INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.This
week Kate and Alex broke the discussion into two main themes
The first dealt with early-stage companies, and the second, as you can imagine, later-stage affairs
Don’t worry, we don’t get to SoftBank for quite some time.Up top, we dug into Kate’s story about Quill, a formerly stealthy company
that could be taking on Slack
That or something similar to Slack
Next, we turned to ManiMe, a startup in the beauty space that raised a smaller $2.6 million round to take on a market that is valued in the
billions.After that it was time to leave the auspices of the early-stage market and move to, of all things, a public company
Grubhub reported earnings this week
Alex wanted to riff over the company’s earnings report and what it could mean for startups that are competing with Grubhub, a leader in
the food delivery space that DoorDash and Postmates would prefer to lead themselves.What impact Grubhub may have on the highly valued
on-demand companies isn’t clear yet, but will be pretty damn interesting to see when it does land.Sticking to the later-stage markets,
Alex dug into the problems at Wag, which is struggling and looking for a sale despite raising a castle of cash from the Vision Fund
Kate followed that up with notes on problems at Katerra
The Information is reporting this week that the business is going through a number of layoffs, and we’re wondering if it will suffer the
same fate of some of SoftBank’s other investments.And, finally, the changing face of things at SoftBank itself
The great money spigot is slowly cutting flow
How many unicorns that will strand isn’t yet clear
But surely it can’t be zero.Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all
