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

March 29, 2021Equity Monday: Deliveroo, ServiceTitan, and Robinhood for everywhere
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 fun mix of news, including some early-stage and late-stage startups entries, along with the latest from the public markets and the great IPO game. Here's the rundown:

ServiceTitan's vertical SaaS success was enshrined in its recent funding round and valuation. Both of which were predicated on its revenue growth. The software market is just gigantic. It's kinda crazy.

Deliveroo's IPO has hit market chop as it looks to price. Governance and how it treats workers were among the concerns that investors have raised.

And then Chinese company BiliBili struggled during its Hong Kong IPO, while Chinese company Zhihu fell after debuting in the United States -- could the public markets bet ratcheting back their interest in tech stocks?

On the funding round side of things, Ajaib extended its Series A, Singular announced its fund, and Cazoo is going public via a SPAC.
It was a lot, but when have we started the week anything less than fully behind? 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.

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9 min
March 26, 2021You can only invest if you promise not to read the fine print, ok?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. News was right back up to a dull roar this week, so we did our best to trim and hone and just bring you the most important things.
Here's the rundown:

David Dobrik stepped down from Dispo, the photo-sharing app he co-created, this past week after allegations came out about him. We talked about the venture capital angle, since early-stage investors in the app reactively distanced from their investments. Could this set precedent or have a chilling effect on celebrity-startups?
Robinhood filed privately to go public! So, it's happening everyone. At long last, one of Silicon Valley's hottest companies is kicking off its IPO process. We're hype, you're hype, and we had some jokes.
And in other mega-unicorn news, it appears that Microsoft is tempted to plonk down $10 billion for Discord. Why, you ask? Well why not. It's just $10 billion from Microsoft's $1,780 billion valuation. Or around half a percent.

Sticking to the $10 billion-and-greater category, Plaid could be raising $600 million at a valuation of $10 billion to $15 billion. That's a lot of money. Danny, however, has some doubts.

Also, Plaid has announced the inaugural cohort of its FinRise accelerator, a program focused on helping fintech startups led by underrepresented founders.

And then there were a few rounds to chat about. Namely the intensely interesting Bevy deal, and Ro raising $500 million at a $5 billion valuation.

And to wrap, Natasha and Alex shared their favs from TechCrunch's massive Y Combinator demo day coverage. Which you can read here, and here.
Let's all get some rest!
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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33 min
March 24, 2021Equity Crowdfunding is making the private markets public
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
For this week’s deep dive, the Equity team brought on Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia and Hustle Fund General Partner Elizabeth Yin to talk about equity crowdfunding. It’s been about a week since the SEC increased the equity crowdfunding cap from $1.07 million to $5 million, creating the perfect opportunity to go beyond the dollar amount and understand how the change impacts founders, venture capitalists, retail investors, and future fund managers.
Here’s a brief rundown of the show:
We talk about the basics of this new SEC regulation, and understand which platforms might be leading the pack for these bootstrapped campaigns. Indiegogo’s founder wrote an op-ed grading the new regulations on the site.
Some banter on Gumroad’s 12-hour campaign that led to a successfully crowdsourced $5 million for the company. Lavingia talks about his decision to crowdfund a round in his company, why it made sense for the company, and what it will take to make this raise mainstream.
Of course, Yin shared a ton of helpful nuggets around crowdfunding, providing a venture capital perspective that was still bullish on growing the amount of check-writers in the ecosystem. Some recent equity crowdfunding campaigns have shown that there are thousands of individuals willing to fund the enterprises they want to see succeed. Juked.gg is one such example.
There are also notes on the Testing the Waters dynamic that could usher some wiggle room to early-stage founders thinking about this.
Will equity crowdfunding supplant venture capital, or will it merely augment it? Our discussion leads us to ponder both possibilities. What seems clear is that equity crowdfunding could widen the band of companies that are "backable," if not the band of companies that traditional venture capital players find enticing.
And we end with a whole bunch of meta debates, from the role of the platform in vetting campaigns. As with every innovation, including crowdfunding itself, there will be fraud and failure. But if there will be enough bad news to limit consumer interest is far from certain.
This is one of those nerdy topics that gets us really excited about the future of dollar allocation and startup creation. We hope you love the show and leave with a better understanding of what’s ahead.
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
34 min
March 22, 2021Equity Monday: Deliveroo sets IPO price range as we gear up for Y Combinator week
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.
If you are paying attention to Y Combinator's demo day this week, our primer is here. And our Friday news roundup is here. With that, let's get into the news:

Ironsource is going public via a SPAC. It's worth even more than eToro, which is also going public via a SPAC. It's a big quarter for Israeli tech.

Sivo is a hot startup that you're going to hear more about. Also a lesson here for founders, if you want attention, share numbers.

Deliveroo has a price for its IPO, and the company could be worth as much as £8.8 billion. Even more, the European delivery giant has seen huge demand gains thus far in 2021.

On the month front, Nuvemshop has raised $90 million, M Capital Management has raised $30.85 million for a new fund, and Aldea Ventures has raised a €60 million investment vehicle.

Remember Dispo? The hot photo-taking service? Read this.

And finally. Happify Health has raised a $73 million Series D, while Clarify Health has put together a $115 million round of its own.
Coming Wednesday we are digging into equity crowdfunding. Which is going to be hot shit. Get ready.
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
9 min
March 19, 2021Forget medicine, in the future you might get prescribed apps
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. This time around we had whatever passes for a quiet week as far as news volume. But that still meant we had to cut stuff and move the rest around. But, once we got done editing the notes doc down, here's what was leftover:
Snap acquires Fit Analytics, a fitting technology startup: A far-past TechCrunch Disrupt alone has found a new home inside of the LA's social leader. No price on this one, but a fun thing to talk about all the same.
eToro is going public via a SPAC (cool), and as it competes with Robinhood it gave us a chance to dig into the market. And frankly there's a lot to like about eToro. And thus Robinhood? Probably.

The co-founder of Siri and a scientist have teamed up to create Riva Health, a software solution that hopes to turn your phone into a blood pressure monitor accurate enough for clinical use.

Copy.ai raised $2.9 million, a round that Alex would not shut up about because of GPT-3. More on that tech here.
The future of cannabis is in the hands of retail shops, or at least thats what Dutchie, a Bend, Oregon-based startup, believes. The cannabis management startup raised $200 million at a $1.7 billion valuation this past week.

Airtable raised another round. A huge one. Again. This time it was $270 million at a $5.77 billion valuation. How much more money could it need? Who knows!
Squarespace, everyone's favorite podcast sponsor, has raised $300 million at a steep, $10 billion valuation. The news broke nearly two months since Squarespace filed confidentially for IPO.

And we closed on how unequal the venture capital world really is. It's super embarrassing to report on, but knowing the numbers is better than not. So we wrote about it.
The show wraps with a teaser for next week that we won't spoil here.
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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30 min
March 17, 2021 Pregame Y Combinator with Equity
This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This is our sweet spot: going beyond definitions and into the dirty and deep impact of how a phenomenon could impact startups and tech. We are hoping to explore more than answer, and debate more than agree.
This week we're riffing on the impending Y Combinator demo day class, all hailing from the Winter 2021 cohort. As we stated on the show, we're not saying that these are the only startups worth looking at. They're simply the startups from the batch that TechCrunch has already covered, and some other favs from our eyes and those of a few investors.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
25 min
March 15, 2021Equity Monday: Stripe's epic new valuation, Deliveroo's IPO, and WeWork numbers
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 — and make sure to check out Friday's news-roundup with Danny and Natasha that included some neat notes on search startups. And their chances against Google.
So, what did we chat about this morning? Here's the rough rundown:

Stripe! Stripe raised new money at a new price and both were rather large. Would you believe that Stripe is still not public? It isn't! But it should be. Perhaps this is the last time it will raise before listing.

Also from the recent past, Megvii filed to go public, and Nimble Robotics raised.

The Deliveroo IPO is happening, and the £1 billion raise could value the company at £5 billion, Reuters reckons.

Oh, and TechCrunch has the most recent WeWork numbers.
DeepSee.ai raised a Series A, and we have questions about its product -- and hopes.
Centrical also raised for its hybrid working software, which could come in demand after COVID ends.
Extra Crunch Live this week is Emmalyn Shaw from Flourish Ventures and Adam Roseman from Steady. That's March 17th at 12 p.m. PDT and 3 p.m. EDT. See you there!
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
10 min
March 12, 2021Can you beat Google with Google's brains?
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Like every week, we had to leave a lot of great stuff on the cutting-room floor. But, we did get to touch on a bunch of news that we feel really matters.
Also we do wind up talking about a few Extra Crunch pieces, which is where our deeper analysis on news items lives. If the paywall is a bother, you can get access while saving 50% with the code "EQUITY."
Here's what we got into:

Crypto-art and the NFT boom continue. Check out what Beeple just did. Danny has an opinion on the matter.

The Roblox direct-listing does very little actually solve the IPO pricing issue. That said, well done Bloxburg.
We talked about the Coursera S-1, which gave us the first financial peek into an education company revitalized by the pandemic.
The numbers needed context, so our follow up coverage gives readers 5 takeaways from the Coursera IPO.

Language learning has a market, and it's big. We talked about Preply's $35 million raise and why tutoring marketplaces make sense.

Dropbox is buying DocSend, which makes pretty good sense. Even if the exit price won't matter much for bigger funds. We're still witnessing Dropbox and Box add more features to their product via acquisitions. Let's see how it impacts their revenue growth.
Zapier buys Makerpad. We struggled to pronounce Zapier, but did have some notes on the deal and what it might mean for the no-code space.
Sticking the acquisition theme, PayPal bought Curv. If you were looking for more evidence that big companies are taking crypto seriously, well, here it is.

And to close we nerded out about Neeva. Can a Google-competitor take on Google if it was founded by ex-Googlers?
The show is back Monday morning. Stay cool!
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
31 min
March 10, 2021 NFTs are changing cultural value creation
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down and focus on a single topic, or theme. This is our sweet spot: going beyond definitions and into the dirty and deep impact of how a phenomenon could impact startups and tech. We are hoping to explore more than answer, and debate more than agree.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, is this week's topic! This is something that you have nearly certainly heard of in the past few weeks but probably don't understand with perfect clarity. While we've all seen the Twitter threads of basic definitions, consider this episode the appetizer to your aperitif understanding.
The Equity team put on our research caps, dug in, and found quite a lot to like. But we did not tread alone: our EIC Matthew Panzarino joined Chris and Alex and Danny and Natasha to help us out. Panzer was early to the NFT world and has contributed some of TechCrunch’s reporting on the matter.
So, what did we get into? More than a little:
We spent a few minutes on the NFT basics, including historical examples and how NFTs are minted, as well as some examples of how they have been used recently.
From there we riffed on use-cases more broadly, and where we might find NFTs in the wild. Sure, we talked about visual art, but also music, tickets and sports moments. The NFT world has the possibility of a large remit if it plays its, ahem, tokens correctly.
Then we talked culture. What could it mean that NFTs are in the market? Could residual incomes from the reselling of NFTs constitute a material revenue base for future artists, and how broad can the value-experiment go? Depending on which side of the NFT hype-cynicism divide you land, there’s plenty of room for discussion. A point made by Panzer:
NFT's and the architecture of smart contracts and the way that social tokens work, these are all opportunities for the creators and originators of culture, to finally take part and participate in their rewards of the platforms of that culture -- you know, that hosts that culture. Because we've seen it over and over again: Artist blows up on TikTok, and you know, somebody does a dance to them, and then that video blows up. What does the artist get out of it? Sometimes they get a recording deal. Many times they get nothing. Right? In Vine, famously built on Black creators and brown creators and Latino creators and Latino creators. You know, TikTok, very much the same. Black Twitter one of the early driving forces of engagement on Twitter and culture on Twitter -- how many of them were actually able to participate in the economic rewards of Twitter as a platform selling advertising and making millions of dollars and their stock going bonkers? Besides, of course, you know, maybe they were able to purchase stock, right? So the, the remapping of how creators can participate in that economy directly by saying, “Hey, I've created something of value, and I'd love to connect directly with the people that enjoy that and they can provide me value back” -- that’s what’s so exciting about this.And we chatted just a minute about the weight, or carbon footprint, of different blockchains. There’s real nuance to this point of argument, but it was also something we couldn’t avoid. Panzer again:And this is probably the biggest negative blowback on Ethereum and NFTs is that Ethereum is by nature a very heavy chain, which means that it takes a lot of work to prove that a block has been written to the chain. Not quite as heavy as Bitcoin, but it's up there. And that energy usage that was used to mine that Ethereum that's being spent on the chain to confirm a new transaction is being sort of credited forwards in-- for lack of a better term to the artists minting on it. I don't think that's absolutely fair. But it's absolutely fair to acknowledge that it does have an ecological impact.Every week Equity will bring you something special on Wednesdays, adding to our regular Monday (weekly kickoff!) and Friday (news roundup!) shows. The world of tech is large, diverse, and variously dangerous and delightful. We're excited to keep talking through it with you.
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
29 min
March 08, 2021Equity Monday: More money for fintech, Deliveroo's IPO, and AI startups
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 — and make sure to check out our Friday show that featured the Square-Tidal deal, some recent IPOs, and some super-neat rounds.
Much like today's show, if I am being honest. Here's the rundown:

Coursera filed to go public, which could help set the tone for edtech founders and startups regarding their own valuations and fundraising prospects.

Bay Area startups did not leave.

And the world of AI venture-capital funding shows that while there's plenty of capital, the number of startups being founded in the space is dipping.

Starling raised a huge new round in the fintech space, and Deliveroo dropped some financial numbers on its path to going public in short-order.

Postscript raised $35 million for its Shopify-SMS service; Praava Health raised $10.6 million to bring better healthcare to Bangladesh.
A packed kickoff to what promises to be a packed week!
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
10 min

About Equity

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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…