INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Hello and welcome back toEquity, TechCrunch venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week
Kate and Alex held the reins as a duo (check out our chat with Greylock Sarah Guo from last week here) to dig into an enormous raft of news
And don&t worry, it not all late-stage happenings
We&re discussing early-stage news every week because that what the listeners want!
Up top we dug into Kate excellent work covering the
Superhuman founder new micro fund, or at least his attempt at raising such a fund
Our main question is how can he be a good VC and a good executive at the same time? Folks don&t tend to do both at the same time because
they&re each more than full-time jobs
Having two such gigs sounds hard.
But hey, it not just athletes and musicians who can bring outsized interest to deals
In-demand founders can have a similar effect
We&ll be keeping a close eye on the upcoming fun
Moving on.
Next, we turned to the other end of the venture landscape, looking at Founders Fund new capital vehicles
With a combined $2.7 billion in eventual capital, FF is hoping to build a financial redoubt from which they can rain capital down on
late-stage targets, wherever they may be.
Is it a bit late in the cycle to cut late-stage checks to companies that might otherwise go
public? That the gamble so far, as we can see it, but perhaps with WeWork IPO dreams turned to nightmares, there demand among a group of
companies for another 12 months in the private markets
And that means more money is required.
On the theme of more money, Lime is raising some more and we were treated to new financial results
from The Information great work getting the figures
Our discussion asked the question of how far the company unit economics could improve
Kate said that Lime is investing a lot now in developing better hardware so their scooters can last more than five minutes on the roads
She thinks things will start looking up when it deploying only new, fancy, good scooters
Alex is bearish.
Before we could turn back to the early-stage market and wrap up, we had to cover the latest from WeWork
SoftBank did, in the end, come and save the day (at least for now) for the company, meaning that WeWork lives on, though layoffs are
expected sooner rather than later
Who knows what the future holds…
And finally, Vendr, a company that is profitable, raised a $2 million round
This is interesting because, again, it profitable! And the startup willingly shared some financial data with us — a rarity
Read more about the recent Y Combinator graduate here.
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