Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: A global selloff to kick off Disrupt week About this episode This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.
A few things this morning:
I shook up the show format a little, including how the script came together and how it was organized. Hit me up on Twitter if you have notes.
Disrupt is this week, so strap thyself in for the best tech event of the year, coming to your living room. The Equity team is hosting -- between the group of us -- a zillion panels and one of the two stages. Come hang out with us. It's going to be on heck of a show.
On the news front, the global stock market is taking a whacking. US stocks are set to fall after European stocks went lower thanks to concerns that the Chinese property developer Evergrande and its constituent debt issues could spread to other parts of the market, possibly leading to contagion.
Cryptos are also off sharply in the last 24 hours, so there sems to be little refuge in today's markets.
A French hosting company is going public, an Indian used-car marketplace raised a boatload of cash, and Amazon is investigating a bribe.
And we are expecting IPOs from both Freshworks and Toast this week.
It's going to be a very busy few days. Pour some extra coffee, and get hype.
Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.
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Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Oh boy, everybody. Oh boy. It is going to be one of those days. Hello, this is Alex, of course. Happy Monday. Hope you're doing well. Hope you had a good weekend and that all things are Gucci where you are. I'm scared because the markets are in freefall this morning. It is an absolute mess out there. We have the Dow Jones Industrial Average off 620 points in pre-market trading or 2.8%. That, in case you're not sure, is a lot. Yes, it is. The Nasdaq is off 218 points or 1.4% this morning. Again, pre-market trading numbers, so we're kind of looking ahead to what the US markets will do. But over in Europe, the EU-focused Stocks 600 is down 2.17%. So this is not a US issue. And over in Hong Kong,
0:50 Speaker 00 the Hang Seng Index was off 3.3%. So it's just a complete mess out there. So why? Well, everyone's really worried about China, not the regulatory stuff this morning. We're not talking again about a crackdown on, I don't know, fan culture amongst celebrities or gaming and how often kids can play. We're talking about debt. Debt specifically at Evergrande, an enormous Chinese real estate group. Evergrande has around $200 billion in debt and has historically taken deposits for new apartments from consumers, folks who buy them, and use that to finish old projects. And this works really well, as long as there's always new stuff to sell and that you can keep the cash flow situation flowing. It's no longer really working. The company is in risk of default and has critically warned that there is risk of contagion. And contagion
1:32 Speaker 00 is when risk spills over from one company or sector into others, causing kind of a chain reaction. It's like the bad news dominos of the financial world. The question now is, will the Chinese Communist Party swoop in and provide some backstopping to Evergrande, or will it not? And I don't think we know yet. I don't think the market knows, and there's a lot of just fear out there. Bringing this back to kind of our world, if you will, software stocks in the US are off around 2% this morning in pre-market trading. That's kind of our estimate, looking at a number of individual companies. But what this means is that all this market chop at the broad level is changing the valuation of technology companies, which means that startups are also being repriced. You just can't really see it. Now, this bad news is not just the boring old stock market. It's also the burgeoning new fun, exciting crypto world.
2:17 Speaker 00 And we've seen prices of Bitcoin drop by 7.8% in the last 24 hours. Ether is off 8.4%, Cardano off 11.6%, Solana off 11.7%. So that's bad. It's a huge mess, frankly, and what we're seeing is kind of the opposite of a melt up. A melt up is when you open your brokerage account or your crypto wallet, whatever, and everything's gone up and you're like, ah, I'm a genius. I'm the world's best investor. No one is better than me. The opposite of that is what we're seeing today, in which everything loses its value to varying degrees and you feel like a schlub. But don't worry, it's not good news, but it's also not the world's worst news. And the reason why is there's been so much appreciation in the value of assets around the world in the last couple of years, especially the last like 18 months, really since kind of March of 2020, that we're still at elevated levels.
3:01 Speaker 00 We haven't really blown off all the foam from the cappuccino of the hot markets. And so, sure, today's sell off, worrisome, but this is not the end of the good times. If these declines keep up, different conversation. So the next couple of trading periods should prove pretty important to kind of set market sentiment about where we are. Keep an eye on the markets. Let's see what happens. We'll talk about it again next Monday. Other stuff going on, Fed tapering, maybe a slowing global recovery, debt levels in other countries, there's concerns out there, but it's not clear if any of those are going to be enough individually or in aggregate to really change things. So watch the news, we'll see.
3:39 Speaker 00 All right, now let's talk about some startup news. According to the Wall Street Journal, Europe-based OVH Cloud plans to go public at a valuation of up to $4.7 billion. That is a lot of money for a company that you may not have heard of, but OVH Cloud is a pretty big player in the kind of French slash European cloud hosting world. So it competes with Hosts and Amazon and also other companies. And the company could raise as much as 400 million euros in their Paris debut. Now, if I recall my currency conversions, that's like 460 million dollars, give or take, so nearly a half billion USD essentially. Now, it's not the only French IPO we've seen recently, so we are seeing continued liquidity over in France, which is, I don't know, a nice blast of good news in this kind of crappy day overall.
4:20 Speaker 00 But these debuts are not enough to actually flip the unicorn traffic jam situation that we've been seeing. Essentially, over the last four or five years, there have been many more unicorns born, which is, you know, a company reaching that mythical $1 billion valuation than we've seen actually exit. And so even though it's great to see OVH Cloud pull the trigger, go public in Paris, huzzah, it's just an indicator again that we're seeing too few of these compared to how many new unicorns are being put together. And as for here, kind of the tail end, I want to say of the SPAC boom, we had this golden moment in which there was so much demand for SPAC shares and, you know, SPAC combinations, and even that relatively easy path, the public markets did not flip the script. So apparently this is never going to stop. And maybe it doesn't matter, but I can't see how it doesn't.
5:07 Speaker 00 All right, let's turn to India. There's a really fascinating funding round out of India this morning that I kept thinking about. Cars24. Now, you may not have heard of this company if you're not in India, but it just put together a $450 million Series F that was a blend of $340 million in equity capital and $110 million in debt. Now, debt is a great way for a lot of companies to access capital at a lower price point if they want to do things like, I don't know, offer financing, stuff like that. So seeing Cars24 raise debt, not a surprise, certainly not a ding against the overall size of this valuation. Company is now worth 1.84 billion. Keep in mind that only 340 million equity was actually kind of sold in the company. So, uh, you know, it wasn't the cheapest round we've seen lately, but certainly wasn't too expensive by historical
5:50 Speaker 00 norms. Cars24 helps sell both used cars and two wheeled motorbikes and has sold around 400,000 vehicles to date. That's quite a lot. And it currently operates in over 200 cities. Just keep in mind how big India is geographically and in terms of both population and economic activity. I am a little skeptical of all startups related that sell cars, thinking about the economics we've seen from Carvana and other kind of similar players. I don't have the data on Cars24, but I'm going to be fascinated to see if it's mostly growing, or if it's actually growing its gross profit as it does so. And also from India, here's a small data point that kind of caught my eye. TechCrunch wrote about this this morning. Amazon. Is launching an investigation into the conduct of some legal reps of the company in India
6:34 Speaker 00 after a complaint from whistleblower alleged that one of the company's legal reps had bribed government officials. Now, a small thing, big companies have bad actors. It's going to happen, but it's not good. So I'm not going to say much more about this other than to say, keep it in mind, both about the Indian market in terms of this business climate and also Amazon's corporate culture. If we don't hear about this forever, okay, move on. One kind of blip in the broader Amazon story. If we hear about it again, we might start to see enough of a pattern to call it a trend. So here's a data point. Let's move on.
7:08 Speaker 00 All right. Now, in other news, Facebook is trying to reclaim the narrative. It's pushing back against a series of withering reports from the Wall Street Journal, breaking down how the company has known quite a lot about the harms caused by its products to everyone from teenage girls to older folks, and how it has consistently prioritized growth over user safety despite constantly making mouth noises about how it's bringing the world together and making things an overall better place to live. But, you know, as with what feels like all Facebook responses to criticism, the company is talking and sharing a couple of partial data points. It's not actually opening up its data to the outside world for researchers and other people to kind of look at and figure things out. So it seems amazingly that Facebook still thinks it can re-haul its
7:49 Speaker 00 reputation with promises. And Facebook, no, no, that's not enough. If the company really does want to change the narrative about its impact and so forth around the world, it should do so by changing its behavior, how it incentivizes its employees, and also by opening up its data. So they're stuck between telling us the bad stuff and then also telling us that it doesn't actually happen. Hmm. Good luck with that, everybody.
8:15 Speaker 00 All right, it is disrupt week. That means TechCrunch is going to have one heck of a next couple days. Disrupt kicks off tomorrow. This, of course, if you don't know, is our biggest event of the year. We used to host this in person in San Francisco and the whole world would come and it was an absolute blast because back then you could travel. Now you can't, so it's virtual. It's going to be three days and I'm very proud to report that I will be hosting the Extra Crunch stage for all three days. So if you want To see my stupid face in front of my bookshelf, you can do that. You can do that for all three days. Uh, I even shaved, so you're very lucky. I will also be leading a panel with a couple of VCs and CFO of CrowdStrike, talking about going public and kind of the different ways to do that, why it matters,
8:56 Speaker 00 and why CrowdStrike did when it did, and why these VCs are, you know, either pro or con startups going public a little bit earlier. But overall, like, listen, the TechCrunch team has been working on this for a very long time. We have an events team internal to TC. You don't see them. I do a lot because I work with them, but like, these people are amazing and they've been busting their butts for a year to put this event together. It takes so much work to get all the speakers compiled, to get everyone on the same page, to handle all the technology and sales and all that. It has been a real, real push, and I think we've come up with something that is going to be just honestly fantastic. And because it's virtual, it's actually kind of cheap to come. So I'm glad that it's open to more folks. So that should be a lot of fun. Two main tracks. The main stage is going to talk about important tech founders, CEOs, investors, the luminary stuff, you know,
9:38 Speaker 00 the headline people, the people from SoftBank's Vision Fund and Marc Benioff or whatever. On the other stage, the extra current stage, it's more how to, hands-on, founder-focused, business-y stuff. That's where I'll be. The cool thing about that stage is the audience can ask questions. So as we do all these panels and kind of workshops, you can weigh in if you would like. And as a final little PSA about Disrupt, it's going to be a busy week for everyone at TC. So if we're a little slow on email or whatever, it's nothing personal. We're just doing the biggest event we do of the year, and this is how this week's going to go. So please be patient with us. What else? Well, Toast and Freshbooks are going to go public this week here in the US. Toast, of course, is the Boston-based restaurant software and fintech company. Freshbooks is a India and US-based customer, I don't know, success service, if you will.
10:23 Speaker 00 Both debuts are expected on Wednesday, and we may see some S1A filings from both checking out their new price structures. And of course, we'll cover their pricing, their trading, and we'll do a couple of CEO calls if we can squeeze them in along with the conference. But it's going to be a very busy week in the markets. It's going to be a very busy week in startups. There's going to be IPOs and Disrupt, so strap in. You can follow the show on Twitter, at EquityPod if you're into that sort of thing. We use that account to host our Twitter Spaces and so forth. So if you want to hang out. That's why we talk through some breaking news here and there. Follow us on Twitter and do not miss the fun. Also, I'm on Twitter where I tweet under the handle at Alex. If you want to say hello and tell me why my voice is so sultry and so lovely. Otherwise, I'm going to go gear up and write some stuff and then start prepping for disrupt because it's that time. So I'll talk to you soon.
11:06 Speaker 00 In the meantime, stay cool, be safe, get vaccinated. Goodbye.
Previous A knock against bootstrapping Next Freshworks, Toast go public and we have Takes Page updated October 14, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
