Brex and the curse of having too much money

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 26 January 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Here’s what we got up to on our Friday show: Deals of the Week: Plural has a new $432 million fund, Vroom is no longer in the car selling business, oddly, and we chatted through the Fantuan-Chowbus deal. From there we turned to fintech (generally) and Brex (more specifically). In short, Brex is a big company today but not one that is having a lot of fun at the moment, it appears. With reports indicating that its growth has slowed and its burn remained sticky, it recently cut staff. To close, we dug into why edtech might not be in the dire straits that many presume that it is. A recent TechCrunch+ investor survey finds notable pockets of enthusiasm in the sector. AI, as you may have heard, is a big deal. That’s our week concluded! We start back up on Monday morning! See you there. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we
0:15.4	unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. Today is January 26th,
0:20.6	2024. My name is Alex. I am joined today by two of my besties. On one hand, I have Mary Ann Asaveto.
0:27.8	Mary Ann, all I can say is hashtag Forbes Strike. Let's go.
0:31.6	Oh yeah, man, Brutal Week in the media world, for sure.
0:34.8	Yeah, we also have Kirsten Corosik, though.
0:36.7	And in Kirsten, I hear there's no bad news whatsoever
0:38.9	in the world of automotive, especially if you're Elon Musk.
0:41.6	Yeah, absolutely zero bad news at all including shares
0:46.1	being down something like 12.5% today following the big earnings day, which shows maybe sales growth is slowing in 2024.
0:58.0	It turns out that if you keep cutting your prices, if you sell more cars, your revenue doesn't go up.
1:03.0	Yeah, that whole margin thing is tricky.
1:06.0	Yeah, I will say watching Tesla maybe get treated as a car company for once is interesting.
1:12.0	We'll have to see how that all works out. But on the
1:14.6	show today we're not talking about Tesla because we have too much startup stuff
1:17.9	to get to. Deals of the week including Plural, Vroom and Van Tuan. Then the first theme is we're talking about what happened to Brex.
1:25.2	This is essentially a FinTech conversation,
1:27.6	looking backwards, looking forwards.
1:29.4	And then we're going to do something
1:30.6	we haven't done in a very long time.
1:32.9	An Ed Tech check-in.
1:34.7	Yes, we do miss Natasha here on the show,
	...

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.