Pod Insights Equity Podcast Equity Monday: I hear this fintech thing is going to be big 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.
Markets were busy, with Chinese tech stocks rallying and the rest of the world posting a mix of gains and losses. If you are bullish on public markets, excellent. But if you are bearish, don't worry -- there are diverse enough signals out this morning to satisfy any investing thesis.
Facebook goes on American political TV: To talk about changes it is going to make to its product. A product that it built. It wants point for fixing the thing it made broken. Sure.
And Tesla, after delaying the roll-out of a beta for Full Self Driving, is also being asked by some in India to build cars in that country.
CRED is raising even more money, at an even higher valuation.
Mono gets the Tiger imprimatur, which matters as the startup could prove that the Plaid model will spawn regional players.
French mobile gaming company Homa Games raised $50 million on the back of huge download numbers.
And ahead we have the GitLab direct listing, and AvidExchange IPO.
Chat you on Wednesday!
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 0:12 Speaker 00 Good morning, everybody, and welcome back to Equity Monday. This is Alex, of course. It is October 11th, bright and early here on the East Coast of the United States, and we are here together to chat all about what happened this weekend, what's going on today, and of course, what's ahead this week. We're talking about technology and startups and money, and it's going to be an absolute blast, and we really need to get started.
0:35 Speaker 00 All right, let's kick off with a quick markets update. I know you need to know what's going on, so let's talk about it. American stocks are set to fall this morning. I will just go ahead and say that it is a partial holiday here in the United States, so some folks are off, and news out of America might be a little slower than usual. European stocks were mixed, Asian stocks were generally higher, especially technology shares from China. Now, that is a notable little detail, because, as you know, regulatory pressure from the Chinese government has harmed the value of a great many Chinese technology companies that are public. So to see a rally caught our eyes. So what's going on? Well, it turns out that China's State Administration for Market Regulation, or SAMR, only fined Meituan, a Chinese technology behemoth, if you will, $534 million. Now, that fine is not cheap. A half billion dollars is never
1:20 Speaker 00 something to sneeze at, but if you were expecting a much steeper fine, it can actually appear to be a discount. So shares of Meituan were up 8% in Hong Kong today, and if you don't know, Meituan Jiangping, of course, is a Chinese food delivery giant. Of course, it does other stuff as well. Looking around elsewhere, let's see. After recent gains, cryptos are pretty muted this morning. Bitcoin is at just around $56,000, and Ether is just under $3,600. All right, now, the weekend.
1:46 Speaker 00 All right, so over the weekend, of course, as it is an American holiday-ish weekend, there was a little bit less happening that we care about than we otherwise might see on a Monday morning, but a few things still did happen that really do matter. So first up, we're going to talk about Facebook, Facebook, of course, has been under withering fire in recent weeks thanks to a whistleblower dropping thousands of documents in the company and talking to everybody in a clear voice, something that Facebook's executives have traditionally failed to be able to do. So Nick Clegg, the VP of Global Affairs and Communications at Facebook, the kind of classic longer and longer job title you get at major corporations, went on an American political show to talk about the company. Now, if you've heard of Nick Clegg and are confused why he doesn't seem like a Facebook employee to you in your
2:29 Speaker 00 memory, you're right, he used to be Deputy Prime Minister of the UK. Facebook is just buying former heads of state, apparently, to do their dirty work for them. Love that. All right. So Nick said a couple of things. I'm going to pull here from a Deadline story that had the quotes that we needed. So shout out Deadline for the transcription. We appreciate it. Here's quote number one from Nick. But we understand the concerns of some that we need to press pause, listen to experts, explain our intentions and so on. We're going to introduce new controls for adults of teens on an optional basis, obviously, so adults can supervise what their teens are doing online. Perfectly reasonable. Parents want to parent their kids, kids want to do dumb things. Okay, fine, little controls. I'm fine with that. Now, here's the second bit. Secondly, we'll be doing something which I think will make a considerable difference, which is where the teen is looking at the same content over and over again, and it's content which may not be so conducive to their well-being.
3:14 Speaker 00 We'll nudge them to look at other content. Ah, there's a lot going on in that paragraph, my friends. Facebook really is making content choices for folks that haven't been very good, and now it wants points for making those same content choices slightly better, or maybe we should say slightly less worse. Facebook still seems unable to own up to the fact that it has tuned its product for engagement and that that choice has impacts that are, actually, yes, on its head. It cannot make editorial choices without dealing with editorial responsibility. So essentially, if Facebook wants to take your Time series newsfeed and tune it so that way you spend more time on it, it has to own up to that fact. But it doesn't want to, so Nick Clegg has to go on American political shows and sound dumb. 2021. All right. And then there's Tesla. Two things here. Quickly, an Indian minister
3:59 Speaker 00 asked the Tesla make cars in India to sell in India versus exporting them, say, from China, where Tesla does have a large footprint. Here's a question. Are we going to see nationalization of EV production akin to data residency, like we see, you know, in the EU and China and so forth? Maybe, maybe not, but this did strike me as an interesting one. If Tesla has to go build factories in every major market, it's going to have less centralization, maybe less efficiency. Of course, the Indian market is huge, and so it makes sense to build cars there long term, but get everything at once. So I'm very curious to watch this story develop. Now, last thing about Tesla, of course, the full self-driving beta 10.2 was delayed over the weekend. You may have seen a tweet about this, but I wanted to make sure that everyone kind of heard about it. It's not entirely clear what's going on here and why there's a final delay for this first kind of batch of drivers that are going to get access to it. But given
4:41 Speaker 00 that no one that I've read or heard from thinks this is actually full self-driving, why is it called that? That's a question that I have for Tesla.
4:52 Speaker 00 All right. Next up, let us talk about startups that are making news this morning. I peruse the blog. I picked out the best stuff. Here is what I am stoked about. First up, we have Indian fintech CRED. That's C R E D, all caps. It's looking to raise more capital just weeks after its last raise. We all know the Indian startup market is very, very active. There's lots of money there and lots of optimism, but raising money a couple of weeks is is pretty quick, even for India. So anyways, CRED put together a $200 million round at a $3.75 billion valuation recently. Lot of money, strong price. CRED, though, a fintech, working with credit products, strong margins. Why not? I can see it. Now it's looking for new money at a $5.5 billion valuation, which is a very rapid pace of value increase for a private company anywhere in the world. And I'll just say that Manish Singh broke
5:37 Speaker 00 the story that they're looking for more capital, so I expect it to close by tomorrow. Manish, of course, has been absolutely crushing his coverage of the Indian startup scene. If you don't follow him on Twitter, where have you been? Next up is Tiger Global. Tiger was one of the most active investors in all of the third quarter. I think it was top two or three in the world. This round is worth $15 million into Mono, spelled M O N O. And according to our own Tash Kene Okafor, Mono is quote "an African startup that helps connect consumers' bank accounts to financial applications." Now, I've heard that pitch before, and it was from a company called Plaid, which you may have heard of. Plaid, of course, is an American fintech unicorn worth a bajillion dollars, almost sold to Visa for like 4.6 bajillion dollars, and then the government was like, "No," and then Plaid was like, "Okay," and now it raised some more money and is
6:19 Speaker 00 doing more stuff. But here's the thing about Plaid, I haven't heard much from them lately in the last couple of months. And frankly, I haven't heard much through the grapevine either. So I'm kind of curious, what's going on over at Plaid? Are they still growing as fast as they were? Why is no one bragging to me about that? Anyways, not a surprise to see Mono raising money if it's doing this. Went around its website this morning. It does feel like Plaid for Africa to a degree, which is a compliment, to be clear, because Plaid's a pretty great company. So anyways, if you know how fast Plaid's growing, email me. And to round us out, we're going to talk about France, and we are going to talk about gaming. Gaming's one of my favorite things in the world, and France is a country. All right. So just days after Vudu acquired Beachbump, that was, I think, an intra-France gaming deal. Another French gaming company has raised $50 million in a Series A. In
7:00 Speaker 00 this case, it is mobile gaming startup Homa Games, H-O-M-A Games. Anyways, the round was led by North Zone, according to our own Romaine Dillet, and the company has posted simply enormous numbers of downloads of its titles to date, including 250 million downloads as of February of this year. Now, a quarter billion downloads of anything is a lot. Equity has not done a quarter billion downloads in its 57 years of operation now, roughly, give or take. But mobile gaming, of course, is big, and it's so big, in fact, that now, today, Homa Games has seen 500 million downloads. So it's doubled since February. That's, that's crazy. That's a lot of downloads in mobile games. Now, we all know that gaming is big as an industry, does more money than Hollywood and, you know, other movie industries and
7:42 Speaker 00 so forth. But I think we forget how big mobile gaming is and how popular it is. Well, Homa Games is a good example of just how large that market is. And I'm going to round out the gaming note here with just kind of a public complaint, if I can. Paradox, you European public gaming company, we love you. Where is Royal Court? All right. And that's your gaming news and your gaming complaints, all in the same paragraph. Looking ahead, earnings this week, kind of early, not too much going on there. Keep an Eye out for it. And also, we are going to see a busy week in the public markets. Gitlab should direct list this week, so get excited about that. It's going to be a fascinating IPO, well, public offering, really, for a fully remote company that competes with Microsoft, interesting enough. And then, of course, Avid Exchange will go public in a traditional IPO later this week, and NerdWallet filed as last week closed out.
8:27 Speaker 00 So more to come about that particular IPO on the blog later this morning.
8:34 Speaker 00 All right, that is our show. Ladies and gentlemen, do not forget you can follow Equity on Twitter, where we go under the handle at EquityPod. We often use that as our Twitter space base. So drop by, say hello. We are always there hanging out. Also, a shout out to Chris, who is off for a couple more days. Hope your rest is going well. We adore you. And if you want to hang out with me and tell me why my diction is terrible and why I should be fired from the show, I'm over on Twitter under the handle at Alex. And with that, we'll talk to you soon. We hope you're doing well. Happy Monday and good luck. Bye.
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