Equity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines! This is our Friday show, a roundup of the week's biggest and most fascinating stories from startups, venture capital and technology.Natasha and Alex along with Grace and Chris had to cut and cut and cut to get the show to fit this week, so if we didn't get to your favorite story, we wanted to. We just ran out of space!Here's the rundown:Twitter Blue: Natasha is not sold, but Alex is all-in on Twitter's new subscription service. What does it include? What do we hope it adds? We have it all for you.Seasoned raised $18.7 million for its frontline worker app and matching service, You.com raised $20 million to continue taking on Google's search hegemony, and Helsing.ai raised a huge pile of money for reasons that we like, even if the details of what it intends to do are still a little vague.INDIAN EDTECHTiger Global's investing rush. Thanks to an act of journalism by our Twitter f

This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today we spoke about the revolution within agriculture otherwise known as vertical farming.Alex and Natasha spoke to Hardware editor Brian Heater, who recently wrote a TC-1 about Bowery Farming spanning over 11,000 words and topics such as the taste of sustainable turnips and produce sections at grocery stores. The core of his multi-part exploration, though, was built around a question: Can Bowery Farms bring the newest and most innovative technologies to bear on civilization’s oldest and most optimized industry?As a result, our episode went down a lot of tasty rabbit holes. We spoke about the current state of vertical farming, the challenges that come with commercialization and our struggling climate, and if your local dairy farm is actually thinking about adding a robot to their staff.There was more to chew on, including the balance between sustainability and profit, how to think about carbon footprints, the commercializa

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.The stock market wasn't incredibly dramatic this morning, from an index-viewpoint. Crytpos were slightly more exciting but only moderately. A host of earnings results this week should provide us with fireworks, however.And on the subject of crypto regulation, news from Congress isn't great for fans of coins and chains. And the rising popularity of NFT games could put consumers in bad tax territory.The SoftBank Vision Fund 1 posted poor results, harming SoftBank's earnings, and leading to the company promising a huge share buyback.And Elon Musk made news not only for tweeting some sort of dick joke at an American Senator, but also for polling Twitter regarding whether or not he should sell 10% worth of Tesla shares. That's one way to do cor

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 FOUNDERSVSCAnd then we chatted for a minute on alternative investing. Namely what Aqua is building, and

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 que

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! 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 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

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 to

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.  Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our

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

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 countr

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 Pin

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