Equity

The Equity crew felt that there was enough media news out recently that we simply had no choice but to fire up a Twitter Space and have a chat. The above episode is a discussion of a few things, in a loose and relaxed manner, so don't take any of the Verizon jokes too seriously, Verizon, as we still work for you. For a few more days.Regardless, here's what Danny and Alex got into:Politico sells for $1 billion: Its new parent company Axel Springer also buying the rest of Politico Europe and all of Protocol at the same time. This deal exploded everyone's Twitter feed due to its scale, and the fact that it was one heck of an exit for a media company. One billion dollars? For media? In this economy? Yes!Forbes is going public via a SPAC: Yep, the venerable Forbes magazing and its enormous digital arm are taking the blank-check route to the public markets, which means that we got its numbers and time to stroll through them. Our take is that Forbes has done massive work to take its IRL brand and extend it into the

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Amanda Silberling on the show to help us parse through OnlyFans' precedent-setting move to ban sexually-explicit content on its service. The decision was a bolt from the blue for many of its creators, a great portion of whom created and monetized adult videos and images through the subscription service. It also stirred up a ton of debate around fintech, crypto, venture capital, and the morality of decision-makers.We put all the facts in context for you, hitting the following points:OnlyFans' recently leaked financials. Of course, the company's historical, and projected revenues are now dated thanks to the platform's planned content changes, but all the same the numbers help put into context just how much money OnlyFans' adult creators were earning on its platform.The leaked financials were part of a pitch deck that the company was using on its plight to raise more capital - an endeavor that has apparently been challenging for the start

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.Today's show was good fun to put together. Here's what we got to:Global stocks are up to kick off the week. It's a great way to start Monday, frankly.Thinking broadly, the latest regulatory news from China regarding ByteDance is not super bullish for the nation's tech industry. And what the Indian government is doing to its own technology industry is not encouraging. But all of that and tension between the two countries, is not stopping deals. You can't stop deals!Facebook bowed to pressure, and released a content report that it had previously shelved.Zetwerk raised a $150 million Series E. The Indian startup scene is trucking right along, perhaps acting a bit as-if its government wasn't increasingly authoritarian.Shelf.io raised a $52.5 m

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through the week's coming and goings. But, before we get to the official news, here's some personal news: Danny is stepping back from his role as co-host of the Friday show! Yes, Mr. Crichton will still take part in our mid-week, deep dive episodes, but this is the conclusion of his run as part of the news roundup. We will miss him, glad that his transitions and wit will continue to be part of the Equity universe.Who will take the third chair? Well, stay tuned. We have some neat things planned.Now, the rundown:Funding rounds: Maven has built a women's health unicorn, Monte Carlo raised $60 million for data observability, and Launch House wants to scale venture community with a fresh $3 million in its accounts. The last round is probably the most controversial one of them all, so each of us took a side and discussed

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex and Danny had colleague Tage Kene-Okafor on the show to chat about the burgeoning African startup scene. Tage has become TechCrunch's key correspondent in the area, chronicling the continents expanding venture capital totals, public company performance, and startup ecosystem.Given that we've paid attention to just how much money African startups are raising, we wanted to have Tage on to give us a better, deeper understanding of the continent's technology activity. Here's what we got into:The power of Y Combinator in Africa: Is the well-known American accelerator a kingmaker in Africa? Or are we merely seeing more of its activity thanks to our own information biases?Fintech as core focus: As in many markets, fintech investment and startup activity stand out in Africa. We wanted to better understand why that's the case in Africa, and what startups are building in the realm of financial technology.African ecommerce: The continent's ecommerce market is perhaps be

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. I also tweet.It's a surreal day to talk about technology, but here we are. If you can pull your eyes away from the greater geopolitical tragedy that is our world today, here's what we talked about:T Mobile may have suffered a material breach. If this bears out, it could be a leading tech story for the week. Vice has confirmed that at least some of the data in the leak appears genuine.Indian travel service ixigo is going public. The company's IPO follows Zomato's own domestic debut.And speaking of IPOs, the Tencent Music offering in Hong Kong could be on hold until next year.And a trio of American tech companies raised a raft o

This week Danny and Alex and Chris took to Twitter Spaces to chat about the current state of the crypto economy, and hang out with friends in a live Twitter Space. We're doing more of these, so make sure that you are following the show on Twitter.As a small programming note, I forgot to tell the folks who chimed in during the chat that we were recording it, so we had to cut most the Q&A portion of the show. We got Ezra's permission, thankfully. The mixup was a bummer as we learned a lot. In the future, we'll not make that mistake and keep all the voices.So, what did we talk about? The following:The current state of crypto regulation in America, and how the government may screw everything up. In short, tech moves fast, and government moves slow. This creates friction.Coinbase kicked the ever-loving shit out of its Q2 earnings. But as it turns out the future for trading-powered companies could include a few quarters of slower results.And everyone wants to fund the next Coinbase. You can understand why. The

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.Our beloved Danny was back, joining Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris to chat through yet another incredibly busy week. As a window into our process, every week we tell one another that the next week we'll cut the show down to size. Then the week is so interesting that we end up cutting a lot of news, but also keeping a lot of news. The chaotic process is a work in progress, but it means that the end result is always what we decided we can't not talk about.Here's what we got into:A little URL to IRL update from Natasha, who just got back from an edtech conference.How one VC got hit by ransomware, and why stolen LP data could be a wake up call for investors.The crew chatted through some Cloud 100 numbers, and riffed for a minute on Figma, Gusto, and Mailchimp, companies all reportedly worth around the $10 billion mark.From the early-stage funding round side of things, we noodled o

This week we were back to full strength, with Danny Natasha and Alex joined by Chris to chat through the latest venture capital brouhaha. Namely whether or not venture capital is about to get shaken to its core, or if we're really parsing some long-term economic trends that will eventually revert.Here's a rundown:Sam Lessin kicked off the Twitter conversation by positing that venture capital as we know it is kaput, with software and later-stage investing possibly seeing the most disruption.Both Alex and Crunchbase News posted responses to the concept, which could best be summarized as yeah, but.However, the point that there is a lot of non-venture money flooding into startups is both real and material, and worth chewing on. So, masticate we did, parsing which areas of startup investing might be the most winsome for the VCs we spend so very much time talking to,The direction and future of the venture capital world has largely been lost amidst a sea of large numbers. New megarounds. New unicorns. That sort of t

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 me here.It's going to be a busy week, with a Samsung event and a host of earnings reports that we'll have to pay attention to. But more important there are a few stories still dominating the news cycle:Apple's privacy choices: The American hardware company's plans to scan iPhones for some illegal material is once again raising the issue of privacy versus safety.China's tech crackdown: The continued clampdown by regulators continued this weekend with Tencent once again under the spotlight.The American crypto regulatory push: This is still causing waves this morning as Congress works to pass a major bill that could include cr

Sara Spangelo's startup Swarm now has nearly 100 of its satellites in orbit, but the journey to get here has had plenty of challenges. After a track record that included working at Google X, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and plenty more, Sara realized with her co-founder Ben that including low-bandwidth network capabilities on tiny satellites was not only possible, but offered massive cost-savings vs. the usual way of doing things. But our talk focuses on the challenges of being a first-time founder and CEO, and creating a whole new business model.Links for this episode:SwarmSwarm’s low-cost satellite data network is now available to commercial clientsConnect with us:On TwitterOn InstagramVia email: found@techcrunch.com 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.

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex hosted a PR roundtable. Yep, our promise back when Alex Konrad came on the program to chat funding rounds is being fulfilled. Here's who joined us:Amy Widdowson, VP Corporate Communications at Zeno Group and newsletter writer extraordinaire Kelsey Cheng, PR Director at Walker SandsCreighton Vance, Media Strategist at Mission North and maker of musicWe had a few things to chat about, so we broke the show into a few sections: Today's PR world: The impact of COVID-19, burnout, what their work entails, and some tips for startups.The sheer pace of news today: The evolution of client expectations, managing clients themselves, and burnout.Tech vs. Media: We chatted content marketing, sharing details with the press, and why the media never shares drafts of stories before they go out.Frankly it was a very good time and a fun chat. Shoutout to our guests for arriving early and being very put together. May all podcast guests in the future learn from such efforts. One gu

Last week, Natasha and Alex jumped on Twitter Spaces to discuss the tale of two edtech IPOs: Duolingo, the consumer language learning company, and Powerschool, the enterprise K-12 software platform. It was a rare moment in the sun for the recently-revitalized sector, which saw two companies list on the NASDAQ on the same dang day.Special shout out to our producer Chris Gates for handling this impromptu live chat, tech difficulties and all, and bringing it to your ears on this lovely Monday. Don't forget that Equity is largely on break this week!Here's what we got into, featuring some edtech entrepreneurs nice enough to drop on by:China's edtech crackdown and how it is impacting startups both internationally and domestically. The regulations, one of which will force for-profit tutoring companies to turn into non-profits, are also getting the cold shoulder from U.S. edtech VCs, it seems.As Lightspeed Ventures investor Mercedes Bent so aptly put it, the news is somewhat ironic: "[T]he US edtech IPO market is on

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.We were a smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex together with Grace and Chris to sort through a week that brought together both this quarter's earnings cycle, and the Q3 IPO rush. So, it was just a little busy!Before we get to topics, however, a note that we are having a lot of fun recording these live on Twitter Spaces. We've found a hacky way to capture local audio and also share the chats live. So, hit us up on Twitter so you can hang out with us. It's fun - and we may even bring you up on stage to play guest host.Ok, now, to the Great List of Subjects:Robinhood went public! Yep, at long last, it is done. The company priced at $38 per share, the low end of its range, and had a medium-weak day of trading once it started to float. In short, Robinhood seems to have deftly priced its IPO, leaving zero fat on the table. So, it is now richer than ever, and public. More here.Ear

For our Wednesday show this week, Natasha and Alex Chris had prior Equity guest Phil Libin back for a chat. Libin was first on our show a while back to chat about his startup studio. But since then, he's been a little busy.You may recall that mmhmm, Libin's project to build a better video communication service, raised $100 million the other week. And we here on the Equity pod made a little bit of fun at the number. It was just so very much money for a roughly one year old company. What was the company going to use it for?Well, Libin's folks got in touch and so we decided to just have him on to chat. And we wanted him back because he was one of the most memorable guests on the show, frankly, thanks to his candor the last time around.So, what did we get into? A refresh on the mmhmm story, and notes from Libin about what's ahead for his company. It certainly has the cash to pursue its vision. But as we learned, building software for a variety of platforms comes with challenges. Challenges that are ameliorated by

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.Ever wake up to just a massive wall of news? That was us this morning, so we had to pick and choose. But since this show is about getting you caught up, we decided to focus on the largest, broadest new information that we could:Asian stocks were down, European shares are lower, and American equities are set to open underwater. Bitcoin had a great weekend, however.China's edtech crackdown continued over the weekend, with the country's ruling party setting new rules for online tutoring companies; they can no longer go public and will be forced to become non-profit entities. Chinese edtech stocks around the world f

We were smaller team this week, with Natasha and Alex together with Chris to sort through yet another summer frenzy of a week.This time around we actually recorded live on Twitter Spaces, which was a first for the podcast. If you missed it, it's probably because we didn't promote the taping since it was just an experiment. Good news, though, is that it went well, and we're going to some more live tapings of the show with the entire crew on the mics. Make sure to follow the show on the Big Tweet to ensure that you can come hang with us next week. We'll also do some Q&A at the end, if we're in good moods.Until then, let's live in the present. Here's what we got into in today's show:The blisteringly-hot EU startup market: You can raise money anywhere, but you might want to do it in Europe where VCs are putting a acre-feet of capital to work this year. Hours before the taping, Index Ventures announced a $3 billion trio of funds (and TikTok strategy?), basically solidifying our earlier reporting.The huge round

For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Natasha took a trip down memory lane to the great WeWork saga. We had WSJ reporter and author Eliot Brown on the show to chat about his new book, The Cult of We, written with his colleague Maureen Farrell. You can snag it here if you haven't already.Brown and Farrell were key reporting voices during WeWork's rise, and fall, covering the company's growth, hijinks, and demise.Recently, WeWork has filed to go public via a SPAC, bringing the co-working startup to the public markets years after it initially tried for an IPO. It will debut at a fraction of the value that it once commanded on the private markets.For fun, you can read the original WeWork S-1 filing here.The WeWork-SPAC deck is here.While we had Brown on the show, we took the time to dive into how he handled reporting the WeWork story, what his take is on today's startup market, and how the tech media in general can do a better job. It felt like a masterclass for journalists and founders alike, which we'd argue is E

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.It was a big damn morning, so we had to cut some stuff. Here's what we got into:Stocks and cryptos are off this morning, as inflation and COVID-19 concerns rise.Zoom is buying Five9. The deal is not super expensive, nor is it cheap. But given the huge percentage of Zoom's market cap that it represents, it's a serious wager from the video conferencing startup.Carlyle is buying LiveU for around $400 million. TechCrunch broke this news. The deal shows that private equity interest in startups that aren't unicorns.Robinhood dropped a new SEC filing this morning! That means we have a price range and valuation target t

The whole crew was here this week, with Danny and Natasha and Alex  together with Grace and Chris to sort through a very, very busy week. Yep, somehow it is Friday again which means it's time for our weekly news roundup.Here's what we got to in our short window of time:The Jianzhi Education IPO: We have questions. The Chinese edtech company is looking to list in the United States after Chinese regulators clamped down on Didi and other China-based, American public offerings. Bravery? Stupidity? Brilliance? It's hard to say, but we'll be watching.Zomato's IPO and the Indian tech scene: As Zomato puts the final touches on its impending public offering, we chatted about the listing and what it may mean for the larger, red-hot Indian startup market.The AI conversation: ZoomInfo bought Chorus.ai this week, which we had lots of say about especially in light of Gong's epic valuation. And Discord bought Sentropy, which also uses AI, albeit for a very different purpose. The great AI startup marketing push of years' pas