Equity

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 sitt

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.This week, the week of October 18, 2021, kicked off with a mixed markets picture. Asian stocks were mixed, down in Europe, and set to fall in the United States. China remains a concern.There are hardware events this week from Apple, Samsung and Google. Along with earnings from Netflix, IBM, and Qualtrics.Amazon is in hot water with American regulators, China may force its tech giants to allow for cross-platform search, and Facebook wants to hire lots of Europeans.From startup-land, Enpal landed a huge dollop of cash for its solar work, while OfficeRnD made bets on a hybrid working future. Notes to come shortly on the Expensify IPO filing.The show is back on Wednesday! Chat then! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing

In today's episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on.Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a Twitter Space to discuss Microsoft's decision to pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market, a move that lit up headlines around the world. That LinkedIn was still in China in 2021 may feel more surprising than the news that it will exit that particular market, but the moment matters all the same as it marks the end of an experiment -- could a mega-tech company have a US HQ and a first-party service live in China?Er, no, it turns out. Not really.Microsoft found itself jammed between its own ethics, and governmental censure. It was a lose-lose for the company, so pulling the plug was the smart move. The company isn't going to miss the revenue.For startups, the Microsoft decision is a good reminder that doing business in China is at a minimum very hard for non-Chinese companies, and perhaps impossible. Recall that Microsoft had t

This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed through tech difficulties, crypto puns, and fintech CAC. It's called coping.Here's what we got into:Magic Leap raised $500 million about which we have thoughts, Mindbody's acquisition of ClassPass caught our eye for obvious reasons (and the fact that it also raised $500 million), and we dug into SoWork's fascinating business proposition.mPharma and the race to horizontal, holistic mental health: Telehealth is great and useful but no panacea. However, in the realm of mental health it's potentially life-changing for millions.OpenSea went from being one of the main characters in our fraud show, to being the underdog that we're rooting for - now that Coinbase is building a copycat.Since we tried to keep the show tight, a ton of news was left on the cutting room floor. The good news, though, is that we're back tomorrow

This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Fashion.Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the world of fashion resale and rental. It's no small market, giving birth to both public companies, unicorns, and startups. Most recently, well-known fashion rental player Rent the Runway filed to go public, giving us a window in its own numbers.Those figures led us to a few questions about how best to go about making money from clothes in a retail context. From our chat:Selling vs. Renting vs. Reselling: To start, we wanted to help you group startups into three buckets: those who sell customers to people, those who rent goods to customers, and those who resell pre-owned goods to customers.Rent the Runway's numbers: We had some issues with Rent the Runway's business model given that it appears that the company is simply underpricing its clothing items given its cost structure. How Wall Street will price the company, or whether Rent the Runway is hoping to s

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.Markets were busy, with Chinese tech stocks rallying and the rest of the world posting a mix of gains and losses. If you are bullish on public markets, excellent. But if you are bearish, don't worry -- there are diverse enough signals out this morning to satisfy any investing thesis.Facebook goes on American political TV: To talk about changes it is going to make to its product. A product that it built. It wants point for fixing the thing it made broken. Sure.And Tesla, after delaying the roll-out of a beta for Full Self Driving, is also being asked by some in India to build cars in that country.CRED is raising even more money, at an even higher valuation.Mono gets the Tiger imprimatur, which matters as the startup could prove that the Pla

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups.Before we hop into this week's topics, you can follow the show on Twitter, where we rather often host impromptu Twitter spaces that sometimes become episodes. Come hang!Here's the rundown for this week:Chalo raises $40M to improve bus transit in India: This startup wins name (and startup) of the week. Chalo wants to tackle inefficiencies in India's bus system, so we noodle over why that makes sense and what challenges could be ahead.Masterworks raises $110M for fractional art ownership: Call it a Series A if you must, but the megaround that Masterworks just raised helps underscore the global shift towards alternative investing, and fractional ownership. How long until we get Masterworks on th

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Gaming.Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to discuss the gaming world from a few perspectives, including those of startups and the largest platform players in tech. Alex is a gamer. Danny is a board gamer. And Natasha isn't big on digital games. So, we had a good array of viewpoints. The goal of our episode was to understand why gaming is garnering more interest from Big Tech and startups alike, and how the business model and environment has evolved over the years.Here's what we got into:A new gaming fund from a16z, and recent venture capital totals, as compiled by our friends over at Crunchbase News.Amazon's new hit game, and Apple's epic gaming profits.It appears, by our read, that the gaming industry has evolved from single-sale titles to games with recurring incomes that studios ha

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.Sorry that the show is so delayed today, it's utterly my fault. Regular service returns Wednesday, and we'll make to not be late on a Monday again this year! Here's what we got into on the show:Tech shares are falling in America in a larger domestic selloff -- but once again we're seeing high-valued technology stocks lose the most ground. Software companies are having a particularly rough morning.The Facebook whistleblower situation remains the biggest news item in the technology world this morning, dominating aggregators and conversation. Precisely what comes next isn't clear, I reckon, but Facebook shares haven't lost enough ground yet to be a worry for the firm; that could change with another few days' declines, however.What else was on

To cap the week off, Danny and Alex and Chris got together live on Twitter to chat through the demise of the Zoom-Five9 deal. Those of you who remember how recently the deal was announced are likely a little surprised -- how did it fall apart so quickly? Well, a few reasons:There could be inherent risk in all-stock transactions provided a rapidly-changing market.It may be the case that Zoom simply did not bid enough for Five9.And there's a mix of anti-trust and national regulatory issues to the deal that never got fully hammered out.So, you can pick your poison, even though the answer appears to be some of each above point.https://techcrunch.com/2021/07/19/the-zoom-five9-deal-is-a-big-bet-for-the-video-conferencing-company/Those of you who caught the Friday episode will wonder, and fairly, what the end of the Zoom-Five9 deal will have on other M&A activity. We talked about it.That's enough for now. Hit play and have a laugh with us. Thanks for sticking with the show! Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, meaning that we were running full-strength for our roundup of this super busy week.Before we hop into the topics, you can follow the show on Twitter -- all the cool kids do! -- and keep in mind that on Mondays Equity provides a short kickoff to the week, we chat a single topic on Wednesdays, and Fridays are when we go through the full week. Make sense? Hell yeah:FiveableCobalt raised $2.8 million to help creators build and sell more stuff. As part of our continuing focus on creators more broadly, we had a few questions!Found came out of stealth with $32 million in total funding from GV, Atomic and Define Ventures. The startup is focused on "weight care management" and it's notable that the co-founder of Atomic, which incubated this company, also co-founded hims and hers -- which also has a telehealth component. Found's new CEO is the former COO of Bumble, who drafted its S-1 while getting chemo treatment for stage 3

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture-capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.We got the crew together — Natasha and Danny and Alex — this time 'round to talk fraud, one of our favorite topics. Sure, we've riffed on the ups and downs at Luckin, and we've spent more time talking about WeWork's implosion than we want to admit. But that's not the most recent stuff. There's been a raft of fraud lately which caught our eye. The heart of today's episode is a question about fraud, and what more of it might mean: Does more fraud indicate that we're in a growing bubble, or that we're in the later-stages of a bubble about to burst?Here's what we got into to help us understand our question:OpenSea admits incident as top exec is accused of trading NFTs on insider information -- NFTs are good fun until the market for them is bent in the favor of insiders!Goldman Sachs, Ozy Media and a $40 Million Conference Call Gone Wrong -- How to not get money from Goldman Sachs and po

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.A few things this morning:Instagram is pausing work on the kids-focused version of its social service. It claims that the product is the right thing to build, but that it wants to talk to folks about why, first. TechCrunch has more here.Shares of Box are up this morning, after the company endured a period of time in the wilderness.Google is cutting its cloud app marketplace take rate as marketplaces more broadly lose their ability to accrete economic value as middlepeople.Spotify is spending to advertise its advertising solution so that others can spend more money on Spotify.Swiss startup Frontify raises $50 million, more than double its previous round's size.And from Sweden, EV company Polestar may go public via a SPAC, as EV company Cake

And the winner of TC's Startup Battlefield is.... gonna have to listen to find out  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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Today we got the gang together -- Natasha and Danny and Alex -- to chat about the most recent IPOs in tech-land, namely debuts from Freshworks and Toast.TechCrunch has covered their pair of firms somewhat closely during their IPO run, as they each have some notable characteristics:Freshworks' IPO provided a fresh window into how public market investors are willing to value growth-oriented software companies out the gate. The news is good. Which means that we could see more unicorns looking to list in coming months.Toast's IPO provided a lens by which we could gauge public-market sentiment for hybrid software-and-payments companies. The answer? That the stock market is pretty dang enthused about the companies in question.So it's a good news day for unicorns, for tech startups, and for Boston, a city that Danny has many thoughts about. Please send him your complaints, and not the show

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.A few things this morning:I shook up the show format a little, including how the script came together and how it was organized. Hit me up on Twitter if you have notes.Disrupt is this week, so strap thyself in for the best tech event of the year, coming to your living room. The Equity team is hosting -- between the group of us -- a zillion panels and one of the two stages. Come hang out with us. It's going to be on heck of a show.On the news front, the global stock market is taking a whacking. US stocks are set to fall after European stocks went lower thanks to concerns that the Chinese property developer Evergrande and its constituent debt issues could spread to other parts of the market, possibly leading to contagion.Cryptos are also off

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, which meant we had the full team. And speaking of teams, Mary Ann is joining the Friday show on a weekly basis now. She's been a friend for years, and a colleague now twice-over for Natasha and Alex and we could not be more excited.That personal news aside, here's the rundown for today's show!Funding rounds in the logistics and infra markets: We went physical-world with our funding round roundup this week. BridgeLinx put together the largest Seed round in Pakistan's history, Releaf is doing incredibly interesting agtech work in Nigeria, and Stord's huge round from earlier in the week brought us to Atlanta.And oh boy has Atlanta had a week. TechCrunch did a deep dive into the city's superlative startup fundraising in recent quarters, and, of course, one of its home-grown startups sold to Intuit for $12 billion just a few days ago. We had a few thoughts on the Intuit-Mailchimp transaction, even if we tried to steer cl

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic. This time 'round we took a look into the world of on-demand delivery in Europe, with an especial focus on the so-called "instant" grocery sector, and delivered convenience items. To help Natasha and Danny and Alex get through the subject, we lassoed TechCrunch alum and present-day VP at Zapp, a company in the sector under discussion, Steve O'Hear to chat with us.We spent time chatting through the following:Recent news from the sector, including that Turkey's Getir has just raised a bucket of new capital, and that Weezy is looking to exit; the latter item wound up being important we got around to discussing consolidation in the space.Steve gave us an overview of Zapp, and how its approach to infra could help its economics.We chatted about GoPuff and its economic fortunes, which in fundraising terms are solid, even if

We are back! From this morning, I suppose. But the news cycle doesn't wait for our publishing schedule, so the Equity crew got together to yammer all about the Intuit-Mailchimp acquisition.A $12 billion deal comprised of stock and cash, it's a big on. And as Mailchimp has both a history of boostrapping and a founding story in a non-Silicon Valley city we had lots to chat about.As a general reminder, if you do listen to the show, hit us up on Twitter as we are doing more and more of these Spaces. They are good and relaxed fun, so don't take them too seriously. We like to have fun.Alright, Equity is back on Wednesday with our regularly scheduled programming. Chat then! 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.

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.Vacation was good, and a big thanks to Mary Ann and Natasha -- not to mention Grace and Chris! -- for keeping things flowing while I mostly sat around reading books and playing video games. But enough being maudlin! To the news!Investors are kinda thinking that the run-up in stocks needs to take a breather. And that the reset could land between 5% and 10%, with another 10% of respondents expecting a correction of more than 10%. Yowza.China may break up Ant, keeping the pace of its regulatory deluge going as this week starts. And the Chinese government thinks that its country has too many EV companies. If the market or central planning will wind up taking point on solving the "problem" is not clear.The Apple v. Epic decision is still drivin