Equity

Despite the advanced week, news is still coming in in hot and heavy, so strap in for today's busy episode: Cryptos have failed to recover from their weekend swoon, leading to most major crypto assets suffering from a double-digit decline in their value over the last week. Sensetime's Hong Kong IPO is set to raise less money than the AI company had hoped. BitMart got hacked, showing that even this deep into the crypto era we are still seeing embarrassing security lapses that deliver material consumer pain. Alibaba is reshuffling its leadership, though we are not sure at this juncture what the changes mean. Not to get speculative, but we're keeping an eye on the new leadership. A number of investors are considering pouring capital into Polygon, TradeDepot raised $110 million, and Stacked raised $35 million for its crypto-investing system. I would normally say that it's a holiday week, so let's relax, but instead I wonder if we're going to see a final push of news this week before things do calm down for

It's Friday, which means the whole crew was aboard for this particular episode. We had Grace and Chris behind the scenes, and Mary Ann, Natasha, and Alex on the mics. And, frankly, we needed the full team because the holidays aren't slowing any news down. First up? Square becoming Block, which we wanted to make fun of but mostly found to be reasonable given the company's disparate interests. From there we chatted about Inpathy's neat take on social networking, Massive's $11 million funding round, and why Butter could help grease the skids of many a subscription business. Then it was time to trade startups for bigger companies, as we had to riff on Bret Taylor's quasi-ascension to the top of Salesforce along with a host of other executive exits. Alex calls it cold resignation winter, but Meta clearly has put some people on the hot seat. Better.com was also in our remit this week, due to its fundraising and layoffs. We debate if you should raise if it comes at the cost of your employees, and the morality of

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 Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. Today? We discussed if the era of founder-led companies is coming to a close, and if we have reached the peak of founder friendliness. The decision to abdicate the CEO role by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey got us onto the topic. You can read our first take on the matter here, or listen to us geek out about it on an earlier Twitter Spaces. But Natasha and Alex decided that they didn't want to walk alone, so we got Floodgate's Iris Choi back on the show, along with recently venture-backed Fractional founder Stella Han to help us dig through the issue. Choi doesn't see a rapid change in the current market dynamic that has led to increased founder influence, and therefore control. Even more, she noted that as the public markets a

Well, so much for a relaxed post-holiday week on Monday. News broke this morning that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey is stepping down from the company entirely. The company's CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be taking over at the helm. Saleforce exec Bret Taylor will take over as board chairman. So, Amanda and Natasha and Alex jumped into onto the mics -- and, ironically, a Twitter space -- to riff on all things Jack and future of Twitter. From the show: Crypto and the CTO, what can we read from the tea leaves? Jack's dual role, and its detractors. The fact that Twitter's product work has been great lately, which we don't want to stop. When is a good time to leave a company, is it on the up and up or when things are quiet? And, finally, Jack's somewhat biting words regarding founder-led companies, which are, frankly, a bit at odds with his own behavior until now. The show is back on Wednesday, unless some other major CEO resigns. Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is o

With a holiday-impacted week behind us, we hope that you are ready for the next few weeks of busy news. Because starting in the back-half of December, the world is going to slow down dramatically. Make sure that you are following the show on Twitter, and let's get into it! No tech IPOs this week, though we will see earnings from select SaaS companies. That means that our information flow will slow over the next few days. India is irked at Starlink, telling the Elon Musk company to get its regulatory paperwork in order. Raspberry Pi is going public, it's expected. The micro-computer company could debut in Spring of 2022 on the London exchanges. And black Friday online sales dipped, though we have a guess as to why. Two acquisitions took place recently that caught our eye, including Booking Holdings buying Etraveli Group for $1.8 billion, and Clearlake buying Quest from Francisco Partners. From the startup world, two deals: Slice is now a unicorn thanks to Tiger Global, while Thought Machine is also now

Find the Found feed here: https://pod.link/found Not only is this week's guest the TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 Battlefield winner, but Nabiha Saklayen is also democratizing access to life-saving cell therapies by using—you guessed it—lasers. Nabiha is the co-founder and CEO of Cellino which is a company developing the tech to automate stem cell production that will lower the cost of cell therapies and increase the yield of viable cells. In this episode, Nabiha tells Jordan and Darrell how she built a start-up beginning with the tech and finding a business fit, her evolving leadership style, and why this work is crucial to the biomedical field. Take our listener survey and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Connect with us: On Twitter On Instagram Via email: found@techcrunch.com Call us and leave a voicemail at (510) 936-1618 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 t

This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. And this week, it was all about the ConstitutionDAO. For those who weren't online last week, here's what you missed: a not-so-subtle group of strangers on the internet banded together to try to buy one of the remaining thirteen copies for the constitution. With crypto. The bold bid eventually fell short, but many saw it as an inspiring onramp into how communities can mobilize around a shared goal in a Web3 world. The whole movement, from its meme start to its poetic, and billionaire Ken Griffin-themed, end, was just too interesting for Equity to not dedicate an entire episode to. So, Natasha and Alex brought on Lucas Matney and Anita Ramaswamy to unpack, decompress, and bond over our shared experience of witnessing this 'financial flash mob.' We talked about what a DAO is, and what they might be used for. We dug into the question of just how many folks the effo

Happy Monday everyone, and welcome to a holiday week here in the United States. Yes, we here in the good ol' States will be off the second half of this week. TechCrunch won't grind to a halt, but we will certainly slow down a little bit. But, that doesn't mean that we didn't have a lot to talk about this morning: Shares of Indian fintech giant Paytm fell further today, after a very disappointing first-days trading last Thursday. The company now has lot of ground to make up just to get back to zero. Facebook is delaying the rollout of E2E encryption until 2023, which has us a bit bummed. Also in big tech news, ByteDance is calling it quits on edtech in India. Turning the page to startups, we chatted through three news items this morning: Jina.ai raised $30 million, Deliverr raised $250 million, and Lydia added equity and crypto trading to its French financial superapp. And we closed on the just what the point of a DAO is. Woo! We are back Wednesday morning. Chat soon! Credits: Equity is produced by The

Good news, everyone: Mary Ann is back! Yes, after a short absence we have our third Friday host back where she belongs. Namely right in front of a microphone, talking to us. And it was good to have her back, as we had a small mountain of news to talk through: OpenSea could be worth $10 billion: Right before we recorded, news broke that OpenSea could raise new capital at a far-greater valuation than it did earlier this year. While we had some jokes, we also did a little math on why OpenSea could really be worth so much money. Other rapid-fire funding rounds: If OpenSea does raise again, it will join good company in putting together several rounds in under a year. Facily has done the same, as has Justt. In short, the old 18-month cycle for raising capital is so dated it might as well get delivered by telegram. Lambda School rebrands: Casper goes private: After a tough time as a public concern, DTC mattress company Casper is going private. Notably its issues have not dampened market interest in taking oth

This is our Wednesday episode when we niche down to a single topic, looking to expand our understanding of one particular technology trend or another. This week? iBuying. Zillow made a decision to get out of the iBuying market, with huge costs hanging over its head and a grip of layoffs to manage. Natasha and Alex were curious what went wrong. So we brought along Ryan Lawler, one of TechCrunch+'s reporting team, who has covered the space for a chat. Ryan helped us use Opendoor earnings as a comparison point -- it turns out that the iBuying model can work, even if Zillow itself struggled with the model. (Opendoor went public via a SPAC, recall.) We also talked about what the situation could mean for startups in the real estate market more broadly. It turns out that merely having data is not enough to make money in the housing space. Equity is back Friday morning with our weekly news roundup, and if all goes well, also back on Saturday with something both special and fun. And if you haven't given our sister

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. Tesla shares are off further this morning in the wake of declines following stock sales by Elon Musk. The company retains its $1 trillion market cap, per Yahoo Finance data, but is at risk of losing a comma if it keeps slipping. Elsewhere in Big Tech, Microsoft is making Windows worse, while bitcoin gets an upgrade On the startup front, we took a look at Writer.com, Zoomo and Rsquared. Up ahead, we have the Braze, Usertesting and Sweetgreen IPOs. Nubank and Paytm are also in the queue. 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.

Friday afternoon the Equity team took to a Twitter Space to hit on a topic that we had to cut from our regular end-of-week show, namely crypto earnings and how Wall Street is digesting the results. And to bring in extra mental horsepower, Natasha and Alex lassoed new TechCruncher Anita Ramaswamy to help. We touched on Coinbase's Q3 financial results and what they tell us about trading incomes, and the company itself. Robinhood's own Q3 results were part of the chat as well, as they showed a similar pattern to what Coinbase disclosed. More companies than just those two, newly-public entities are reporting crypto trading declines. Square did as well, after its bitcoin revenues slipped in Q3. Simply put, consumers traded less crypto in Q3 than they did in Q2, and a number of companies that were recently riding high on that particular volatility cycle had to deal with a down-cycle period. We talked about what the results mean for the noisy world of crypto startups, many of which are looking to the highly-visible

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 EDTECH Tiger Global's investing rush. Thanks to an act of journalism by

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 commercial

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 t

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 VSC And then we chatted for a minute on alternative investing. Namely what Aqua is bu

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 w

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 o

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 a