Equity

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

What a week, yeah? Instead of the news cycle slowing as the year races to a close, things are still as hot as ever. We have funding rounds big and small, IPOs, first-day extravaganza and more.

Luckily we had the whole crew around -- Chris and Danny and Natasha and I. Here’s the rundown:

• Career Karma raised $10 million, and we have thoughts and concerns.
• Skyflow raised $17.5 million in an effort to try to get the Equity team to understand the nuances of different encryption types.
• Calm raised $75 million, which felt pretty reasonable given reports and its fundraising history.
• Squire tripled its valuation in a new round that included $45 million in equity capital along with some debt.'
• We also talked about the DoorDash and C3.ai IPO pops, where Airbnb priced, and who is coming next
• And we rounded off with what's up with TikTok stars investing in tech startups. Danny was not a fan.

And that's that! If you aren't tired, have you even been paying attention?

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.

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 big news, chats 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 don’t forget to check out last Thursday's epic run of early-stage rounds.

It was busy this morning. So, in blocs, here's what the show got to:

• This COVID news made me smile, even if the markets are set to open lower this morning after a big end to last week. So much for bad labor data mattering, I suppose.
• Airbnb's IPO range is set to rise, boosting the company's valuation to as much as $36 billion, and $41.8 billion on a fully-diluted basis.
• Bloomberg got its hands on some Sequoia returns data. Shockingly the data is good. Who could have imagined.
• Sourcegraph raised even more capital, raising both our eyebrows and its valuation.
• Luko added $60 million to its coffers, showing that the insurtech boom is not merely a United States-phenomenon.
• And in short-form: Highland Europe has a new fund, and Wonder raised.
• Here's the Extra Crunch piece that I helped write with Danny and Natasha.

And that was our show. Hugs from here, and chat Thursday at the latest.

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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We're back with not an Equity Shot or Dive of Monday, this is just the regular show! So, we got back to our roots by looking at a huge number of early stage rounds. And a few other things that we were just too excited about to not mention.

So from Chris and Danny and Natasha and I, here's the rundown:

• A hacker house aimed at college-age women and non-binary individuals.
• What Sketchy is and why it just raised north of $30 million.
• AgentSync's rapid-fire funding news, and what we can discern from it.
• Pave's round, Welcome's second this year, and what's up with helping startup employees navigate equity compensation.
• What Heru is building in Mexico with its new round.
• How BuildBuddy managed to raise double what it had originally targeted.
• Then we touched on AI: The new Scale AI round, what happened to Element AI, and Danny's take on some big news from the technology itself.
• Finally, Lightspeed bought Upserve, Facebook bought Kustomer, Vista bought Gainsight, and Amazon wants to get into paid podcasting.

That was a lot, but how could we leave any of it out? We're back Monday with 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.

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

Welcome to an Equity Shot all about the huge, and hugely interesting Salesforce-Slack deal, in which the enterprise social company will be subsumed for the mere price of $27.7 billion.

TechCrunch has notes on the deal here, and on what Salesforce expects the acquisition will do for its growth rate here.

Some of the drama, we admit, was removed when the deal was presaged several days ago, but that didn't stop the Equity crew from having a lot to say on the matter. Here are some of the topics we discuss:

• How big is this deal, both literally and figuratively?
• We talk about the market reception and if the rumors correctly valued the deal
• Does Slack deserve snaps or just a simple pat on the back?
• What does the deal tells us about vertical SaaS tools?
• The COVID-19 effect on remote tools
• What does SoftBank have to do with this (and why does SoftBank always have something to do with everything)?
• And whole lot of conversation and discussion on Microsoft and its competitor

We are back in two days' time, so don't wander too far. Chat soon!

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.

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 big news, chats 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 don’t forget to check out last Thursday's edtech deep dive from our own Natasha Mascarenhas.

Right, now through the first of America's national Q4 feast days, it's time to get back to business. Namely, the business of VC and startups. Here's what we got into this morning:

• It's Cyber Monday, which means that the Internet is going to be annoying today, but the fake-holiday is boosting ecommerce players like Etsy. That should be good news for payments processors incumbent and startup, as well as other ecommerce businesses, again large, small, and even platform-focused.
• Zappos founder Tony Hsieh passed away this weekend. It was a surprise. He was loved.
• The UK is banning China's Huawei 5G gear next year as Australia condemns China over a different matter. So if you are keeping tally of countries where Chinese tech may no longer be welcome, the list is certainly longer than merely India, which has banned all popular China-built apps from its mobile phones.
• These broader tensions are changing where VCs are investing their money, notably.
• Primer, the fintech helping merchants consolidate the payments stack, raises £14M Series A
• HungryPanda raises $70M for a food delivery app aimed at overseas Chinese consumers
• Firstminute Capital launches second $111M fund, featuring a who’s-who of founders as LPs
• And finally, we are heading into a deluge of IPOs over the next few weeks. So strap in, it's going to be messy and fun.

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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week, we're doing a first-ever for the show and taking a deep dive into one specific sector: Edtech.

Natasha Mascarenhas has covered education technology since Stanford first closed down classes in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. In the wake of the historic shuttering of much of the United States' traditional institutions of education, the sector has formed new unicorns, attracted record-breaking venture capital totals, and most of all, enjoyed time in a long-overdue spotlight.

For this Equity Dive, we zero into one part of that conversation: Edtech's impact on higher education. We brought together Udacity co-founder and Kitty Hawk CEO Sebastian Thrun, Eschaton founder and college drop-out Ian Dilick, and Cowboy Ventures investor Jomayra Herrera to answer our biggest questions.

Here's what we got into:

• How the state of remote school is leading to gap years among students
• A framework for how to think of higher education's main three products (including which is most defensible over time)
• What learnings we can take from this COVID-19 experiment on remote schooling to apply to the future
• Why ed-tech is flocking to the notion of life-long learning
• And the reality of who self-paced learning serves -- and who it leaves out

And much, much more. If you celebrate, thank you for spending part of your Thanksgiving with the Equity crew. We're so thankful to have this platform and audience, and it means a ton that y'all tune in each week.

Finally, if you liked this format and want to see more, feel free to tweet us your thoughts or leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. Talk soon!

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.

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 big news, chats 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 don’t forget to check out last Thursday's main ep, and our bonus episode that went out on Saturday.

If you like Equity, your cup runeth over.

So, what did we get into this morning? A grip of things, which I've listed below in order:

• American Thanksgiving is this week, so news may slow as we move towards Thursday.
• New, good vaccine news is boosting stocks and hopes that the pandemic could be brought under control next year.
• Bitcoin is racing towards new records.
• LA-based Credit Key raises $33 million for its business-to-business payments platform -- in light of the Affirm IPO this round is no surprise.
• Digital freight forwarder Forto raises another $50M in round led by Inven Capital -- the pandemic is messing around with supply chains, perhaps leaving room for startups in the space to aggressively grow.
• Digital electricity supplier Tibber closes $65M Series B led by Eight Roads, Balderton -- of our three rounds, this one took me the longest to understand.
• This essay from Tomasz Tunguz, which is good.

Please stay safe this week, America. Do something boring and unfun, so that we can keep more of us alive into next year.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PDT and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is an all-time first for the show, it's an Equity Leftovers. Which means that we're not focusing on a single topic like we would in an Equity Shot. This is just, well, more Equity.

Danny and I and Chris got together to chat about a few things that we could not leave out:

• Our piece looking at which venture capital firms are expected to make the most bank from the recent IPO deluge.
• Roblox's IPO filing, and our take on its impending debut.
• All things Wish IPO, including what's up with its revenue costs, and the broader ecommerce market.
• DoorDash's epic financials, and how COVID helped propel the food delivery giant into the business hall of fame.
• The exit of one of Robinhood's co-CEOs from the role.
• The HuffPo-Buzzfeed tie-up. And what is up with media companies in general.

And with this, our fourth episode in six days, we shall pause until Monday. Hugs from the Equity crew.

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.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week wound being incredibly busy. What else would a week that included both the Airbnb and Affirm IPO filings, a host of mega-rounds for new unicorns, some fascinating smaller funding events, and some new funds?

So we had a lot to get through, but with Chris and Danny and Natasha and your humble servant, we dove in headfirst:

• Affirm has filed to go public! The fintech unicorn is big, growing, and losing less money over time. We were pretty impressed in our first look. Then, with a bit more time, we dug deeper and found a weakness or two. Still, Affirm is heading public and not in poor shape.
• Airbnb filed, and we jumped into an Equity Shot as fast as we could on Tuesday to get our minds around the news. Since then, Danny dug through the venture capital winners circle -- a surprisingly small subset of firms! -- and we also got into some questions that I had about the company's finances.
• Robinhood is said to have an IPO in the books, so we talked a bit about what we know concerning its Q3 growth.
• And then there was edtech, as always. This week we talked about Tencent backing Udemy, Duolingo raising again, and Transfr picking up a Series A that we thought was super interesting.
• Danny wanted to talk about the Trust & Will Series A. We tried to not make that many jokes.
• ZenBusiness raised $55 million as well, in an outsized Series B.
• Financial Venture Studio put together a new fund to cut small checks into Seed-stage fintech startups. We think that's great. Especially given what we know about what is going on in the fintech venture world.
• And Natasha walked us through her latest deep-dive, a look into the world of virtual headquarters. This led to the worst joke of the show.

What a week! Three episodes, some new records, and a very tired us after all the action. More 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.

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

Today we have an Equity Shot for you about Airbnb's S-1 filing, as it looks to go public before the year is out.

• First we get into Airbnb's macro performance, which shows a stable picture historical revenue growth. There is a ton of numbers to get to so get ready for a quick dive into net revenue, gross margins, and losses.
• Then we discuss the dramatic drop in bookings, the promising comeback, and if short-term travel is Airbnb's future.
• There's a weird quarter of profitability that you should all know about, and a heads up on what to look for in Q4 numbers.
• Finally, we talk about the bullish and bearish case on Airbnb, which poetically filed the same day that Moderna announced a promising vaccine trial. 

All that, and our trusty other host Danny Crichton was busy filing a post about the winners and losers of the Airbnb IPO. Ownership, you quiet, billionaire beast. There's more coming from TechCrunch on the company's IPO, and from the Equity crew on everything else we ferret out on Thursday. Stay tuned!

https://techcrunch.com/2020/11/16/airbnb-files-to-go-public/

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.