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 joined today by the whole crew.

We are recording live on a Thursday.

If you're listening to this on a Friday,

tune in two weeks. We're going to do it again. But in the meantime, I am here with

Natasha Moscarenis. Natasha, hello. Hello. It's so good to be back and let me just say

we have tried to do an Equity show every day of the week this

week because there's been so much news so everyone should buckle in.

Yeah we have a couple of things to get to.

Mary Ann actually dropped some breaking news right into the script before we started.

Mary Ann, how are you feeling?

You've been busy.

Yeah, it's been a crazy week.

That's really like the only way to sum it up.

Yeah, it's been pretty nuts.

And you'll hear about why in a second second but quickly in case you're just tuning in

Here's what we're going to run through today on the show. We have three deals of the week from

Conceive, Cottage, and Tandem, then we're going to talk about Austin. We had an event there this week. Mary and has tons of data on one of the most important and I would say burgeoning startup scenes in the United States and the world.

Then we are going to talk about is this the year of the layoff? There is some news around that you've may have heard of that's quite important and we have some late breaking news we're going to bring in as well.

And then we're going to wrap with something that we didn't quite get to do a shot on earlier this week, which is apparently Elon Musk now helps run Twitter.

And as you can imagine we have no opinions about that whatsoever and that'll be a super

non-controversial part of the show. But that's at the end we're going to do some deals to begin with.

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