Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was incredibly fun. We recorded live from the first floor of TechCrunch’s Disrupt SF confab, putting us right in the middle of the action. So it was good that we had a full crew on hand to natter about the news. From TechCrunch, Connie Loizos and Danny Crichton were on deck, along with myself. In addition to us regulars, Garry Tan joined in. He’s a managing partner at Initialized Capital.
So we had the crew, a lovely stage, and four mics. Putting that together we kicked off with some ironically non-Valley news, in particular, Amazon reaching the $1 trillion market cap threshold. The firm has since given back around $50 billion in value, but we wanted to know why it was up, and why it was down.
Segueing with some precision we tucked into the recent “Peak Silicon Valley” conversation, specifically predicated on two recent pieces from the Economist (here and here) that, in effect, ask the question is the Valley no longer what it once was? And the answer, as you can imagine, is a firm kinda.
Next up we riffed on the recent crypto meltdown. Tan was not concerned, noting that you have to have 10 percent down days to have 10 percent up days. I found that hard to stomach, but crypto remains young, per Tan, so perhaps we’ll see things calm down yet.
Next, two IPOs. First up: Elastic, a search company that seems quite young has an impressive set of numbers to show off. It’s not as hot as Snap, perhaps, but the firm is in good shape to make a good debut. And Upwork is going public as well. If Elastic is quick to IPO and quick growing, Upwork is a bit less of each. It’s older and growing more slowly.
The firms are linked by an investor, however, something that Crichton broke down for us here.
We wrapped with Caffeine’s $100 million round, and the changing pace of supergiant capital injections. And then we stopped talking, so we’ll catch you all in seven days. Thanks for being great!
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