Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: Elon Musk Elon Musk's the crypto markets, while Indian startups raise huge rounds About this episode Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
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 and myself here.
There was lots to get through today, so, in order, here's the rundown:
Early-stage founders can still apply for the impending Disrupt Battlefield even. You can sign up here if that's you. It's going to be a lot of fun tbh.
From the weekend: San Francisco real estate is a mess; Twitter Blue is coming and I am hype about it; Elon Musk roiled crypto markets by being himself, which doesn't speak too highly of the asset class.
AT&T is getting out of the TV game to some degree, selling media assets to help pay down debt. Just like Verizon did by selling TechCrunch and family to Apollo.
We also chatted about two Indian mega-rounds: Pine Labs raising $285 million and Moglix raising $120 million.
From the early-stage front, two rounds this morning for your pleasure: Telda's super-cool pre-seed round, and recent Y Combinator-grad Houm's latest investment, which explains why the accelerator program is still so popular.
Extra Crunch Live this week is Shaun Maguire (Sequoia) + Samir Vasavada (Vise) on Wednesday, May 19th, at 11:30AM PST / 2:30PM EST.
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 0:00 Speaker 00 Equity is brought to you by Extra Crunch, that prodigious tech ranch paywall you keep running into. You can break through that paywall at a steep discount if you use the promo code EQUITY. If you do, you'll get access to our best stuff and you'll make Equity look really good internally at the same time. Enough of that, let's start the show.
0:25 Speaker 00 Good morning and welcome to Equities Monday, episode, our weekly primer where we catch up on the news and as always, explore the numbers behind the headlines. My name is Alex Wilhelm. Today is May 17th, 2021, and the week is kicking off with a bang. However, before we get into any of that, my dear friend Nisha, who runs the startup competition at our events, wanted me to let all the early-stage founders know that they can still apply to take part in the upcoming Disrupt Battlefield event up until May 27th at basically midnight. The winner gets 100K, I think, for zero equity, so please come and take our money. I will link to her post on the matter in the show notes over on the blog. And of course, previous competitors like Yext
1:08 Speaker 00 have gone on to go public, so it's a good time. I will see you there. And with that, let's talk about the news.
1:17 Speaker 00 So kicking off with this weekend, it was actually not super crazy busy, which means that we get to look under a couple of stones this morning. One thing that did catch my eye this weekend was a CNBC report indicating that SF, our San Francisco-based companies, are really taking pretty large real estate charges due to unused space or kind of defaulting renters. Regardless of whether you think Miami is sufficiently above sea level or not to be a long-term technology hub, precisely what San Francisco will look like when the pandemic lifts is not entirely clear from a technology perspective, but my prediction is that SF will look pretty much like it did before. Sure, some of my friends have left, some of my friends are still there. Look, old people leaving for Florida
2:00 Speaker 00 is not a surprise in American culture. That's pretty standard. And I bet you that young people who are ambitious will move to San Francisco like before. So woo, so much for that being a big Change. Also this weekend, news broke that Twitter is building a subscription service that may be called Twitter Blue. I love that name. Apparently it will cost a couple of dollars per month and come with additional functionality for the service. As a Twitter addict, of course, I will pay for it and double if it will do away with ads because Twitter ads are annoying. Twitter, of course, is working to grow its overall revenue footprint in an advertising market run by two companies of which it is neither. So the subscription push really makes sense. And at the price point being discussed, it may actually have a pretty wide audience. And that brings me to a question that I have about startups. So Twitter, right?
2:45 Speaker 00 Take a subscription product, which I think is going to be $3 a month, give or take. And its newsletter service, because about review and kind of bake that into Twitter. And what you have is the possibility of almost medium like network in which there's like writers and there's money and the two can come together. And suddenly Twitter is like taking on Substack, maybe. Substack, of course, is one of the hotter startups in Silicon Valley at the moment. Controversial, maybe, but really famous for having an interest in Horowitz money stuffed up to its gills. I would love to see Twitter versus Substack because I'm a writer and having two companies bashing each other to try to gain my custom. Sounds lovely. Who would have thought that writing it for all this time would be a hot commodity?
3:26 Speaker 00 It's fun. Now turn into the wider world, the impact of WhatsApp's privacy changes drove a huge spike in downloads of rival chat services Telegram and Signal in India. Another example of platform overreach, I think, and kind of the glory of having other options. Also, just keep in mind, this is a good example of how Facebook is not God, even though it is obviously the biggest player in the social space. You can go after them because they will screw up like this, capitalize on it. And finally, crypto prices shifted around this weekend as Elon Musk did Elon Musk things. Namely, moving trillion dollar markets by discussing which cryptocurrencies he prefers. I am not going to drag you through the saga of Elon and crypto in the last couple of weeks, I guess.
4:08 Speaker 00 The gist is it turns out that one nerd can move the crypto markets by like a bajillion dollars. It's kind of crazy. Anyways.
4:19 Speaker 00 Turning to this morning, quite a lot has happened. Starting at the very top, Asian markets were mixed. The US stock market is set to start a little bit lower today. And European stocks are also mixed as I record this. Now, major cryptos are off 7% to 10% in the last 24 hours, except, according to CoinMarketCap, Solana, which is the 16th most valuable cryptocurrency. It's worth $2.5 billion, apparently, and is up 1.5% in the last day. Well done, Solana, whatever the [bleep] you are. Now, the big business story of the morning doesn't impact the startup world much, but it's something that's so big, we kind of have to talk about it. So, AT&T, an American telecom,
5:00 Speaker 00 is spinning off its linear TV assets to a thing called Discovery, which is another kind of linear TV thing, and they're going to schmush them together. Now, the decision has a lot of folks talking in the media world, but there are really just two things that stood out to me that I want to tell you about. The first is that this move sounds super similar to what Verizon is doing with Verizon Media Group, which is my employer, because VMG owns TechCrunch. Namely, AT&T is spinning out media assets to try to lessen its debt load so that it can spend more on hardware and stuff for 5G. All right, that's pretty familiar. And second, linear TV deals always sound a bit like the scraping sounds that deck chairs make when you arrange them on a sinking ship. Like, if you take two companies that exist in kind of a slipping market,
5:45 Speaker 00 can they really combine and make things work better? Like, I don't know, what if you went back in time and combined AOL and Yahoo? You know, would that work? Now, moving along before someone shouts at me, a few pieces of private market news for your morning. TechCrunch reports that India-based Pine Labs, a startup that offers merchants' payments terminals, invoicing tools, and working capital, said on Monday it has completed the first close of a $285 million funding as the nearly two-decade-old firm looks to expand its offerings and build and scale an online payments gateway. Essentially, a company that's quite old, raised a bajillion dollars for online payments tech. Not surprised by this. Think about how much money Stripe is worth. Everyone wants a piece of that particular pie in their own country.
6:26 Speaker 00 Now, moving on, India-based Moglix, an industrial business-to-business marketplace in India, said on Monday that it has raised 120 million in a new financing round at a $1 billion valuation, becoming what our own Manish Singh notes is the 13th firm from the world's second-largest market to attain unicorn status this year. That's 13 unicorns in, what is it now, four or five months? So, times two, 25 unicorns from India this year, maybe, at least? That is a lot. I just still cannot shake how notable it is that tech news from India seems to always deal with these huge mega rounds and new unicorns and this and that, while tech news from China that I read at least is mostly about a government crackdown on tech companies. Now, obviously, neither narrative that I just mentioned is entirely correct or fair,
7:10 Speaker 00 but the difference and kind of the gap between them does keep sticking in my mind.
7:16 Speaker 00 All right, so on the early-stage funding front, we have two rounds of your enjoyment this morning, both of which I am very, very excited about. Now, first up, we have the newly-launched digital bank Telda, that's T-E-L-D-A, which targets the Egyptian market. It has put together a $5 million pre-seed round, very cool, but includes money from Sequoia Capital, very, very cool. So here we're seeing an American VC put money into an Egyptian neo-bank. My philosophy, by the way, that there is infinite private capital for neo-banks in general continues to be correct. I mean, not to toot my own horn, because it's a very, very obvious trend, but I presume that Telda will raise 500 million and then 5 billion in the next couple of weeks, because that is what neo-banks do. Though it is very cool to hear about Egyptian startups, a cohort that I honestly don't know enough about.
8:01 Speaker 00 If you're an Egyptian startup, say hi, love to say hi. All right, second, Latin American house-selling service Hoom, which TC calls kind of like a consumer-run Zillow to some degree, put together an $8 million seed round. That is neither here nor there, but what's cool is the company, TechCrunch reports, was part of the recent Y Combinator winter 2021 batch. That means that a recent YC grad raised $8 million. Not that its valuation was $8 million, but we've essentially converted old YC post-money valuations into modern YC round sizes. And that is probably the best summary of the startup market in the last five years I can possibly do in so few words.
8:41 Speaker 00 All right. So looking ahead, the earnings calendar isn't super busy, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind for the week ahead, one of which is Google's I/O event. It is coming this week from the 18th to the 20th. Of course, TechCrunch will have all the coverage that you need, so stick to the blog if you want to keep up with what Mountain View is up to. Tencent, Cisco, and Baidu will drop earnings this week, so we still are getting some stuff, but I mean, the bulk of it's already happened. And this week, TechCrunch's Extra Crunch Live is Sean McGuire from Sequoia and Samir Vasavada from Vise, which V-I-S-E, not V-I-C-E. That is this Wednesday, May 19th at 11:30 a.m. PST, 2:30 p.m. EST, and some later time in Europe. Now, closing, a brief reminder, you can follow the show on Twitter at EquityPod
9:25 Speaker 00 or myself on Twitter where I post under the name @Alex. And with that, hugs, good luck, and may you have a better second vaccine dose than I had. Thank you, Moderna, but also ouch.
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