The TikTok ban clears key hurdle while Perplexity AI continues to shake up search

Equity Shot: Our favorite startups from YC Demo Day: Yep, it's another Equity Shot. We're back. And then we're going to be back on Friday. Because we can't stop talking about the biggest news week in the world of startups and venture capital in some time. Before we start, shoutout to the NBA for the growing, wildcat strike to protest racist police violence in America. Ok, back to our regularly scheduled programming. This time 'round Natasha and your humble servant were joined by Lucas Matney, a member of the TechCrunch reporting team and a first-timer on Equity. Where's he been all this time? Covering all sorts of things, including VR startups for the publication. He was also a big part of our coverage of both days of Demo Day, making him a perfect fit for this episode. Danny was given a break to sit at home, play board games, and iron his favorite sweatshirt. He's back Friday morning. In case you've missed the words, here's what we wrote this week on the subject: All the Day One by Equity

24 min listen

Equity Monday 07/06: 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 week-starting primer in which we go over the latest news, dig into the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds, and dive into the latest big news from the startup world. (You can follow the show on Twitter here, and myself here, if you are so inclined! Don't forget to check out last Friday's episode as well. All the cool kids are doing it.) by Equity

9 min listen

The iron rule of founder compensation is dead: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. by Equity

35 min listen

The 3% gap in no-code: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. by Equity

32 min listen

The rules of VC are being broken: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. As ever I was joined by TechCrunch managing editor Danny Crichton and our early-stage venture capital reporter Natasha Mascarenhas. We had Chris on the dials and a pile of news to get through, so we were pretty hype heading into the show. by Equity

36 min listen

Give us your seed round and we will send back double: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. This week was full of news of all sorts, but as we recorded both Danny and Natasha were still locked out of their Twitter accounts after a proletariat revolution on the social platform saw the ruling Blue Checkmark Class forced into silence. That's not really what happened, but it sounds better than actually went down at Big Social. by Equity

34 min listen

Why isn't Robinhood a verb yet?: This week Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and your humble servant gathered to chat through a host of rounds and venture capital news for your enjoyment. As a programming note, I am off next week effectively, so look for Natasha to lead on Equity Monday and the both her and Danny to rock the Thursday show. I will miss everyone. But onto the show itself, here's what we got into: by Equity

37 min listen

Looking at how GenZ has changed fundraising: The TikTok saga continues: This week we spent a few minutes discussing why bankers are incentivized to make the proposed TikTok-Microsoft deal as competitive as possible. Or at least make it look as competitive as possible. And, there's some data from inside Microsoft about how the deal is being viewed. Airbnb could file to go public this month! It might go public before the year is out! That's way better than we expected. (Bloomberg got its Q2 finances.) Palantir could file for a direct listing next month! That's great. We wanted to know what Palantir really is, namely a consultancy or a tech company. And then we played valuation bingo so that we can look back later and mock ourselves. I was very excited about the Duck Creek IPO. Few of my friends joined me in being excited. The three of us also took a minute to riff on the latest Pinterest news, namely that it's poorly run and is sexist per its now-former COO. We'd love to stop coverin by Equity

37 min listen

Go SPAC yourself: Hello everyone, it's a busy week with TechCrunch Early Stage underway and a slew of tech earnings to parse through. But that didn't stop the Equity crew from sitting down to chat about the recent wave of SPAC commentary Danny and I wanted to talk about what a SPAC is -- the acronym stands for special purpose acquisition company -- and why everyone seems to be chatting them up. by Equity

16 min listen

Equity Monday 08/10: 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. by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Shot: All about the Qualtrics IPO: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. After the morning show went out, the Equity crew could not shut up about the Qualtrics-SAP deal, so we had no choice but to jump back into recording mode for an off-the-cuff Equity Shot. As always, Shots are short-form Equity episodes that focus on a single, news topic. by Equity

14 min listen

Equity Monday: No, tech news doesn't stop over the holidays: 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 don’t forget to check out the first of our two holiday eps, the last one talking to VCs about what surprised them in 2020. Anyhoo, from vacation, here's what Chris and I got up to: A report looking at how ecommerce changed during 2020. The epic carnage surrounding the Chinese government's clamping down on its tech sector (more here, and here from TechCrunch). Lalamove raised $515 million in a Series E. Yuanfudao raised another $300 million. Indian startups did not have the strongest year of venture fundraising, which felt a bit surprising. And it doesn't appear that Japan did either. But here in the United States, holy shit things were bonke by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Monday 8/3: 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. by Equity

8 min listen

Silicon Valley is built on immigrant innovation: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. We wound up having more to talk about than we had time for but we packed as much as we could into 34 minutes. So, climb aboard with Danny, Natasha, and myself for another episode of Equity. by Equity

34 min listen

Quibi’s shortform life: The fall of Quibi, and who lost money in the mix. TechCrunch has a bit more on the video service's downfall here. The Netflix quarter, and why its shares lost ground after its report. The Quibi-Netflix stories show that it's not smooth sailing in the market for online video. If Netflix stumbled, Snap soared with stronger-than-expected growth. The company still loses lots of money, but it's getting closer to reasonable results, and has lots of cash. Then we turned to a few media startups that raised, including $4 million for Stir and $2.5 million for Quake. Quake the podcasting company, mind, not the excellent FPS. Next was a handful of housing rounds, including the very neat Abodu and the somewhat controversial RVshare, which split the three of us about whether or not it was going to work out. Then we had some great reporting from Natasha to parse through, including her piece on startup hacker houses, and her report on a new women-focused accelerator class. by Equity

36 min listen

Equity Monday 07/27: 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. by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Monday 07/20: 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. by Equity

8 min listen

Warren Buffett invests in an unprofitable business: 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. by Equity

33 min listen

Edtech is the new SaaS: The whole crew was back, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself chattering with Chris Gates behind the scenes making it all work. An extra shoutout to Natasha this week as we spent a lot of time talking about edtech, a category that she spearheads for us and has brought to the show. It's a big deal! We're on YouTube now, don't forget, and with that, let's get into the news: Climax Foods raised $7.5 million to help fuel its work to develop alt-foods that are not animal-based. The Equity crew votes that this is a tasty deal. And, Capchase has raised $4.6 million to help cash-out SaaS contracts ahead of their real revenue accrual. Our read is that more financing options for SaaS companies will lead to lower costs of capital for those startups that want it. And, the Envision Accelerator made it through batch one and is on to batch two. Then we chatted about edtech, with Natasha talking us through Owl Ventures raising huge new funds, Course Hero ext by Equity

38 min listen

Equity Monday 08/24: 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 IR by Equity

10 min listen

A tale of two direct listings: Two direct listings in one day. Lots to talk about. Asana started trading just a bit after noon Eastern today, quickly zooming to roughly about $29 a share in early trading this afternoon. Meanwhile, Palantir is running like a herd of bulls straight out of the gate, jumping to almost $11 a share in the first trades — a first day jump of nearly 50%. by Equity

12 min listen

Equity Monday 10/12: So, what was on our minds this morning? Headlines: The Twilio-Segment deal is real, happening, and is priced about where we expected. Big names in the ex-China Internet want to make encryption worse. And, how the United States government would break up Google is becoming clearer by the week. On the Twilio Segment deal, as TechCrunch and Forbes anticipated, the transaction came in around $3.2 billion, forming something of a API monster from their combined form. As we noted on the show, a lot of investors made a mint from the transaction. Airkit has raised $28 million while in stealth since 2017. What does it do? Per Forbes, it's a "low-code platform" that wants to "improve customer engagement." That's notably similar to what Segment does. Flash Express raised $200 million, as the on-demand and delivery spaces stay hot. And Razorpay raised $100 million at a valuation of $1 billion, meaning that we have just witnessed the birth of yet another fintech unicorn. And, fin by Equity

8 min listen

Equity Monday 10/19: American equities are set to rise, which is good news for the startup-VC world as it means that the current up-cycle will continue. But the good public market is not landing evenly, as Europe sees its VC-backed IPO tally lag the rest of the world. by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Monday 07/13: Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. by Equity

11 min listen

Equity Monday 08/17: 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 by Equity

8 min listen

Equity Monday 08/31: This weekend was a welcome reprieve from last week's insane news cycle inside the world of technology and money. If you are still catching your breath from the Great IPO Wave of last Monday, we feel you. Here's what we got into this morning: The TikTok sale could be in trouble, this time due to China changing its rules on sales of tech firms that have certain algorithms. TikTok parent company Bytedance intends to comply with the rules, but what impact the news could have the sale of the social service is unclear as of yet, though the developments are not good if you were in favor of a deal. American tech shares are set to rise once again after setting records last week. Equity is back on YouTube, hell yeah! From the weekend: Medium's growth in both traffic (pageviews) and income (paying subscribers) is super impressive according to its latest reporting. And the publishing platform and media company is doubling-down on product to fend off upstarts like the popular by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Monday on Tuesday 09/08: 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. Headline roundup: TikTok's parent will pay an irregular bonus to staff, a move that is causing ripples as Bytedance's social service finds itself an international political football. Reed Hastings is not big on working from home. And China's fight with Australia is escalating, again showing how willing China is to become an ostracized internationally; in business terms this makes the India market more important to tech companies. New IPO filings are out from both JFrog and Sumo Logic. We're going for a dive soon, but the short riff is that JFrog wants up to $37 per share, valuing it at more than $3 billion while Sumo Logic wants $21 per s by Equity

9 min listen

Equity Monday: Edtech and insurtech stay red-hot: This morning was a somewhat odd episode of our Monday show, in that the American election is tomorrow. Still, some things happened. So, here they are: Match, Uber, Alibaba, Square, Dropbox, EA, and Roku are expected to report earnings this week. The UK's venture capital industry is even less focused on investing in diverse founders than you thought, with our own Natasha Lomas reporting that "all-ethnic teams received an average of just 1.7% of the venture capital investments made at seed, early and late stage" between 2009 and 2019. The edtech boom is lifting all boats, it seems, not just those that belong to startups. Chegg's growth is picking up media attention. Marshmallow raised $30 million for its auto-insurtech product. The insurtech market is super hot these days, after the Lemonade and Root IPOs. Tencent led $50 million into Zego, another company that wants to provide video communications services to other companies. Warre by Equity

8 min listen

A faster, easier, cheaper way of going public: 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 s by Equity

30 min listen

Schools are closing their doors, but OpenDoor isn’t: This week Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and myself hosted a live taping at Disrupt for a digital reception. It was good fun, though of course we're looking forward to bringing the live show back to the conference next year, vaccine allowing. Thankfully we had Chris Gates behind the scenes tweaking the dials, Alexandra Ames fitting us into the program, and some folks to watch live. What did we talk about? All of this (and some very, very bad jokes): by Equity

30 min listen

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The TikTok ban clears key hurdle while Perplexity AI continues to shake up search

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