Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: Crypto hacks and a scuttled AI IPO About this episode It finally happened, ladies and gentleman and our non-binary friends. The Holiday News Slowdown has arrived. Late, I might add, but still here at last. But that did not stop Grace and Alex from making you your weekly kickoff show!
Welcome to the final Equity Monday of the year. Here's what we got into:
The Indian PM's Twitter account was hacked, and used to promote bitcoin. Not a great look for the crypto world.
The SenseTime IPO is on hold after the US government "added SenseTime Group Limited to the Non-SDN Chinese Military-Industrial Complex Companies List," per the company. The AI listing's delay is not a great look for Chinese tech market liquidity.
Fuse added $25 million to its Series B, helping bring insurance products to Southeast Asia.
Thirdweb raised $5 million to bring together no-code and Web3, which we think is pretty cool.
Don't forget that Equity is back Friday for a final news roundup, and that we have two holiday eps coming during the last two weeks of the year! Talk soon!
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.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hello, everybody. Good morning. It is Monday, December 10th, 2021. This is Alex and welcome to our kickoff show where we figure out what's coming up, what happened over the weekend and what we might care about during today's lunch break. Well, here's some news. This is the last Equity Monday of the year. We are going to be taking a break for the last two weeks of 2021. We do have some special episodes promised. Don't worry, we're not going to leave you all alone. But after this Equity Monday and our Friday roundup, we will go into stasis for a couple of weeks, recharge, rest, and come back at 110% in January. But first, guys, the news. All right. So the stock market, taking a look around the world, Asian stocks mostly up, European stocks mostly up, and American stocks were set to rise. But while I was writing the
0:51 Speaker 00 script this morning, I did see that the Russell 2000 was looking a little bit weak. So keep an eye on what's going on. We could see a small cap, big cap divide today. And the fact that I'm talking about that is indicative of the fact that things are pretty quiet. In fact, if you want an indication of just how much things have slowed down in the last couple of days, the big business news story involved Peloton, and not because of some macro trend or, you know, a real terrifying report from some short seller. No, in fact, it was because someone named Mr. Big on a reboot of a show called Sex and the City died during one of the episodes after writing the Peloton. That's what we're down to. It's really the dregs. But hey, you know what? The winter slowdown is not bad. We could all use a break. And this week, we do have the Samsara
1:33 Speaker 00 IPO. So if you care about IOT, we have quite a lot coming up for you there. With that, guys, I think we can talk about the big news.
1:42 Speaker 00 All right, kicking off the big news. Well, the biggest news story this weekend that I was watching was when the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Twitter account was briefly compromised, as Tuck Wunsch put it, and then was used to promote a Bitcoin scam. This, if you're in the US, is akin to, I don't know, Joe Biden's Twitter account saying the US has accepted cryptocurrency as its key currency and is giving some away. Yes, that would be suspect, given that Joe Biden probably doesn't know how to use a computer. But I will just say that this can have an impact around the world and was Very embarrassing moment for Twitter, for the Indian government, and I would say for crypto fans as well. It's not good when the thing you're trying to tell government regulators is going to change the world is being used as a way to extract money from dupes. Not a good look. A small analogy here, just really quickly.
2:24 Speaker 00 If you recall the last couple of years, China's overall regulatory posture towards the world of cryptocurrencies was back and forth, if you will. There would be some bad news and then things would kind of loosen up for a little bit and there'd be some more bad news and then people would say, you know, is this fun? Is this actually a regulatory change? In the end, the bears in China, the anti crypto folks kind of won out. And so I'm curious to see where India goes regarding cryptocurrency next, but I'll just say this didn't help. The other major news story from this weekend is that the SenseTime IPO is off. Now, if you recall, this was going to be a $767 million public listing of Chinese AI companies SenseTime in Hong Kong. A couple of reasons why this matters.
3:04 Speaker 00 One, there is the AI arms race between China and the United States, a very important geopolitical conversation to have. Also, we're seeing Chinese companies stop listing on US exchanges. We're seeing DDD list. There's rumors that Alibaba itself might D-list from the American markets, which means that going public in Hong Kong is going to be a key liquidity path for Chinese tech companies. So to see an AI company going public in Hong Kong pull its listing is a pretty big darn deal. So what's going on? Well, we dug into the company's regulatory filings and we found the note about why it's pulling its IPO. And frankly, because I cannot improve on the official language, I'm just going to read you a paragraph that does include a little bit of a clip in the middle, but you'll see what I mean. Here is what SenseTime said about the delay.
3:46 Speaker 00 "On December 10th, 2021, the US Department of the Treasury added SenseTime Group Limited to the non-SDN Chinese military industrial complex companies list." I love that sentence. "To safeguard the interest of the potential investors of the company by helping them consider the potential impact of such latest development on their investment decision, the company," bit of a break, "announces that there will be a postponement of the global offering and the listing, and the company expects to publish a prospectus later on." So essentially, the US government, the thing, and now the IPO is off. "But not all is lost. The company remains, quote, 'committed to completing the global offering and the listing soon.'" Now, this matters on a couple of different ways, but I'll just say this. We don't know if the company decided to pull its offering, if the Hong Kong exchange demanded this, or the Chinese government forced it.
4:29 Speaker 00 But I'll just say, not a very good look for the overall Chinese technology market.
4:35 Speaker 00 Now let's talk about a couple of startups, including Fuse. Fuse is an Indonesia-based insurtech startup that announced that it today has secured a $25 million Series B extension round, so an enormous addition to its preceding Series B. Plans to use the money to move into countries including Thailand, Vietnam, and other parts of Southeast Asia. Now, what's fun about this company is that it works in the insurtech space. And if you've been tracking the US startup market, insurtech companies have been kind of struggling in the last couple of quarters. So it's fun to see that globally, insurtech is definitely not dead. So what does the company actually do? Well, according to TechRunch.com, quote, "Fuse connects insurance companies with multiple distribution channels and partners to make insurance services accessible and affordable." The last couple of words there are very important.
5:18 Speaker 00 A lot of people around the world don't have access to insurance products at all, or they can't afford them, but making them accessible and affordable, well, Fuse could have a pretty big impact on its own market. And then there's Third Web. Third Web is an interesting kind of hybrid of Web3, which is the broader world of blockchain or cryptocurrencies, and the no-code world. Third Web just closed a $5 million round from a number of folks, including Gary Vaynerchuk and Mark Cuban. So what does it do? Well, it's kind of like essentially allowing creators, or folks that make art or music or other things, to interact with the Web3 world and build products for the blockchain while not using code. Pretty much, it's no-code plus blockchain, which I absolutely adore, because it does seem to be that a lot of the gains from the crypto world are going more to the developers
6:02 Speaker 00 than to the creators, and that seems to be a little bit backwards. Who should make the money? The folks building the rails or the folks traveling on the rails? Well, I would say the latter. And so I hope that projects like this can really help unlock, or maybe broaden, the crypto world to more folks. Anyways, there are 500 unique projects currently on Third Web, and the company eventually plans to take a 5% take of secondary sales. So that's kind of an aligned way to make sure the company only makes money when its users do. But I'll just say this, 5% of secondary sales is kind of a future business model. It'll be fun to see how quickly that becomes an actual revenue stream.
6:37 Speaker 00 Just to close us off today, one little thought from me, which is that as the news dies down, there seems to be a greater penalty for making mistakes. Think about the better.com fiasco and the CEO firing all those people on Zoom and how that became an international meme and how he got TikToked for being a jerk and all this. The lesson does seem to be if you're going to be a jerk, don't do it around the holiday season because there's not that much going on. Imagine if the better.com fiasco had come during, I don't know, YC Demo Day or an Apple hardware event. No one would have paid attention. We can only think about one or two things at a time and it's lunch and one news event. So better.com would have been swept under the news rug, but because nothing else was going on, well, it became the story for several, several days. So the lesson here is if you're going to implode
7:20 Speaker 00 your company or your corporate brand, don't do it around December because everyone's going to make you look extra dumb. Now, just before we go, a couple of very small personal notes for me because I can't, no one can stop me because I have the mic. Ha ha. Equity Monday, this particular episode has been an absolute treat this year. We made up this idea, I think it's about two years ago now during the holiday break, Chris and I, and we thought we'd try it out and now we've done two years of them. So it's probably around 100 episodes and that's just kind of crazy. It's an idea that just kind of persisted and that's thanks to y'all showing up every single Monday and listening as a bunch. So thank you. Also, this is effectively my two-year anniversary of my return to TechRunch. It was a couple of days ago, but same diff, you know? And also Equity turns five next
8:01 Speaker 00 year in March and we're coming up on episode 500. So wow, it's just a couple of milestones all hitting at the same time, making me feel very just thankful that I get to do this as part of my job. And the reason why I get to is you. It's all thanks to you. You guys have been showing up for years and years and just putting numbers into the show that we never kind of expected to see and it means we get to keep doing it. So a big thanks from myself and I'm sure from the rest of Equity crew as well. We're back Friday morning with our news roundup and don't forget you can follow the show on Twitter where we tweet under the handle EquityPod. I tweet under the handle at Alex and we'll talk to you Friday morning and then we're going to sleep for two weeks. Goodbye.
Previous Your local trucker is giving us creator economy vibes Next You are the most influential person we know Page updated October 14, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
