Equity

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Equity Monday: Everyone is going public so what's wrong with your startup? Feb 22, 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 — and be sure to check out our last main ep, in which Natasha coins a slogan for a16z that I both hate, and became the headline of the show!

But enough of all of that, we have a lot to get through this morning. Here's what we talked about:

The Weekend: Coinbase at $100 billion? More on that to come. Toast is going public! Probably! Wait Toast the company that laid off staff last year? Yep that Toast! It's not toast! And new rules on online lending in China.
This Morning: Oscar Health put together an IPO price range that is interesting, and Apex Clearing is going public via a SPAC.
Funding Rounds: Gophr raises money! Ageras Group raises money! Promise raises money! It was hard to pick just three, but each of those rounds has something notable about it. Enjoy!
Deeper Dive/Riff: If the public markets will float even the most leaden of startup via a SPAC-balloon, any late-stage startup that doesn't take the ride out of the private markets must either be perfect or too heavy to lift. And if it's the second, we can write it off? Maybe?

And, finally, this is precisely what I feel like this Monday morning. Chat soon and stay safe!

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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A16z doesn't invest, it manifests Feb 18, 2021

Show notes

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He's working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hype!

Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion:

Bitcoin broke the $50,000 barrier, something that we wanted to talk about. Especially in light of Coinbase's $77 billion valuation. Natasha walked us through some growth metrics, and Alex was sad that he isn't already retired. Danny remains a full-on crypto bull.
And on the blockchain thing, Blockchain.com raised $120 million, proving that there is huge amounts of capital available for the guts-and-bolts tooling of the bitcoin world.
Li Jin, who coined the term 'passion economy', has closed her debut $13 million fund for startups within the same category. She joined other investors in our latest survey on the creator economy's changing tides.
Off of $1 million in ARR, Circle has brought on $4 million in funding at a valuation north of $40 million.
A16z invested in Stir, which helps creators manage and view their various income streams. The funding total was not disclosed, but is reportedly valuing the company, still in beta, at $100 million.
TalkShopLive brought on new cash for live video shopping.
Pipe17 closed an $8 million round that caught our eye. By building a service to help smaller ecommerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller ecommerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in ecommerce automation that also recently raised money.
From there we riffed on the software market itself, its size, and the potential for investors to loosen their rules of intra-portfolio competition.
Public raised $220 million, OutSystems raised $150 million, and Ally.io raised $50 million.
Finally, a wave of edtech startups is over Zoom University and hopes to create much, much better. alternative.

And that's our show! We are back early Monday morning for a packed week. So keep your podcast app warm, we're coming for it.

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Equity Monday: The electric car boom, tech regulation, and some sad American VC data Feb 15, 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 — and be sure to check out our riff on whether SoftBank has another 20 DoorDashes waiting in the wings.

This morning was a more relaxed Monday than I can recall in months, thanks to a holiday in many parts of the world. But that didn't stop us from parsing the news:

The Weekend: This investigation into Clubhouse's data security is getting results, while over the weekend Dispo got huge in a hurry, and the Apple-Facebook dynamic got a better explaining. Increasingly the tech giant world feels like ad engines (Facebook, Alphabet) in opposition to software-and-hardware shops (Microsoft, Apple).
This morning: GM has new electric cars, TechCrunch reports. VW isn't worried about Apple. And every EV company in the world is going public via a SPAC. Who will win? You can place your own bets. And India is loosening some tech regulation. The American stock market is closed.
Funding Rounds: We chatted about the recent Libeo round, and the latest on Nymbus, both of which are more than cool.

And, finally, read this if you want feel let down by American VCs. (American media, to be clear, has similar issues.)

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Does SoftBank have 20 more DoorDashes? Feb 12, 2021

Show notes

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This week felt oddly comforting from a tech news perspective: Facebook is copying something, early-stage startup data is flawed enough to talk about, and sweet DoorDash is buying robots for undisclosed sums.

So, here's a rundown of the tech news we got into (as always, jokes aren't previewed so you'll have to listen to the actual show to get our critique and Award Winning Analysis*):

Ethena raising $2 million more for corporate training that is not awful, and Zeta raising $1.5 million for couples' banking. Natasha has been killing the early-stage beat lately.
How Seed data could be getting harder and harder to parse from Alex's desk, and why VC data in general is dicey, from Danny's. We discuss if directional data is useful, and why the limited numbers could have a cultural impact on signal.
Reddit raises $250 million, but doesn't tell us who the investors are and what the money is precisely going to. Still, the company has had quite a year so far so the capital comes at an interesting time.
Justo, an online grocery based in Mexico, raises $65 million as the pandemic continues to shake up the way we live and shop.
DoorDash buys a salad robot, which brings Natasha nostalgia and Danny anger.
The inverted SoftBank J-Curve thesis is a must-listen and read.
And from the world of dating, a big M&A deal that caught our attention, and the latest from the Bumble IPO.

In good news, long-time Equity producer Chris Gates is back starting next week, which means we'll have our biggest crew ever helping get the show put together. And, in other good news, there's going to be more Equity than ever for you to hear. Coming soon.

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Equity Shot: What's next for the startup software market Feb 10, 2021

Show notes

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace noticed last week that we had a bevy of software-as-a-service (SaaS) stories that we wanted to chat about. So we decided to break them out into their own episode.

What came out of the conversation is a mix of optimism, sarcasm, and healthy doubt regarding what's next for SaaS. SaaS matters as it is an incredibly popular business model for startups, a way to generate high-margin recurring incomes. Indeed, it's almost the default method for revenue generation amongst startups today.

But precisely what SaaS is, and how it works, appear to be moving targets.

This piece by our own Danny Crichton, for example, digs into a trend that he has noticed in the broader software space, namely startups taking a single task, or feature, and providing it in a manner that ascribes to best practices. For example, online checkout tech has been around since the dawn of the Internet. And yet Rapyd and Fast and Checkout.com and others are raising oceans of capital to provide checkout solutions to other companies. Why? They offer best practices-like services.

From there we talked about the inclusion of humans into software, which isn't a radical concept but has new weight considering the information overload world we live in. The whole concept of having an Airtable hotline to answer each and every random question we have seems like music to our ears, what about yours?

And finally we discussed the growing use of on-demand pricing over traditional SaaS. Danny asked if this is really something new, which we discussed. Perhaps we're seeing more on-demand pricing in modern software companies thanks to not only the success of companies like Snowflake, but also growing ranks of API-delivered startups.

Overall it was fun to niche down to a single theme, something we rarely get to do on the main show. Expect more of this from us in the following months!

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Equity Monday: Tesla buys bitcoin, Nexthink raises, and Bumble Feb 08, 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 — and be sure to check out last week's main ep that dug into Robinhood, Miami, and a host of other topics.

This morning we had a pile of news to get through. Here's the rundown:

Pony.ai raised another $100 million, which underscores our growing thesis that there is no amount of money yet that will produce the tech required for self-driving cars to work. Perhaps we will get there, but it is going to cost a pretty penny or two.
Sticking to cars, the Apple-Kia tieup is kaput, which we should have known the moment it became known. Apple previously bought startup Drive.ai back in 2019, of course.
Vroom, a 2020 IPO, bought a Super Bowl ad. Who would have expected that? Its shares are up, however, after the ad.
Still on the car beat, Tesla bought $1.50 billion in bitcoin, and may accept the stuff as tender to buy its vehicles in the future. The move sent the price of bitcoin higher.
Clubhouse got banned in China.
Phable raised $12 million, Nexthink raised $180 million, and Bumble is targeting a higher share price in its impending IPO.
And we may have figured out the ∆ between what investors are saying about the Seed market, and what data has largely said.

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A lake house architect, a Miami VC, and homeowner walk into a wine bar Feb 04, 2021

Show notes

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week's biggest tech happenings. The good news is that we managed to fit it all into a single episode this week. The bad news is that that means the show is pretty long. Sorry about that!

So, what took us so much time to get through? All of this:

Robinhood raised $3.4 billion after its trading hiccups, and we also chatted over what we know about the company's Q4 2020 numbers. In short, the company is growing nicely.
RPA is big and UiPath is cashing in on the trend, raising $750 million at a $35 billion valuation. That's a lot of cash for very little dilution.
Databricks raised $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, after reaching $425 million in ARR. The company's growth is hot, but its valuation may be even hotter.
Bumble is going public, so we chatted about its results, and how founder- and venture-friendly the dating market may be in the future.
In a big exit for the Boston startup ecosystem, alcohol delivery platform Drizly has sold to Uber for $1.1 billion.
Sticking to the alcohol beat, Danny talked us through the Vivino news, describing himself as a wine sophisticate with a distaste for sommeliers, which is just about the most Danny thing he has ever said. But the company really is neat.
Divvy homes raised a $110 million Series C to make it easier to buy a home, after financing five times as many homes in 2020 as it did in pre-pandemic times.
And then there were some neat early-stage rounds to chat about: Balance raising $5.5 million to bring B2B payments to the modern world, Alloy Automation raising $4 million for ecommerce automation, and Beam raising $9.5 million to build a new browser.
Make sure to read Natasha's profile of the new Expectul CEO here.
And, we closed on some Miami news.

And somehow we still have another entire day before the weeks is up! So much for 2021 calming down after 2020's storms.

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Equity Monday: Rich tech folks chat rich tech things on rich tech app funded by rich tech investors Feb 01, 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 — and make sure to check out last week’s main episode and companion chat about Robinhood.

This morning we ran into quite a lot of the same material, with Robinhood back in the news and the stock market looming large. Here's what we talked about:

American stocks are set to rise, bitcoin is flat, and meme-stocks are mixed.
In India, news is out that a new law could ban bitcoin (whatever that means), and this morning India forced Twitter to take down some accounts that had been critical of government policy. That's a pretty bad look. And it comes as we see a coup in Myanmar leading to a decline in internet connectivity; there is a clear link between authoritarianism and a desire for Internet control.
Robinhood's CEO went on Clubhouse, where he was interviewed by Elon Musk about last week's mess; it turns out the National Securities Clearing Corporation, or NSCC, had asked Robinhood for $3 billion in deposit requirements. That number was reduced to $700 million, with Robinhood limiting some consumer behavior, allowing the company to open Friday morning.
This morning the key news stories include the mess that is Facebook Groups, and the EU is appealing a tax decision that could impact tech company structure for years to come.
Ben raised $2.5 million
Phocas Software raised $34 million
DesignCrowd raised $7.6 million
And, finally, we are heading into earnings season, so strap in and get ready for a deluge of results.

All that and we are back Thursday, if not before. Hugs and hellos from the Equity crew!

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Why calendar invites are worth $3B Jan 28, 2021

Show notes

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace hopped online for our weekly show, sans Gamestop news (which you can find here) to talk about all the other busy news happening in startup world right now.

Here's a taste of what we got into:

Qualtrics IPO pricing, and the future of major acquisition pricing schemes. This company's path to the public markets has been a long-time coming, so we had plenty to say.
How Atlanta's Calendly turned a scheduling nightmare into a $3 billion company. This story was not only neat, but also operated as a sort of palate cleanser for the team.
Rhino's interesting insurtech play, and how it is pre-IPO pretty damn early. Revenue questions, the power of insurtech, and public markets impacting startups? This story had it all!
Alex talks about how Fast is raising fast money ($102 million to be exact). Even more, the Fast story fits into a broader narrative of online checkout startups raising a zillion dollars in recent weeks.
A boom in food delivery and restaurant startups, and why Danny is bearish on a plastic-free play. Natasha is in favor. Alex gets a company's model mixed up with Spoon Rocket.
Natasha explains how Clubhouse isn't the first company to raise millions off of millions of users with no known near-term monetization plan. Her piece on ClassDojo illustrates how a quiet edtech giant finally turned its 51 million users into a profitable base. There's also an investor survey for you to check out (Discount code: EQUITY).
TCV's record fund, and a female-focused angel fund coming out of Africa.

As always, it was a ton to get through because there is just so much going on. More Monday morning, until then stay cool!

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