Equity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week was a treat. Not only did venture capitalist Annie Lamont join our own Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, and Alex Wilhelm, we also recorded this episode live at SaaStr, a yearly SaaS-focused confab in San Francisco.

Happily for us, though not happily for your 401k, the markets took a massive dive and wound up bouncing SaaS stocks right as we were prepping the episode. Perfect fodder, if you will, for the moment.

What the market's chop means in practice is that quite a few companies that went public last year took hits while this year's IPO list is just getting itself together. Will the market turbulence impact private-market investment? Lamont votes no, given that the upward swing was only so impactful.

Scooting along, we noodled our way through the Big Cash Return Cycle, in which a host of tech giants may bring home hundreds of billions of cash. What will they do with it? Well, that's the new game. Will they buy a host of smaller tech companies? We tried to figure it out.

All that and we looked into the crypto meltdown (sorry for the jokes), and the news that Slack now has a CFO. Which can also be spelled "IPO."

This week Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm were joined by General Catalyst's Steve Herrod, who helped us dig through the week's biggest news.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week the crew — Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley, Alex Wilhelm — were joined by Barrett Daniels, the CEO of Nextstep Advisory, an IPO shop that helps companies go public.

Guess what we talked about?

Yes, we went back through the biggest debuts of 2017, several of the quiet hits and the laggards. We also answered critical questions like "what was the worst IPO of 2017?" (For more results, check the spreadsheet here.)

And, it being our holiday episode, we played a bit of what if. Or what may be, looking into 2018. After all, some IPOs that we expected to see have yet to appear (Vice, Pinterest, Dropbox), while some have cropped up before we thought that they were probably fully-cooked (Snap, Blue Apron).

This week we turned our eyes to Stitch Fix's first-ever earnings report as a public company. As you may recall, we've spent time on the Stitch Fix IPO given that it drove a bit of disagreement regarding if, or if not it was a success. The firm's financial miss but market disappointment in its financial report did little to quell the discussion.

Moving ahead, the stock market is doing something silly that we wanted to touch on. Back in the dot-com boom, non-tech companies would boost their share price by adding ".com" to their name. Billy's Mega Roofing.com, for example, and so forth. We're back to that again, but this time it's blockchain that companies are stapling to their name tags, in hopes of attracting bitcoin bulls to their equity.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself — Alex Wilhelm -- were joined by Eric Liaw from IVP to dig through the pre-Christmas news.