Equity

Here's what Mary Ann, Alex and Kirsten got into: More layoffs at Divvy Homes: More cuts at a company that was once richly valued and heavily venture-backed. Rising interest rates are having a ripple effect across startup-land. Databricks is big, and now richer: With $500 million in a new Series I, Databricks is now worth more money and has fresh capital to continue working on AI. Lime, just go public already: What is profitable and private and a tease? Lime. Well, that last bit is a stretch, but really you can only ring us up and tout profits and growth so many times before we expect an S-1. More data is good: Venture capital firms, however, seem to disagree. If you want groceries in 15 minutes, here's where to live: Brazil, for one. Or India. Differing labor costs around the world appear to be the axis around which quick deliveries are feasible, or a financial mess. We are back next week for a busy run at Disrupt! We'll see you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we brought TechCrunch+ senior climate reporter Tim De Chant on to talk climate tech, hardware breakthroughs, and why we have a whole stage this year at Disrupt focused on sustainability. On that last point, perhaps you have gone outside recently. Extreme weather around the world, warming oceans, fires — it's a mess out there. That's the bad news. The good news is that a number of startups are working hard to build new technologies that could shoothe our struggling planet. And perhaps make a lot of money in the process. Here's what we got into on the show: Climate tech venture capital activity. Why aren't we seeing more capital despite some interesting activity. The question of fusion. Is it really around the corner (this time)? Why we're both excited about potential hardware breakthroughs, even if LK-99 was not the real deal. Dread about our changing world. Tim is not only a great journalist, he's also very good at the whole science thing, so he was a treat to talk to! We're back on Friday for our last recording before we're on stage at Disrupt! Talk soon. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's what we got into on the show today: Instacart IPO: We have a first price range for Instacart! And the company is going to take a roughly $30 billion haircut on the valuation it raised at back in 2021. Still worth north of $7 billion by our math , Instacart is set to raise a lot of money at a multi-billion price. Hard to get too worried about that. (Even more, the company's fully-diluted valuation range is, if we are doing our sums correctly, $8.6 billion to $9.3 billion.) Klaviyo IPO: Also taking a price cut is Klaviyo, which also dropped its first IPO price range this morning. It is taking a smaller cut in both absolute and percentage terms, but in aggregate the two companies show just how much room there is for 2021 prices to come down. What we worry about is what less-strong startups will have to endure, as Instacart and Klaviyo are both very healthy. Coinbase and India: Coinbase is not leaving India, contrary to reports. What it is doing is shuttering some accounts in the country. Crypto and regulation continue their long, and twisty path. Cheap, shared satellites: What raised $50 million and wants you to share a LEO satellite? This startup! Disrupt is literally around the corner and by that we mean next week! We'll see you there. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's what Mary Ann, Alex and Kirsten got into: Mentra wants to help neurodivergent jobseekers find ideal jobs: We love a startup that is doing good for itself and doing good for others. This deal that Mary Ann wanted to chat through seems to check both boxes. SimpleClosure raises $1.5 million: What happens if your startup dies, and you need to wind down? You might need a simple way to close things up, right? Enter SimpleClosure. Argo AI founders are building something new: What just raised more than $1 billion to take another crack at self-driving trucks? This company. All Things YC: You can find demo day favorites from day one here, and day two here. And, for an overview of sectors, here you go. EU x Regulation: We wrapped with a quick look at regulation from the EU that will impact a bunch of major tech companies. It led to a conversation of what sort of market regulatory structure is most conducive for startup growth. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While the Equity crew prepares for another Y Combinator Demo Day, we're throwing it back to when Natasha and Alex caught up with current YC Partner and Managing Director of YC Early Stage, Michael Seibel. The main question on the pair's mind was how is YC evolving to meet a changed market? Seibel doesn't often do press -- and neither does YC -- so the interview was used to connect the dots on news from the accelerator, cross check top trends from the 2022 summer batch and ask about some of the biggest critiques people have about the institution. We went a bit long, but figured it was worth it given the way the conversation was going. As always, we'll be back with our weekly roundup on Friday, and don’t forget that Equity is opening this year’s Disrupt. We’ll see you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's what Alex got into this morning: Earnings Season Never Ends: Gitlab, Asana, UiPath, Docusign, Rent the Runway and others will report this week. Crypto Down Bad: Prices for major cryptoassets are flat this morning, while the crypto venture picture is looking up to some degree. Arm Sets IPO Range: Shares of Arm are expected to sell for $47 to $51 per share, according to the company. The question for investors is whether to value the company on its trailing results, or future profits. More on the impact (or lack thereof) of Arm's upcoming debut can be found here. The Catalyst Fund: The Africa-focused venture fund has reached a first close, and intends to invest in climate-focused startups on the continent. Elon Musk Is Mad And to close out, a new Chinese semiconductor fund is potentially coming, while India wrestles with net neutrality. Don’t forget that Equity is opening this year’s Disrupt. We’ll see you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the show rundown: Teamshares: Here’s an interesting one. Teamshares has raised a lot of money and is buying a lot of SMBs. But that’s just the start. It also plans to allow employees of those companies to buy most of their stock over time, while serving up centralized fintech services to all its sub-companies. Who doesn’t love to chat about a new model? MoonPay’s new venture arm: Crypto payment infra company MoonPay is getting into the venture game, with a focus on crypto, gaming, and fintech. The union of those three is crypto games, of course, but we have two eyes fixed on what MoonPay decides to invest in. New crypto-thematic, or crypto-adjacent funds are rarer these days, making the MoonPay news exciting. Rent Butter and Kiki: Now that the zero interest rate period is over, and the experiment in building new iBuying and mortgage service startups has partially concluded, renting is hot again. And thus, so too are rental-focused startups. The IPO drought has lasted longer than you anticipated: Working off a Crunchbase dataset, Alex has notes on just how long we have been waiting for real tech IPOs. The good news? They are (partially) back! What happens when you bring lean startup ideology into the AI world? A lot of experiments, it turns out. And that is us until next week. Due to an American holiday, Equity will kick off on Tuesday next week instead of Monday! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex spoke to Anu Hariharan, who’s previously worked with a16z, sits on Brex’s board, and more recently has been investing in later-stage companies at Y Combinator. She's also working on something new. Hariharan recently tweeted about how "great" founders were successfully guiding their companies towards cash flow positivity. Since that very interesting post, both Instacart (a former Y Combinator company) and Klaviyo have filed to go public. And both have super strong cash flows. Our chat could not have come at a better time. We dug into how early- and late-stage startups should approach growth and cash conservation (in her view), the future of venture as an asset class, and how healthy the unicorn herd really is. We had a blast recording this one! Enjoy! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a small heads up, we had a bonus show over the weekend that is well worth your time! Alright, here’s what’s on the show this morning: Stocks are up around the world: A good note to start the week on, of course. In the meantime, the crypto market is still dragging. We’re back to minimal week-over-week price movements. Tech IPOs are back: After a drought that will be talked about for years, it’s raining tech IPOs again! Instacart and Klaviyo have filed their Form S-1s to go public, and we are busy digesting the numbers. On the Instacart front, read our first impressions here. In short, the company’s trailing performance is super solid, but the question is, how much it can scale total transaction volume in the future. We are still getting our boots on when it comes to Klaviyo, but the business seems strong. Is it the champion that software companies have waited for? We’ll have to see. More to come on the site later today. And Didi is selling part of its business to Xpeng. This is not the first time we’ve seen a ride-hailing company divest non-core assets. Don’t forget that Equity is opening this year’s Disrupt. We’ll see you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Why the extra edition? Because Battery Ventures dropped an interesting report on Gen-Z and we wanted to talk about it. Alex got Courtney Chow, a vice president at Battery and one of the report's authors to chat about it. You can read the report itself here. This is what we got into: The fracturing of culture: Gen-Z is large, and very diverse. The trend away from monolithic cultural primacy that began years ago has accelerated with the generation, making culture itself more personal, and more distinct. For startups, this means branding will become a different challenge if they want to reach this demographic slice. Everything is short-form video: Given massive usage of TikTok by Gen-Z and the popularity of other platforms that feature short-form video, we were curious how smaller companies can compete with incumbents that already have a Reels strategy, if you will. Ethical capitalism: One of the most interesting areas of the Battery report was its notes on how entrepreneurial Gen-Z is, and how diverse they are. Gen-Z also has expectations around goods and services they purchase relating to the actions of the companies behind the sale. So, if you want to sell to Gen-Z, you might need to care about climate change, for example. Now, that's officially it for us this week. Enjoy the rest of your weekend, and we'll catch up on Monday! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news. Here's what Mary Ann, Alex and Kirsten Korosec got into: Nvidia blew the doors off with its earnings report. We talked through some of the high-level numbers and marveled at the company's growth. TechCrunch has more on the matter here. Ramp raises $300M: In this market, a multi-billion-dollar valuation is a win for a fintech, even if Ramp's new price tag is a bit lower than it was previously. So, while Ramp likely doesn't love that it raised a down-round, it does have fresh capital and is worth $5.8 billion. That's simply not that bad. Lex raised $2.75M: Alex covered AI-powered writing tool's Lex seed round. Kirsten got to give the app a try, and we all had nice things to say about the nascent startup. Northvolt is bringing its volts to North America: The global battery-building boom includes Swedish company Northvolt building a new facility in the United States. The company raised $1.2 billion from BlackRock. Better.com went public: Mary Ann interviewed the company's CEO ahead of its SPAC-led public market listing, which got panned. In the transit world, Cruise got its wings clipped in San Francisco after an accident involving a fire truck. Alex is annoyed. Mary Ann is not. This year's TechCrunch Battlefield 200 companies feature a lot of startups focused on excrement. We're not kidding. That’s all from us this week. We are back Monday morning, chat then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Mary Ann spoke with Mercedes Bent, Partner on the early stage team at Lightspeed Ventures and co-lead of Lightspeed’s LatAm region and angel fund. The pair chewed through a number of topics, including: How and why Mercedes started investing in Latin America, and why she thinks the region is more resilient than others Why we're early in the hype cycle when it comes to the intersection of AI and fintech Why generative AI and fintech aren't always the best combination and much more. Equity is back on Friday with our weekly news roundup! Talk to you then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s the rundown from this morning, with real news from the crypto-front, and even a neat startup round to round it out! Stocks are up in most of the world, China apart. The Chinese economy is a real topic of conversation lately, mostly centered around concerns regarding credit appetite, debt levels, housing costs, and government activity. In the crypto-world, prices are sharply lower compared to a week ago, and Recur is no more. The partial retrenchment of Cruise in San Francisco is a bummer, but given how poor human drivers are here's hoping that progress doesn't slow on the self-driving front. IPOs are back? Kinda, maybe, and perhaps. The good news is that recent data from Instacart and Databricks indicate that we could see some filings soon. And to close out, Threads is coming to the desktop web while Enough put together a big round for mushroom-based proteins. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Mary Ann and Alex were joined by our regular guest host Kirsten Korosec. Here's what the gang got into: FTX's former CEO SBF is heading to jail: We struggled to find much pity for the former celebrity executive. Better.com is going public: After much controversy Better.com's SPAC merger is a go. The deal is a fundraising mechanism by our understanding, though we had a bit of a tough time coming up with a bull case for the company in the present moment. Monday.com's growth: Alex has kept tabs on the earnings cycle as always, which led him to write rather kind things about Monday.com's most recent quarterly results. In short, the former startup is posting quick and cutting its losses and generating lots of cash. What's not to like? Vinfast went public, and investors are stoked: Another SPAC deal for the list today is the Vinfast debut. Vietnamese EV company Vinfast is now worth more than many major auto companies, despite falling revenues and massive unprofitability. So what, says the market. The IRA turns one: The Inflation Reduction Act's impact on American manufacturing is big, and growing. Europe might have been irked to start, but it appears that fans of domestic production have found their champion. The fundraising market: To close out the show we chatted about Becca's recent article on new venture funds raised by women, and a quick look at the pre-seed market for all the founders out there. That's all from us this week. We are back Monday morning, chat then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex had Amplitude CEO Spenser Skates on the show to talk about the SaaS market journey since his company went public in late 2021, which happened to be right before investor sentiment changed. After a successful IPO, Amplitude warned analysts and investors alike in early 2022 that it was seeing some macroeconomic pressure, which led to its stock being sharply repriced. (That happened to most companies eventually, to be fair.) Since then, the digital analytics company has shaken up its organizational structure, launched new AI products, and has continued to grow while becoming cash flow positive. All that made Skates the perfect person to talk about: The current state of the business software buyer, and when Skates expects demand for digital goods and services to improve. When to charge for AI products, and when not to; also, the power of data moats in AI, and how they may be more durable than they are in other areas of SaaS. How to know when you have to cut staff. And, critically, how much Baldur's Gate 3 Skates has played so far. Equity will be back with our news roundup Friday morning! We'll see you then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the rundown from this morning: Worries about the Chinese economy dragged down Asian shares this morning; the equity picture was more mixed in Europe and the United States. Meanwhile, why is crypto so slow lately? What happened to price volatility? On the earnings front, we're looking ahead to Monday.com, Getty, Cisco, Bill.com and Palo Alto Networks this week. News that Anthropic is raising another $100 million got us talking about a few other AI rounds that are in the pipeline; the gist is that there is a lot of money flowing around AI startup-land these days. Indian electronics manufacturing is making real strides, Mastercard is buying some African fintech, and the better.com SPAC is a go. It's going to be yet another busy week, so strap in and let's go! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Mary Ann and Alex got into a mix of growth stories, and some less-than-winsome on the startups that are not having the best 2023: How Lula went frugal and set itself up for a massive up-round in 2023: Mary Ann's recent reporting on Lula was perfect Equity material as it dealt with capital in motion, and a quickly-growing startup. Even more notably, Lula is in the insurtech space, part of the fintech world that has had an up-and-down few years. Weights & Biases raises $50M: Back in the day if a startup raised a big round, and then a smaller round afterwards, we would have worried a little. Today's venture market feels a little bit different. So, MLOps startup Weights & Biases has added $50 million more to its coffers, and we didn't fret too much on the round coming in light compared to its previous tranche. Summing our views, anything ML and AI is hot today, and Weights & Biases is well known. This round was not a shocker. BlueJeans folds: Remember when Verizon bought a Zoom competitor during the pandemic? It seems that customers didn't, either. Sendy shutters, Proterra reaches for bankruptcy help: While insurtech and MLOps are showing vigor, Kenyan logistics startup Sendy is over, and an EV startup that went public via a SPAC is trying to shake up its accounting so that it can keep going. Not the best news, frankly. And we closed with the latest from WeWork (not so good) and its erstwhile bestie, SoftBank, which is getting busier with its checkbook again. What a strange week and one that went by so quickly. More on Monday! Talk to you then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Dominic-Madori Davis came back on the show to chat with Mary Ann and Alex about two of her latest pieces: A lawsuit targeting a grant program that provided small checks to Black women small-business owners. The context here is that there's a movement in the United States to curtail programs that seek to provide access, or opportunity to underrepresented peoples in business and education. Given venture's somewhat embarrassing investment demographics, we struggled to understand the seeming animus behind the suit. Some countries are taking a different track, including the United Kingdom. Dom has more on that topic here. Equity is back on Friday with our weekly news roundup! Talk to you then! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the rundown from this morning, which saw Alex catching up from a few days off last week: Earnings season is slowing down, while global stocks slip to start the week. Crypto is not doing too much to start the week, but do recall that Coinbase earnings came last week. Peak smartphone? In the wake of Apple earnings, questions linger regarding just what is ahead for smartphones and what could get that market moving again. Thankfully for Apple shareholders, the company has done yeoman’s work to build out a services and subscription business. Enough to compensate? Perhaps. A controversial privacy-Internet law in India passed. Triller’s IPO is going to be fun, though your humble podcast team have yet to fully dive into it. And, finally, how do you get a shareholder off your cap table while respecting their upside? Like this! We may be deep in Disrupt prep, but the show continues! We’ll see you Wednesday (and on day one, when Equity will kick off our major event in San Francisco)! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're bringing you an episode of our sister podcast, Chain Reaction. Chain Reaction unpacks and dives deep into the latest trends, drama and news in crypto with some of the biggest names in the industry to break things down block by block for the crypto curious. Jacquelyn interviewed Stu Alderoty, chief legal officer of Ripple Labs. Stu spent most of his career working for traditional financial institutions in legal roles at firms like CIT Group, American Express and HSBC and left that world in 2019 to join Ripple. Ripple has been around since 2012, but has been making headlines lately for the recent federal court ruling that stated the XRP token, which is linked to Ripple, is not a security when sold to the general public but can be treated as a security for past XRP sales to institutional clients. We broke down the nitty gritty details of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York federal court ruling for Ripple and what it means for the company, XRP token and crypto ecosystem. We also talked about: Securities vs. commodities Ripple’s SEC lawsuit Future regulation and clarity Advice for other startups Need to catch up before you listen? Read these for a quick overview: Federal court rules Ripple’s XRP token can be treated as a security… sometimes Ripple’s XRP case ‘underscores the need for regulatory clarity’ Chain Reaction comes out every other Thursday at 12:00 p.m. ET, so be sure to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite pod platform to keep up with the action. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex and Mary Ann had Sara Mauskopf on the show, the CEO and co-founder of the childcare marketplace, Winnie, and a former Postmates and Twitter denizen. Here’s what we got into: The progress of Winnie over time, and how it found its niche in the childcare market The state of care as a venture-backable category, and where startups can find the most impact and business results The reported issues at Papa and the pressures of fundraising-driven growth in care-oriented markets And, of course, why care work is not given its full due and value in our society. We had a blast with this one. Thank you for sticking with Equity for all these years. We’ll see you live at Disrupt! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s the rundown from this morning! Stocks are higher around the world today, but the real story in equities is earnings. This week we are going to hear from AMD, Uber, Pinterest, Shopify, PayPal and Block, Apple and Amazon, Alibaba and Airbnb, Coinbase and Cloudflare. It’s a lot. In crypto-land, things are muted, but it appears that the Coinbase-SEC lawsuit had a bit more behind it than we first realized. Tiger is out of Flipkart, selling its remaining stake to Walmart for $1.4 billion. The American investor did well on its Flipkart investment. Fidelity has cut the value of its investment in Gupshup, but remarked its Reddit, Discord and X investments up some. So, the news is not all bad. Twitter’s rebrand is a go on the App Store and the social app has a new tagline that we alluded to in today’s episode title, while Shein and Temu fight it out for global domination of the fast-fashion market. Whew! What a start to the week, yeah? For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We had our friend and colleague Kirsten Korosec on the podcast this week, meaning that Mary Ann and Alex got to stretch their legs a bit and talk things that move and beep and boop. Here's what we got into: Deals of the Week: AngelList bought Nova, taking the well-known venture service into the more traditional private equity realm; Waymo is focusing on self-driving cars instead of trucks, which has Mary Ann worried; and Alex wanted to talk about interest rates. On the subject of Earnings: Guess what? AI costs are here, AI revenues are coming as the ad market recovers. For big tech earnings thus far have generally gone well, though not perfectly. Do not miss GM news from the transit desk, of course! And we wrapped with some interesting analysis from the TechCrunch+ team on how funds of funds might be one way to get more LP capital into diverse venture funds. Whew, what a week y'all. It's hot and we are tired, but we had a blast recording this for you. Talk more Monday! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex had Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz on to chat about her upcoming book, Extremely Online, the history of online platforms, and the rise of creators. We've covered the creator economy a few times on the podcast over the years, but this addition to our historical coverage is more than worth inclusion. Here's what we got into: All the cool kids are pre-ordering Lorenz's book, which you can find here. Why online work has always been treated like a sideshow: While culture is often created -- or born -- online, there's a disconnect between historical centers of authority and influence, and where it's bubbling up today. The rise and fall of Vine: Vine's massive rise and later implosion is a technology story, a startup story, and the saga of how a platform's userbase and its leadership can often be on different pages. In a sense Vine was a warning of what we'd see later on when it came to platforms winding up at odds with the very folks driving attention their way. New formats, new platforms: It's worth understanding the progression of online influence shifting from text (blogs) to pictures (social media) to video (TikTok, et al). When new formats have come to the fore, they often bring new platforms along with them, or vice versa. Alex wanted to know what might be next! And we wrapped with quick notes about AI and Twitter, er X, whatever it's called. As always, we're back on Friday with your news rundown. Talk soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the rundown from this morning: Stocks are mixed around the world: Chinese equities sold off while American shares were set to rise at the open. A massive run of earnings this week should shake up the stock market for tech companies and their traditional brethren alike. In crypto-land, prices are back to where they were pre-XRP decision. I don't know what to make of that, but do know that Worldcoin is still a thing and is now actually out. Twitter's new brand: All hail X, I suppose. Musk's work to defenstrate what we all knew about Twitter, the company is being rebranded to X, which the company intends to be a superapp of sorts. Cool if it works, embarrassing if not. Spotify is finally raising prices, and all I can say is thank god. It was getting weird to get all the world's music for what felt like a song. I want to pay more making the price hike welcome, if still far smaller than it should be. SF really is the new AI hub. Ahead we have Disrupt, which is taking up more and more of my time. See you there! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's what we got into today: Deals of the Week: Layoffs at Cameo, where fintech valuations are today and where they are going, and Egnyte's slow-burn path to an IPO. The end of VanMoof: Raising a lot of money doesn't necessitate a startup's success. Such is the case with VanMoof, which raised nine-figures and built and sold e-bikes. Now it is no more, and we have questions. CEO turnover: As the CEO of OnlyFans steps down, the gang dug into when a CEO can or should step down. Certainly some companies do best, for example, with long-term leadership by a founder. But not all. Generative AI and the writer's strike: It turns out that we're bigger South Park fans than we knew as a group, but that's not really the point. What matters is that a recently released 'AI-generated' episode of the show is driving a conversation today concerning how critical — or not — humans are to the creative process. Google is also busy here. And that's the end of the week! Equity is back on Monday! Chat soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews foundersand more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, what happened in venture capital-land during Q2 2023? A lot, and not very much. We got PitchBook venture guru Kyle Stanford to come back on the podcast to riff with us on the good, the bad, and the late-stage. Here's what we got into: How did American venture perform in Q2 2023? Welcome to the new normal, and why that's actually bad news. How are Seed deals faring, and what about later-stage transactions? How bad is the slow pace of exits today, and what impact will they have on venture capital fundraising itself? More on the topic here. And, any green shoots popping up? Here's a rundown of what could be considered good news. You can read the underlying dataset we were riffing on here, and we are back on Friday with the news roundup! Chat soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s the rundown from this morning! Stocks are largely down around the world following weak Chinese economic data for the second quarter. We’re also heading back into an earnings cycle, so get ready to hear from Tesla and Netflix this week, among other major names. In crypto-land, the XRP/Ripple partial victory drove a short-lived boomlet for many crypto tokens; XRP is the clear winner from last week. Twitter is cash-flow negative, per its CEO, but the company intends to double-down on paying individual tweeters for their high-view activities. While Twitter molts, Threads continues to grow like a weed. Speaking of Meta, the company is in trouble in Norway. On the startup front, Intel invested in Figure, which we think is quite neat, and Thunes is now nearly a unicorn! We will be back on Wednesday and Friday. Talk to you soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's the rundown from Mary Ann and Alex: A new Chinese AI model had us wondering who is really going to win the AI war and whether governments will play a role — perhaps not the role that they are expecting. A founder that Founders Fund funded is now funding other founders at Founders Fund: Yep. Sticking to the venture theme, is it possible for AI models in venture to actually create a less biased landscape for entrepreneurs? Connetic Ventures thinks so! Two bits of good news: Tech layoffs have dramatically slowed, and slowing inflation could herald the end of interest rate hikes, which could bolster tech valuations. Or at least cut some of the pressure. Finally, as Twitter does what it usually does when a rival service takes off, we asked ourselves how other social media services are doing. We are more familiar with some than others. As always, Equity will be back for you bright and early Monday morning. Talk soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week we had a very special guest on the podcast: Matthew Lynley, one of the founding hosts of Equity and a former TechCruncher. Since his Equity days, Lynley went off and started his very own AI-focused publication called Supervised. We brought him back on the show to ask him questions in a format where we can all learn together. Here’s what we got into: From Transformers to GPT4: How attention became so critical inside of neural networks, and how transformers set the path for modern AI services. Recent acquisitions in the AI space, and what it means for the “LLM stack:” With Databricks buying MosaicML and Snowflake already busy with its own checkbook, a lot of folks are working to build out a full-stack LLM data extravaganza. We talked about what that means. Where startups sit in the current AI race: While it’s great to think about the majors, we also need to know what the startup angle is. The answer? It’s a little early to say, but what is clear is that startups are taking some big swings at the industry and are hellbent to snag a piece of the pie. Thanks to everyone for hanging out with us. Equity is back on Friday for our weekly news roundup! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s the rundown from this morning: The global stock market is looking mixed, with the leading piece of financial news dealing with inflation data in the Chinese market. On the crypto side of things, there are no massive price movements in key tokens to examine. That said, the NFT market has been turbulent in the last few days due to incentive changes as a key marketplace. An FYI: We are back in earnings season, but there’s little to report on the tech side of things this week. Expect the pace to pick up next week. Ant has a new valuation thanks to a choice to offer share buybacks to existing backers. It’s still worth nearly $80 billion, just a lot less than it might have been valued at back in its 2020 IPO that got scuttled. People like Threads: The new social service from Meta has reached the 100 million sign-up mark rapidly. More on threads here on the TC Podcast. In Startup-Land: FrontRow is shutting down in another blow to Indian edtech, while Propel raised $2.7 million to connect African tech talent to global employers. And that is our show! We are back Wednesday, and Friday this week! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're switching things up and bringing you two interviews this week, so let's niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. Mary Ann took the lead this time, and she sat down (virtually) with Immad Akhund, the CEO and co-founder of Mercury. For those who are unfamiliar, the fintech made headlines earlier this year for how it stepped in to help fill the business banking void left in the wake of Silicon Valley Bank's collapse. Here's what the pair caught up on: Mercury's impressive growth in the months since SVB crashed Lessons learned from Immad's angel investing experience What Immad calls the "Startup Death Spiral" and how to escape it As always, Equity will be back for you bright an early Monday morning. Talk soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long-time Equity listeners and TechCrunch readers should be familiar with LAVCA, and association of capital managers in the Latin America region. We have reported on its data a number of times. Well, it turns out that LAVCA is part of the larger Global Private Capital Association, which keeps tabs on a host of markets that we're working to cover more carefully as startup activity becomes an increasingly global phenomenon. So to cap off the second quarter, and to get our claws into what is going on around the world, we had Cate Ambrose, the CEO of the GPCA on the show to riff with us about Asia and Africa and Latin America and Central and Easter Europe. Here's what we wanted to find out: How wild was the 2021-era venture peak in less mature startup markets? How resilient are smaller startup ecosystems in a more conservative venture and macroeconomic environment? Are we seeing green shoots anywhere in the world? Or put another way, where is the rebound kicking off? We closed with a short discussion on the role of government in startup markets and squeezed in an AI question because how could we not! We have another interview coming your way Friday, so stay tuned! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Ann and Alex are back for another busy news week chock full of deals to chew through. Here's the rundown: Deals of the Week: We think that the idea behind the recently-funded Honey Homes is excellent, but we're split about the cost. We also went over Gusto's latest financial achievements and its plans to team up with Remote. Fintech M&A: The biggest deal of the week in fintech was Visa's purchase of Pismo. We haven't had unicorn-level acquisitions lately, so this one was welcome. Elsewhere in the space, Brex has brought on board a former SVB and a16z denizen, and Ramp bought Cohere.io (not this Cohere, the other one). Other M&A: But those weren't the only deals. Databricks bought MosaicML, IBM bought Apptio, and ThoughtSpot has acquired Mode Analytics. Help, my unicorn is starving: We closed with Alex's look at the declining funding to unicorn and web3 startups, as well as Rebecca Szkutak's latest on the secondary market in the process. Equity will be back on Wednesday as we head off into yet another holiday weekend here in the U.S. when Alex will finally put his PTO to use. In the meantime, let's catch up on Twitter @EquityPod. Talk soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotifyand all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single person, think about their work and unpack the rest. Mary Ann is taking over today's interview with David Vélez, the co-founder and CEO of Nubank, the $35 billion Sao-Paulo, Brazil-based digital bank that offers credit cards, checking accounts and life insurance to consumers. Equity listeners know that digital banking has been on our minds for some time now, so naturally we were excited to have David on the show. Here's what we got into: How Nubank has achieved -- and maintained profitability -- in this challenging macroeconomic environment How not only the LatAm fintech market differs from that of the U.S., but how founders in the region operate their businesses differently from their U.S. counterparts The state of digital banks in general and how David sees banking evolving in the next few years from the lens of both a founder and former investor (he once led Sequoia Capital's Latin American investments). Mary Ann and Alex are back on Friday with more Equity, but as always, you can keep up with us on Twitter @EquityPod. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here's the rundown for the very last Equity Monday of Q2 2023: Crypto's mini-boom in the last week comes after a brutal few weeks of negative headlines; for the crypto-faithful, it must be a breath of fresh air. Startups: IRL was a digital fraud, Vanta is a unicorn to watch after quick ARR growth and a resulting valuation has grown into, and TreasurySpring is riding a changing macroeconomic climate to rapid fintech growth. As Amazon pledges more investment in India, we're seeing a lot of other big economic pieces move. Other American companies are pledging big dollars to the country as Japan looks to buy one of its domestic chip companies, and American investors are putting capital into their own domestic silicon players. Finally, Apptio is selling to IBM for $4.6 billion. Whew! That's a lot, but we had a good time and will see you back here on Wednesday! All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Ann and Alex are back, and once again this week they tapped the TechCrunch roster for expert input. This week were lucky enough to have Kirsten Korosec back on the podcast. She's TechCrunch's mobility lead, hosts a podcast of her own, and is one of our favorite humans. Here's the rundown: Deals of the Week: Mary Ann wanted to talk about Robinhood buying X1, a deal that seemed inexpensive but we lack enough numbers for full confidence; Alex wanted to riff on Dropbox's new AI fund, even if it does feel a little small; and Kirsten had notes for the team on Cruise's latest app rollout. Even if Mary Ann and Alex cannot find a way to agree on self-driving cars, we all thought that the Cruise bus is cute. Twitch and Reddit try to balance corporate requirements with community power: Building off our recent show digging into the creator economy, the crew tackled the latest from Twitch (a new creator-corporate revenue split of sorts) and Reddit (where the battle between the company and its power-users continues to blaze). It's feeling more hot war than cold war lately on the Internet, with platforms struggling to find a way to keep revenue growth coming while not estranging the folks who make their services tick. The power of Not Boozing: How big is the market for non-alcoholic drinks? Smaller than the market for vodka, certainly, but we're curious. Also there's a new app in the market that is helping folks find non-booze bevies, which we dig. Before we let you go, don't forget to fill out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you! A big thanks to Kirsten for swinging by, and we'll chat with you Monday morning. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get started: all the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you! On today's episode, Alex had Eric Silver, Head of Creative at the podcast collective Multitude on the show to help us sort through: What the hell happened with Spotify's big podcast push, and its resulting layoffs. Why tech platforms have not yet found a way to make creative work lucrative enough to engender a new 'creator middle class.' The state of the ad market, and its impacts on creative work more generally. Towards the end we had a moment to comment on AI, but we kept that somewhat far from our central theme. Long-time Equity listeners will recall that we've covered the creator economy a few times on the show and the blog, including: Yeah, funding for creator-focused startups is drying up [blog] F*ck creator funds, we need a creator index fund [Equity] Not every creator economy startup is built for creators [blog] And if you need even more, this investor survey from 2021 on all things creator-economy is a great look-back in time! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This time 'round we are here on a Tuesday due to an American holiday! Here's the rundown from Alex: Stocks are mixed the world around as central banks tinker with interest rates to try and tune their domestic economies. The crypto world remains muted. Alibaba's shakeup: The CEO of the Chinese tech conglomerate is leaving that role to run its cloud business, which is one of the pieces of the company that will be spun out. Intel managed to extract a handsome package from Germany in exchange for building a plant in the country. OpenAI is working to limit the impact of EU AI regulation on its products and services. No one wants to buy Tiger's startup stakes en masse, so it is reduced to selling loosies to anyone who wants them. Go-Ventures is now Argor Capital, and it has a new $240 million fund. And funding rounds from Yellow and ElevenLabs as Byju's cuts more staff. Don't forget, all the cool kids are taking our listener survey. Head here to make your voice heard! We are back bright and early tomorrow. Talk soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All the cool kids are filling out the Equity listener survey. We want to hear from you! It was a hectic week, with little in the way of the traditional Summer Slowdown making itself known. So, here's what Alex and Mary Ann covered with some help from our dear friend Jacquie Melinek: WWDC in a nutshell: In case you missed it, Apple had a big event this week. On tap were the usual run of software updates, and improved computers in both laptop and desktop format. And, you know, that other thing. Affirm partners with Amazon (again): This is not Affirm's first tie-up with Amazon, but investors are pretty excited that the pair of companies are once again linking arms. As we continue to wait for mega-unicorn Klarna's IPO — more notes here — we are keeping our ears close the BNPL ground. Cava's IPO continues to delight Alex: What has an IPO coming up and has this little podcast in a tizzy? Yep, it's Cava, the fast-casual chain that, thanks to a dollop or two of venture capital money, we get to cover! All things SEC and Crypto: The SEC broke into its hammer closet so that it could go play whack-a-mole this week with crypto exchanges both foreign and domestic. Sequoia does to itself what regulators want to do to Google: What has three parts and is now competing with itself? Sequoia. Think of it like an inverse Google, if you will. How real estate will affect the climate crisis: It turns out that construction is not so good for the planet. And with a commercial real estate crisis brewing, can we add one to one and get five? Next week, Equity is on vacation! We're taking a breather before launching into another massive run of shows, but we'll be back before you know it. For episode transcripts and more, head toEquity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us onApple Podcasts,Overcast,Spotifyand all the casts. TechCrunch also has agreat show on crypto, ashow that interviews founders, one thatdetails how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, we had Carta CEO Henry Ward on to chat through the early-stage market with us. Alex had a grip of data and a sheaf of questions, so here's what we got into: The current state of the early-stage venture capital market: From Ward's perspective, the early-stage market is in better shape than many folks think. It's the later-stages of venture capital that are the most moribund. We also riffed on the quality of startups that are raising today, and how much pain is coming for young tech companies that can't quite attract more capital. Carta's new Seed and Series A product: Carta is offering a mostly-automated method of closing early-stage rounds; we wanted to better understand the economics of the effort, and what the unicorn hopes to achieve from the work. We closed with a look ahead, and a series of fun closing questions with Ward. That's just the high-level summary. We also discussed entrepreneurship more broadly, the importance of LLCs, and even how to construct a podcast interview. Don't forget: our listener survey is back! Take a moment to let us know what you want more of, what you want less of, and how we can make this the kind of podcast you want to come back to every week. Chat soon! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here’s what Alex got into today: Stocks are mixed around the world this morning while crypto stays pretty flat. Earnings this week that we’re excited about include Gitlab, Couchbase, Yext, Smartsheet, and Hashicorp. (We’re also keeping an eye on the Atomic Wallet hack.) Reddit’s proposed API changes (charges, more like) are having a pretty big impact on the service’s userbase; there are calls for a blackout of certain forums in response to the proposed updates. Reddit, on the other hand, is a business and needs to make money. Sticking to social media, news broke this morning that Twitter’s revenues are down sharply compared to year-ago totals, at least when we consider its American advertising incomes. Twitter does more than just ads in North America, but given that it’s likely a pretty big chunk of its total top line, it’s not good news. Canva’s valuation was slashed by a mutual fund (something that we have seen a lot lately), the latest in a string of similar headlines for other unicorns. Closing, WWDC is today. Get. Hype. Don't forget: our listener survey is back! If you can, please take a moment to let us know what you want more of, what you want less of, and how we can make this the kind of podcast you want to come back to every week. Equity will be back on Thursday this week, but in the meantime, you can catch us on Twitter @EquityPod. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Ann and Alex were a busy pair this week, so much so that they tagged in Dominic-Madori Davis from the TechCrunch+ crew to help out. Before we kick things off, our listener survey is back! If you can, please take a moment to let us know what you want more of, what you want less of, and how we can make this the kind of podcast you want to come back to every week. Now, here's what we got into: Fraud is bad: Elizabeth Holmes is in jail, and the SEC wrapped insider trading charges against a former Coinbase staffer. Our take? Breaking business law is bad and perhaps people should not do it. Controversial, we know. Deals of the Week: Alex is enamored with Web Roulette, while Mary Ann wanted to talk about Stripe's deal to buy Okay. Klarna's Q1 2023 results led Alex to share some enthusiasm that the fintech market could be rebounding, a topic that he's been going on about for some time. QED's plans to invest its new funds carefully is a clear example of the new investing climate, Mary Ann argued. The show also touched on our latest check-in on the a16z early-stage strategy. And we closed, thanks to Dom, with a chat through the Atlanta startup scene in advance of our upcoming City Spotlight. Equity will be back on Monday, but in the meantime, you can catch us on Twitter @EquityPod. And for the early-stage founders out there, don’t forget to apply for the Startup Battlefield 200 cohort at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Mary Ann hopped on the mic with number one New York Times best selling author, producer, personal finance thought leader, and host of the Women & Money podcast, Suze Orman. We’re following up on Suze’s not-so-surprising-startup debut with SecureSave, what the company’s been up to and how Suze is thinking about protecting employees in today’s economy. Here’s what we got into: How little money many Americans have saved for emergencies and how SecureSave wants to change that How inflation may be making it harder for people to save when they have less money to do so We ended, as always, with a “lightning” round Q&A in which Suze revealed her secret weapon for success For the startup founders listening, today is your last chance to apply to the Startup Battlefield 200 at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023! Fill out those applications while you still can, and Mary Ann and Alex will be back Friday to close out your week with a special guest. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, crypto prices are static, unlike a particular valuation and Alex is still mad about SPACs. Here's the rundown: Stocks around the world are happy that America is once again going to avoid a default; congrats, United States. At the same time, the crypto market is a bit boring right now, due in large part to muted trading volumes as the crypto winter tests new low temperatures. No one knows what Byju's is worth, but Blackrock is marking its price in one consistent direction. Serve Robotics is having a good run as a startup, partnering up with its prior parent company. The WSJ has some great data on SPACs that drove us nuts. Whew. What a way to start the week! We are back tomorrow! For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mary Ann and Alex were a dynamic duo this week, and here's what they got into: The fascinating backers of Checkmate, and the future of online shopping: Mary Ann covered a very interesting Series A for Checkmate, a startup that not only has shown real legs on the competitive App Store, but also on social media platforms far and wide. Cava's IPO won't save the IPO market, but it could help all the same: Alex is so IPO-deprived that he's drawing connections between anything that files and the startup market. This time it's not even that much of a stretch! Daylight calls it quits: From the 'not a huge surprise' category comes the end of Daylight, a neobank aimed at the LGBTQ+ market that has been struggling for a while yet. This begged the question are themed neobanks going to make it? Layoffs, Layoffs, Layoffs: Soundcloud is cutting staff to get to profitability, which we can understand. Meta is cutting staff because it, well, wants to conserve capital for more share buybacks? Anthropic's massive funding round and who is going to win the AI war? When is $450 million not that much money? When you are building foundational AI models that are taking on OpenAI and others. Also in this section: Cold War metaphors. And with that, we're heading off into a holiday weekend here in the US, so Equity will be back next Tuesday. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex sat down with GGV Capital's Jeff Richards, an investor who has perspective on the last venture boom and the resulting dénouement of that particular saga that we've been covering since the end of 2021. Richards has been an investor since 2008, so he's seen a business cycle or two, which convinced us that he'd be the perfect person to discuss the diverging fates of late-stage startups. Here's what we got into: The idea that all unicorns are in trouble is wrong; some late-stage startups got it right. What this means for some eventual IPOs, and for those that didn't, likely some liquidations as well (some examples here, but the list is longer than that post outlines). We also talked about the existence of unifying characteristics at late-stage startups that are doing well, and how to note early signals that the venture climate is about to molt. As always, Equity will be back on Friday with your weekly news round up, but until then, you can catch us on Twitter @EquityPod For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we are talking about Meta’s latest fines, what’s new in chips, and a few startup rounds that caught our eye! Stocks aren’t moving too much this morning, which could change if the American government voluntarily defaults over some bullshit. Crypto hasn’t moved too much lately, though we are keeping tabs on overall trading volume. Meta was hit with a record fine over how it handled EU user data. Data residency is a big deal and will likely crop up in future conversations concerning generative AI models and where they source their own data and from whom. China has banned some Micron products, irking the United States. The two economic powerhouses are working to distance themselves from one another in key technology areas. Elsewhere in chip-land, Applied Materials is investing in the United States and there are labor concerns regarding the sheer number of chips projects kicking off here at home. Patient21 raised a massive round for its software-and-services healthcare business, while Infinite Uptime raised more money for its “predictive maintenance solutions for machinery.” Whew! And that’s just the start! See you back here Wednesday for more!For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week Mary Ann, Becca, and Alex gathered to chew through the biggest news of the week. Here’s what the gang got into today: Vice goes bankrupt: Now is not a great time for media companies. The advertising market is in the toilet, layoffs are rampant, and the end of Vice is like a cherry atop a trash sundae. Mary Ann points out during the show that some operational difficulties were at play at the company. Here’s a real unicorn death for us to stare at. Deal Dive: AI. AI coaching. AI human relationship coaching? It’s a thing, and whether or not it is the future, we have questions. Freshly-Nestle: How often do you see a venture firm sue an acquirer? Not very often. We dig into the what and why of the Freshly suit. Why is Musk buying other companies? What do you do if you buy a company and fire most of its staff? You buy a tech jobs platform, it turns out. NewLimit and the limits of life: NewLimit is a company that Alex likes. Why? Because he doesn’t want to die before he can go to space. Mary Ann and Becca noted that the company’s setup is more than non-traditional. For NewLimit, the proof will be in the pudding. What’s ahead for venture debt? Becca’s work on the venture debt landscape has been critical reading since the SVB crisis unfolded earlier this year. Her latest venture survey helped us understand where founders will be hunting up capital in the back half of 2023 and beyond. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, Alex spoke to two guests from the world of Microsoft for Startups - GM, Hans Yang, and Senior Director, Tom Davis. We're working to figure out how big tech corporations are playing in the startup sandbox, starting with the launch of Microsoft's Pegasus program. Here's what we got into: Why programs like Pegasus are particularly helpful for startups in a conservative VC market The mutually beneficial relationship between the large tech players and startups The close relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI As always, Equity will be back on Friday with your weekly news round up, but until then, you can catch us on Twitter @EquityPod For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7:00 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders, one that details how our stories come together and more! 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices