A ping-pong match between bulls and bears

Equity

TechCrunch

Business, News, Technology, Business News, Entrepreneurship

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 27 May 2022

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production. You can tell from the topic list today that we are in an odd time. There are myriad signals that the startup market is slowing down. And there are some counter-narrative data points that paint a more complex picture. Where do you stand in your own viewpoint? Well, read on for some data to consider: Natasha gave us a brief update on All Raise's annual VC summit, but she'll get into more on an upcoming Wednesday show (stay tuned!) Monte Carlo just raised a unicorn round, worth $135 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. On the other hand, Bolt is laying off staff amidst a correction in the larger startup market, and perhaps its own space. If startup news is pointing in two directions, so too are data from the venture capital world. While Sequoia is warning founders about a downturn, a16z just raised a king's ransom to pour into the web3 market. Parse that as you will. There were other bits of news to consider as we work to understand where the startup world truly is today, including news from Zip and Nowports -- two newly-minted unicorns that Mary Ann recently profiled. And we closed on, what else, drama in fintech. As Stripe and Plaid gear up to battle, Finix is either in the fray, or about to jump in, depending on your perspective. What's clear is that increasingly overlapping fintech giants are going to rub up against one another. You can read more about that in The Interchange, out on Sunday. Hugs from us to you, and we will talk to you next week! Equity drops every Monday at 7 a.m. PDT and Wednesday and Friday at 6 a.m. PDT, 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:16.1	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and I am
0:20.0	joined today by the entire crew. In one corner I have Mary Ann
0:23.3	Elizabetho. Mary Ann hello and how are you? Hi Alex doing great how are you? This has
0:28.8	been a long week. It has. For every possible reason which is why I'm glad that I also have Natasha Moscuanes here.
0:35.7	Natasha, hello, how are you?
0:37.4	I'm good, I guess I have a raspy voice because I've been talking to real people in person
0:42.1	for this whole week.
0:43.6	So if I sound different, I'm not sick,
0:45.8	I'm just, I'm just on socializing.
0:48.4	That's because before the show, we were doing our levels check
0:50.4	and I was like, you sound like you've been talking to line.
0:52.2	She's like, three days of networking and we all said wow how are you still alive but
0:57.2	before we talk about what Natasha has been doing because that is actually the first
0:59.9	thing we'll dive into a quick note on the show. We're going to riff on the all-rays
1:04.0	event which was a big darn deal. Then we're going to talk about a couple of
1:06.8	deals of the week involving Monte Carlo and Bolt. Bolt's not a deal of the
1:10.9	week the more of a happening of the week, but you'll see what we mean just a second.
1:14.0	Then we're going to talk about Sequoia and Andresen, leaning in and leaning out during the downturn, I suppose.
1:20.0	We're going to talk about Zippin-N Nowports and how companies are still raising
1:23.4	2020 money in 2022 and why and then we're going to talk about Plaid versus the
1:28.0	world through the lens of Phoenix and Stripe. There's quite a lot to get
1:31.9	through this week. There's a lot of just dense news items but all that really matters. So hang out with us, we're going to get through all of it. But first, Natasha, you went out into the world and saw other humans. Tell us about that.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from TechCrunch, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of TechCrunch and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.