Hello and welcome back to Equity, the Tech Runch Podcast, where we unpack the numbers and the

nuance behind the headlines.

This is Alex and today is March 13, 2024 and welcome to our Wednesday show.

This is when we dig into critical startup

and venture capital stories from the week thus far,

and we have an absolutely packed show for you today.

On the show, notes on startup comp for workers

and how those numbers are changing.

Then, how one startup is profiting off of death,

but in a way that's actually great. I promise it will make sense. Hear me out.

Then, Bear robotics and its killer new round for cute robots, new stuff from Blue Sky and Brave,

and then we'll wrap with some venture capital news that

actually took us by surprise.

Let's go.

Starting somewhere a little bit different today. Let's talk about startup employees

before we get into all the startup news proper.

Now I have a bunch of data from Karda

that tells us quite a lot about the state of compensation for startup employees.

Roll with me here. There are going to be a couple of numbers, but I promise this is going to be easy to understand.

So, first of all, companies that use CARDA, and that's a pretty big subset of the overall startup population,

hired about 523,000 people in 2022.

And notably, that was pretty much the same number as were hired in 2021 when it was 525,000.

...