Equity

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 the fourth episode of the week, pushing our production calendar to the test. Happily we've managed to hold it together amidst the news deluge that the last few days have brought. It was a good week for our scheduling change, with the main episode of the show coming to you on Thursday afternoon versus Friday morning.

Change is good.

But unchanging this time around was our hosting lineup, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself yammering with Chris Gates on the mix. Here's what we got into:

• The CEO of TikTok is out, bids are swirling, and whom will wind up owning a piece of all of TikTok's global operations is not clear. Walmart is in the mix, apparently, which feels very 2020.
• The New York Stock Exchange has gotten approval from the SEC for a new type of direct listing, one in which the company going public can sell a bloc of shares during the normal price discovery process. This means that all the banker-faff of setting a price and roadshowing to various investor groups could be going the way of the buffalo.
• About time, maybe? That was our take after reading this Bill Gurley note and the latest SEC news.
• But while the direct listing world is getting more interesting, the SPAC world is taking flight. Desktop Metal is going public via a SPAC which is all sorts of fascinating. A younger, Boston-based unicorn going public in this manner is eye catching!
• And then two funding rounds, the first from Finix, which can't stop adding to its Series B. And Mural, which raised the largest Series B we can recall.

And with that, we're all going to bed. We're tired. No more news, thanks!

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 Friday’s episode.

What a busy morning. We had to cover TikTok. We had to talk VC rounds. So, this is what we got up to:

• US tech stocks are poised to sell off further this morning.
• The Oracle-TikTok-Walmart-ByteDance deal is either coming into focus, or a period of even less clarity. It's hard to tell.
• Nikola founder Trevor Milton is leaving the board of his own company in the wake of fraud allegations. Shares of the company are sharply lower in pre-market trading.
• Turning to TikTok, this primer represents the best over-the-weekend roundup that we could find. But, of course, things are still breaking as we come to print.
• Since recording, Oracle has said that "upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global." And, President Trump said this morning that China has to give up control of TikTok or the deal is off. ByteDance has said that it will retain control. You figure that out.
• But there was some good stuff to chat about. Including the super-neat Mobile Premier League round worth $90 million, growth news from EU-based Babbel, a new London-based Seed fund that got raised, and a Swedish healthtech Series B.
• As you guessed from today's title, it was fun to see such a concentration of EU VC activity.
• Finally, will the Nikola mess discourage more SPACs from taking companies public? If the rest of the stock market wasn't selling off, we would have said no. But today? Is the answer maybe?

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.

What happens when the entire podcast crew is a bit tired from, you know, everything, and does its very best? This episode, apparently. A big thanks to Chris Gates for helping us trim the fat and make something good for you.

Before we get into the topics of the week, don't forget that Equity is not back on YouTube most weeks, so if you wanted to see us do the talking with some fun extra from the production team, you can do so here. More to come once I get my new external camera to work.

That done, here's what Natasha and Danny and I got into this week:

• The public markets are afire these days with Apple reaching $2 trillion in market cap, and Tesla's stock doing all sorts of odd things. In short, stocks have only gone up for a while and that means that there's warm, nigh-stuffy temperatures around assets of all types.
• This is leading to a surge in liquidity, unsurprisingly, as asset managers of all types look to take advantage of the times. So, Asana is prepping a direct listing, Airbnb has filed privately, And ThredUp is eyeing an early-2021 IPO. Around the same time as Coinbase, we'd reckon.
• Airbnb banned parties as well, which wound up being the title of the show.
• And SPACs are still happening in rapid-fire fashion. The Equity crew is not super impressed about the whole affair, but I'll say that with Paul "Fucking" Ryan involved, it's probably a sign of the top.
• And capping the liquidity chat, Natasha ran us through what Chamath is up to now, and Danny rabbited on about Kabbage.
• Funding rounds! Welcome raised a $1.4 million check that I covered, Labster raised $9 million that Natasha wrote about, Carrot Fertility picked up $24 million that we all thought was pretty smart, and our friends at Crunchbase News wrote about PadSplit, which is honestly neat but we ran low on time after spending too much time on SPACs. Check them out here.

Whew! We're doing a lot over at TechCrunch.com, so, stay tuned and know that if we were a bit frazzled this week it's because we're working our backends off to bring you neat things. You will dig 'em.

Ok, chat Monday, a show that we're already planning. 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.

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

The whole crew was back, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself chattering, and Chris Gates behind the scenes tweaking the dials as always. This week was a real team effort as we are heading into the maw of Disrupt -- more here, see you there -- but there was a lot of news all the same.

So, here's what we got to:

• AngelList is doubling down on rolling funds, driving that SaaS revenue into the firm that is also investing in the rolling funds. So that's neat. (Really!)
• Edtech stayed hot this week with Byju's raising $500 million from Silver Lake. Founded back in 2011, Byju's is the highest-valued edtech company that we can think of, now worth $10.8 billion.
• And speaking of Silver Lake, the group just poured $1 billion into a part of the Reliance empire, this time Reliance Retail. And we talked about JioMart, which is taking on both Flipkart and Amazon in the country.
• Next there were two companies with names that start with "S" that raised $100 million in the last week, namely Snyk -- more here -- and Sprinklr -- more here.
• Sticking to our "S" theme, Slack's earnings were incredibly interesting. The company's quarter didn't get plaudits from investors, and it did note some negative COVID impacts that could impact startups as well.
• And, one more S-company to get through: Snowflake. We were all a-twitter about the company's new valuation range and fact that fucking Berkshire Hathaway is going to invest in it. That's wild! What a thing!
• Finally on the IPO front, we did a quick Palantir update. Danny has all the latest here.

We wrapped with whatever this is, which was at least good for a laugh. We are back next week at Disrupt, so see you all 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.

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 Friday’s episode.

What was on the docket this morning? All sorts of good stuff, though the Sumo Logic S-1 did drop just after we wrapped. Here's today's rundown:

• YC Demo day is this week, so make sure to stick around TechCrunch and Extra Crunch for all our coverage.
• SPACs continue, with more automotive companies looking at alt-routes to the public markets. This time it's Luminar. And, here's the Bill Gurley post that we promised to link to.
• E-commerce and on-demand are booming in China after we saw similar results via Uber and domestic e-commerce players.
• The Fortnite-Apple brouhaha continues with more filings and even Microsoft weighing in. At the same time TikTok v. The United States appears set to go to court. (Zuck is behind some anti-TikTok Washington sentiment, it appears.)
• The Palantir S-1 has gone missing. Where is it? Give it to us!
• Dataiku has raised $100 million for its enterprise AI platform. Forbes has more.
• Datasembly has raised $10.3 million in new capital for its IRL store data service. TechCrunch has more.
• The Anti-Antitrust Club is live and you can read it here. We're trying to find out who is taking on the biggest names in tech on purpose. Who would be so garishly bold? The Anti-Antitrust club!

Whew, with YC and Palantir this week and a chat with Twilio's CEO it's going to be an active few days. 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.