A lot!

Recent price changes to the value of major coins
The impact of China on the larger crypto ecosystem
What's the latest from the NFT craze?
Are DAOs, you know, actually a thing?

And more. A big thanks to Romain Dillet and Lucas Matney for hanging with us, Drew Olanoff for hosting, and Chris Gates for snagging the audio and making it all work.

See you tomorrow!

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Equity Monday: China hates crypto, and the Vision Fund's vision lives on Jun 21, 2021

Show notes

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Our live show is this week! And we're very excited about it! Details here, and you can register here. It's free, of course, so swing by and hang with us.

Back on theme, we had a lot to get through this morning, so inside the show you can find the following and more:

The Chinese cryptocurrency clampdown is a big damn deal: With lots of the nation's mining capacity heading offline, there's a scramble to relocate rigs and generally figure out what a crypto market sans China might look like.
In the wake of the news, the value of cryptocurrencies fell. As did shares of Coinbase this morning in pre-market trading.
Facebook's Clubhouse rival is out. The American social giant follows Spotify into the live-audio market. You have to give it to modern software companies, who thought that they could be both leading tech shops and Kinko's clones at the same time?
Revolut is unprofitable as hell but increasingly less so. That could be good news for fintech as a whole.
Amber Group raised $100 million; Forto raised $240 million.

See you this Thursday at the live show!

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