Equity

By TechCrunch, Rebecca Bellan, Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, Sean O'Kane, Theresa LoconsoloBusiness Entrepreneurship News Technology Business News

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Equity episodes

May 14, 2021Hundreds of SPACs waiting in the woods
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
The fully-vaxxed and officially fully-immune took over the podcast this week, with Natasha and Danny co-hosting the show while the inimitable Alex is out from Shot #2. Grace and Chris, as always, were behind the scenes making sure we sound pretty and don't fall down too many punny board game rabbit holes after vacation.
Here's the rundown of what we got into:
Crypto crashed - thanks to either Elon or the guy who created Ethereum and then donated some to relief efforts for COVID-19. We debated how signal gets lost and rediscovered and lost again in this news cycle, and what that means for anyone in tech trying to get a pulse of. what's actually happening.
One symptom of market craze and disconnected booms? A startup named Caplight that wants more people to buy and sell short positions on private startups.

We then pivoted into the last bit of our 'The World Is Melting' section to talk about home ownership and the slow stink of real estate stocks right now. Ontop of that, Better.com, a digital mortgage lender, decided to SPAC after reportedly tabling an IPO.

A mention of SPACs obviously opened up a can of worms, or should I say, oasis of woods.

The world might be melting, but Softbank could be having the last word. The Japanese conglomerate shut us up with its recent profits - proving Danny's point in an old EC piece (use code EQUITY for a discount).

We switched gears and talked about a neat new $20 million fund coming out of the Midwest, Sixty8 Capital, and its plan to invest in underrepresented founders.

The show ended as chaotically focused as it began with a round robin of the most interesting funding rounds of the last week, not limited to but including Blind's $37 million raise, The Last Gameboard's $4 million check, Just Women's Sports, and Morressier's $18 million Series A.
And that's where we break! Follow the podcast on Twitter, be kind to your humans, and be the kindest to yourself. Back sooner than you can raise a $25 million pre-seed round for an audio app for Dogecoin lovers.
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.

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34 min
May 12, 2021Duolingo swipes Tinder in a Clash Royale
For this week’s deep dive, Alex and Danny unpacked Natasha's latest project: The Duolingo EC-1. The 12,000 word four-part series was published last week and is worth a read. But, until you get to it, enjoy our podcast that doubles-clicks into its most interesting bits.
[caption id="attachment_2146587" align="aligncenter" width="482"]
Duo, Duolingo's mascot, flying around. Image Credits: Duolingo [/caption]
Here's how it went, after we got our morning allergy banter out of the way:
What's an EC-1? A TechCrunch-style deep-dive into one of the startup world's most promising, and interesting companies.
What's with the flying vermin up above? That's Duolingo's mascot. Which is a combination of hypercutness and modest menace. (You will have fun learning a language. Or the owl will visit.)
Why did we write about Duolingo? No, it wasn't only because Duolingo is edtech. Natasha dug into the company's product-led growth mode, and its views on gamification, which were fascinating.
What's up with today's show name? As it turns out, Duolingo has a Tinder angle. In fact, Duolingo leaned on some of the biggest companies out there when it came to design and monetization.
And as with all edtech companies, we talked monetization and outcomes!
The Duolingo EC-1 comprises four main articles numbering 12,200 words and a reading time of 48 minutes. Here’s what’s in store:
Part 1: Origin story “How a bot-fighting test turned into edtech’s most iconic brand, Duolingo” (3,300 words/13 minutes) — looks at how Guatemalan immigrant entrepreneur Luis von Ahn pivoted from fighting bot attacks on login screens with squiggly text to building one of edtech’s great success stories.
Part 2: Product-led growth strategy “The product-led growth behind edtech’s most downloaded app” (3,000 words/12 minutes) — analyzes the tactics and tradeoffs that an edtech company has to evaluate as it grows from thousands to 500 million registered learners.
Part 3: Monetization “How Duolingo became fluent in monetization” (2,800 words/11 minutes) — examines how Duolingo experimented with a variety of different business models to match its unique community, and why it chose subscription in the end.
Part 4: New initiatives and future outlook “Duolingo can’t teach you how to speak a language, but now it wants to try” (3,100 words/12 minutes) — explores how Duolingo is launching new business lines, their chances for success, and how the company is attempting to expand its main product from basic language fluency to mastery while adding speaking skills to the mix.
And of course, use code Extra Crunch "Equity" for a sweet, and perhaps the best, discount to access this story and all of our best stuff.
Until Friday!
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.

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19 min
May 10, 2021Equity Monday: Dogecoin is passé, but student notes are big business
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.
This weekend was all about memecoins. And I am sorry about that. But Equity doesn't run the world, sadly, it merely notes what is going on:

Dogecoin dropped during Elon Musk's SNL appearance. Which was somewhat ironic. Also there's another memecoin that is skyrocketing.

Palantir, DoorDash, Airbnb, Alibaba will report earnings this week, amongst others.

Clubhouse is finally coming to Android. In the United States. By invite. So, if that's you, congrats, welcome to the app.

A major cyberattack and ransom situation in the United States is a data point, yet again, that we're woefully unprepared for cyber risk.
StuDocu raised $50 million which was cool, while Gojek raised another $300 million, which was the very opposite of surprising.
This week's Extra Crunch Live is going to be really good. I will see you there!
It is going to be a busy week! Already since we recorded this show there's more drama from Box, and more. Strap in!
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.

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8 min
May 07, 2021If 12% is the new 30%, 4% is the new 12%
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
The whole team was aboard for this recording, with Grace and Chris behind the scenes, and Danny, Alex, and Natasha on the mics. We had to cut more than we included this week, which should give you a good idea of how busy the startup and VC worlds are of late.
Make sure that you are following the podcast on Twitter, where we post all sorts of memes and cuts and, perhaps, the occasional video here and there. That aside, here's the rundown:
Investing legend David Swenson passed away.
Twitter is buying Scroll (neat, very cool) as part of its subscription push, but also killing Nuzzel in the process (bad, very uncool). Natasha and Danny fill us in on why Nuzzel will be missed. Alex has thoughts on why Twitter-Scroll is good.
Epic bought ArtStation and cut its marketplace take rate. This is the future, says Danny, who throws his own estimates in, too.
Sony and Discord are tying up after the Microsoft-Discord deal fell apart.
Edtech is doing the edtech thing in which it raises money and consolidates, as shown by Kahoot's latest scoop.
A friend of the pod, Jomayra Herrera, is joining Reach Capital as its first ever outside-partner hire.
Uber is teaming up with Arrival for ride-hailing designed electric vehicles. We're pretty bullish on the idea. Also Alex likes to say "microfactories."
IVF startups are raising venture capital, and this time its Alife Health that we're talking about.
WorkBoard raised again. Alex once again made us talk about OKR-focused startups. He needs to get a life, and so does the rest of the Equity team which fought to do the transition into this segment.
To end, we spoke about Leda Health, a new startup focused on at-home rape kits for sexual assault survivors. It's a controversial company, and we discuss critiques and opportunities,
And that's our show! No private equity deal can slow the Equity team down, so we'll see you Monday!
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.

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34 min
May 05, 2021 The morality and efficacy of going public earlier
For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Chris dug into the world of the IPO. Not just the numbers and the metrics and the calculations of valuations at diluted, and non-diluted share counts. No. We wanted to talk about the morality and efficacy of going public.
So to round out our conversation we enlisted Steve Cakebread, the CFO of Yext and Garth Mitchell, the CFO of Latch. Cakebread is known for being aboard the Salesforce, Pandora, and Yext's IPOs. Mitchell has sat on both sides of the table during the IPO process, and is currently helming the money equations as Latch approaches the public markets via a SPAC.
For more context, Yext, a company that first launched at a Techcrunch event back in 2009, provides data tooling and search software to businesses, while Latch builds software and hardware for rental-focused buildings. Yext is public. Latch will be in a few months.
Back to our topic, we asked Cakebread to talk about his thesis on why going public earlier than later can help a company's maturity process and can help provide greater returns to the general public. The CFO has written a rather good book about the IPO process more generally and what it means for a company's internal processes, but his morality notes especially stood out because its an argument far less noisy than the POP critics. Baked beans comes up, somehow!
We also asked Mitchell to talk about Latch's choice to go public, and what opportunities and challenges the SPAC route brings for the company. Of course, there's a SPAC joke in there (or two), but we get into broader "what's next" debates about if more companies will start to leave the private world, venture capital's role in this whole mess, and the financial lift of going to the public market.
Hope you enjoyed the show, and get excited: Equity is going to have more guests on from time to time, and we welcome any suggestions you want to throw at us.
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.

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25 min
May 03, 2021Equity Monday: TechCrunch goes Yahoo while welding robots raise $56M
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.
This morning was a notable one in the life of TechCrunch the publication, as our parent company's parent company decided to sell our parent company to a different parent company. And now we're to have to get new corporate IDs, again, as it appears that our new parent company's parent company wants to rebrand our parent company. As Yahoo.
Cool.
Anyway, a bunch of other stuff happened as well:

Flywire, a Boston-based payments company filed to go public. More on the site about this shortly.

Earnings this week are coming from Uber and Lyft and PayPal and Square and more.

Dell is offloading Boomi to private equity as it wants to de-lever. Again.

Cloud market share numbers are out, but what matters is that the growth of the cloud market helps explain the growth that we're seeing in the startup game. (Our own Ron Miller dug into some rival cloud metrics here.)

The Chinese government's crackdown on its tech giants continues. And it's impacting valuations.

And Wealthsimple raised an epic CAD$750 million round, while Ohio-based Path Robotics just raised a $56 million Series B. Super cool.
We're back Wednesday with something special. Chat then!
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.

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11 min
April 30, 2021The second shot is kicking in
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
First and foremost, Equity was nominated for a Webby for “Best Technology Podcast”! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We’d appreciate it. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we’ll keep doing our thing and making each other laugh. (Note: we are in last place, which is, well, something.)
Regardless, the Equity team got together once again this week to not only go over the news of the week, but also to do a little soul searching. You see, some news broke yesterday, so we figured that we had to talk about it in our usual style. So, here's the rundown:

Do you want to buy TechCrunch? Apparently you can? Albeit probably along with a few billion dollars worth of other assets -- whatever is left of Yahoo and AOL -- you can now own an NFT. A non-fungible TechCrunch. What is ahead for us? We don't know. So if you do know, tell us. Until then we'll just yo-yo gently between panic and optimism, as per usual.

We also dug into the latest All Raise venture capital data, and the results were abysmal.
Next up was the news that fintech startups are setting records in 2021, raising more capital than ever before. That brought us to the latest from Brex.

And then there was a suspicious trend when three fintech companies focused on teen banking raised in one exhale. We talk Step, Greenlight, and Current.

Natasha talked about her last Startups Weekly post, in which she unpacked The MasterClass effect's impact on edtech.

And to close, we discussed the latest cool-kid venture capital funds. Sure memes are cool, but did you know that they can help you raise a $10 million fund? They can!
We are back Monday morning with our weekly kick-off show. Have a great weekend!
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.

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32 min
April 28, 2021In a room with no smart speaker, Alexa can't hear you scream
For this week’s deep dive Natasha and Alex and Danny and Chris dove into the world of audio. Sure, you've heard of Clubhouse, but there's lots more going on than just a single app's cultural rise. So from the biggest companies to niche startups, we compiled all the recent audio news into a single show for all our delectation.
Here's the rundown:
Facebook is building a number of audio products, including a Clubhouse clone and a short-form audio service that we think could be neat.
Reddit is also building a Clubhouse-like service, and Alex is excited about it.
It's not just the established social networks that are trying out live audio. Peanut, a social networking app for women, added live audio "Pods" to its platform. It kicked off a conversation on what it takes to win this market, and what's a smart versus silly bet.
While a drop in downloads doesn't necessarily mean a drop in active users, it's worth pointing out that Clubhouse's monthly downloads dropped 72% in March. Where is that gosh darn Android app?
And Alex explained why the Clubhouse-NFL deal matters for the company, as it could molt into something more akin to a platform over time.
Danny explained how Apple and Spotify are building paid podcast services -- more here, and here, respectively -- and we have thoughts about which service is being more fair with the money. Natasha tied in how sentiment around the creator economy might be driving some of these individual-friendly business models.
Alex brought up TWiT's new business model.
All told there's quite a lot of excitement around the spoken word. Which is good as Equity is a podcast? Right?
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.

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23 min
April 26, 2021Equity Monday: Social media crackdowns, earnings, and a funding deluge
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.
This weekend had a key story, earnings are on the way, and there is a huge number of funding rounds to talk about. Ready?
The Indian government's move to remove a number of social media posts critical of its handling of COVID-19 was the key news item this weekend. As the country's healthcare system buckles, and deaths spike, the move by the current administration to censor the Internet was just about as bad a look you could imagine. At least in terms of a tech response.
Also this weekend conversation continued about Substack's recent push to hire away well-known writers from traditionally-respected publications continued, with Insider reporting that six-figure offers to join the paid newsletter platform are the norm.
This morning we're focused on the impending earnings deluge. Major American tech companies, along with some key social media and ecommerce names will report, giving us a look into how tech companies performed in the first quarter of 2021. We already know that the venture market was hot during the period. How business fared, however, is less clear.
On the funding round beat, Mighty Networks raised $50 million, LEAD School raised $30 million, Kidato raised $1.4 million, StashAway stashed away $25 million, and Kyligence put together a $70 million Series D of its own.
The Honest Company also set an early IPO price range after we stopped recording. More to come on the IPO front. Chat Wednesday!
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
8 min
April 23, 2021No one is talking about remote work from space
First and foremost, Equity was nominated a Webby for "Best Technology Podcast"!!! Drop everything and go Vote for Equity! We'd appreciate. A lot. And even if we lose, well, we'll keep doing our thing and making each other laugh.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Chris got together to chat through the week's biggest news. And like every other week in recent memory, it was a busy one. But we did our best to hit some M&A news, some unicorn news, and some funding news from smaller startups.
Now, onto the show rundown, here's what we discussed:
The Discord-Microsoft deal is done, and Danny has a hot take. Namely, in his view, the deal was mostly banker chatter more than a real possibility. More chaff than wheat, in other words. Agree or not, we're stoked for the Discord IPO in a few years (quarters?) time.
Mastercard bought Erkata, and Danny was on hand to hand to explain why we care about the deal. Sure, it was $825 million in value, but some venture data from Finledger helped explain just how much capital is flowing into similar companies. Let's see how that math works out.
Clearbanc rebranded itself into a fintech unicorn, providing services along with sweet, sweet capital.
The UiPath IPO finally priced and started to trade. It had a good first day, and you can check out what we learned talking to its CFO here.
Over in China, a country that we've not covered enough lately, Laiye raised $50 million more. Like UiPath it competes in the RPA world.
Deel, for one, had a good 2020. It hit 20x growth in revenue last year, and recently raised at a $1.25 billion valuation.
And then we closed with two seed rounds raised by recent Y Combinator grads: Here's the Queenly round, and here's the Albedo deal!
We'll see you on Monday.
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
33 min

About Equity

From the publisher's feed

The intersection of technology, startups, and venture capital touches everything now. That’s why Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast, digs into the business of startups for entrepreneurs and…