Fintech unicorn Affirm has a lot of eggs in one basket

Equity

TechCrunch

Entrepreneurship, Business News, News, Business, Technology

4.2 • 372 Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2020

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Affirm has filed to go public! The fintech unicorn is big, growing, and losing less money over time. We were pretty impressed in our first look. Then, with a bit more time, we dug deeper and found a weakness or two. Still, Affirm is heading public and not in poor shape. Airbnb filed, and we jumped into an Equity Shot as fast as we could on Tuesday to get our minds around the news. Since then, Danny dug through the venture capital winners circle -- a surprisingly small subset of firms! -- and we also got into some questions that I had about the company's finances. Robinhood is said to have an IPO in the books, so we talked a bit about what we know concerning its Q3 growth. And then there was edtech, as always. This week we talked about Tencent backing Udemy, Duolingo raising again, and Transfr picking up a Series A that we thought was super interesting. Danny wanted to talk about the Trust & Will Series A. We tried to not make that many jokes. ZenBusiness raised $55 million as well, in an outsized Series B. Financial Venture Studio put together a new fund to cut small checks into Seed-stage fintech startups. We think that's great. Especially given what we know about what is going on in the fintech venture world. And Natasha walked us through her latest deep-dive, a look into the world of virtual headquarters. This led to the worst joke of the show.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody. This is Alex. Hey, it's Natasha. And we are here to talk just for a second about
0:06.0	Extra Crunch, Tech Crunchy subscription product. Extra Crunch is where a lot of our best analysis and follow-up stories lives. We focus a lot on startups, building, and even
0:16.5	poke fun here and there.
0:18.5	It's true. I also write a daily column called The Exchange that's over on Extra Crunch
0:22.2	and the good news is if you don't have
0:24.1	EC access yet we have a deal for you. Yes you can use I think the best code there
0:29.7	is so don't tell anyone who doesn't listen to equity because they're not invited the code is equity all caps for 50% off your extra crunch subscription
0:39.2	So head over to tech Tech Ranch. Hello and welcome back to Equity, Tech Wrench's Venture Capital Focus Podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
1:06.5	My name is Alex Wilhelm.
1:07.7	It is Thursday afternoon.
1:08.8	It is cold, but I am happy because I have two of my absolute favorites here, including Natasha Moskarenis.
1:14.0	How are you doing?
1:15.0	So happy, we are close to this week ending, even though we're all working next week.
1:19.0	It just feels right.
1:21.0	Yeah, I don't even think I'm taking like Thanksgiving off because I'm not doing anything so I might as well just sit at this desk instead of the couch I guess I don't know
1:28.0	Anyways Danny you're here too. How are you doing? I'm doing all right. I'm sweating from all these funding
1:32.9	announcements. I feel like we need to stop covering the ones that do get
1:36.1	funding and start covering the ones that don't. It's harder to cover a negative
1:39.9	in that sense. Also people won't tell us when they didn't raise so it's hard to do that but if you didn't
1:46.2	raise around and want us to talk about it equity pot at techrunge.com let us know how you screwed it up
1:50.7	okay look guys it was a really really really busy week. Like it was, it's been hectic. We've had a number of filings. We have a lot to get through. There's some big rounds. I want to start with the late stage stuff. That's okay. Dig into that and then we'll kind of work our way backwards into some seed rounds and then also a new fund and then at the very end there is a Natasha special of some really interesting stuff to think about for the future over this weekend. So kicking off a firm filed which ended June 30. So now we're in there
2:16.3	I believe 2021. The reason they do that as a payments company they're trying to kind of group the
	...

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