No parties allowed at the Airbnb IPO

08/21/20 • 32 min

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.

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.

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

Previous Episode

Equity Monday 08/17

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.

This morning we had a bit of a detour, wandering into the world of BigTech to wonder what is going on with those megacorps. Too big for their own good, or too big to be good, here's what's up with the incumbents:

Germany is taking on Amazon at the very same time that Canada is taking on Amazon, meaning that the Seattle giant is taking shots from two key markets at the same time.
Google is having a war of words with Australia, after a ruling in the country didn't go its way.
Walled gardens are seeing their walls come under heavy fire, which means that Apple and Google are fighting both sides of their marketplaces (producers, consumers) at once at the moment, which isn't great.
And Microsoft might buy TikTok.

All told it seems that the biggest tech companies are busy defending their market position instead of re-earning it with great products. A good time for startups? I think so. When incumbents are busy fighting with governments, themselves, and each other, it's a great time to show up, steal a march, and build neat products that take away their momentum.

On the funding front, we peeked at the neat Help Lightning round, the Agiloft investment, and the Vertafore exit.

And then there was this report concerning Asana, which is growing nicely for a company of its size and could actually be cheap at its current price? Anyway, we want the company to get on with getting public so that we can read its S-1 filing. Give it to us!

All that and we had some fun, chat soon!

Next Episode

Equity Monday 08/24

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

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!