Equity Monday: Robotaxis hit a speed bump and IPOs are back on the menu

Our Monday show covers the latest in tech news from the weekend and what’s making headlines early in the week. Here’s the rundown from this morning, with real news from the crypto-front, and even a neat startup round to round it out! Stocks are up in most of the world, China apart. The Chinese economy is a real topic of conversation lately, mostly centered around concerns regarding credit appetite, debt levels, housing costs, and government activity. In the crypto-world, prices are sharply lower compared to a week ago, and Recur is no more. The partial retrenchment of Cruise in San Francisco is a bummer, but given how poor human drivers are here's hoping that progress doesn't slow on the self-driving front. IPOs are back? Kinda, maybe, and perhaps. The good news is that recent data from Instacart and Databricks indicate that we could see some filings soon. And to close out, Threads is coming to the desktop web while Enough put together a big round for mushroom-based proteins. For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website. Equity drops at 7 a.m. PT every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. TechCrunch also has a great show on crypto, a show that interviews founders and more! 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

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, the TechCrunch podcast where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex. Good morning. Welcome to our Monday show where we take a look to the weekend that was and a look at the week that is to come. Today is August 21st, 2023, and on the podcast this morning, we have stocks and earnings, crypto and chaos, self-driving cars, the possible resurrection of the IPO market, threads, and even more money for fake meat startups. It's a packed show today. Let's go.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  Starting off, as we always do, with a look at the stock market. Shares are up today in Japan and South Korea, but down in China. Regarding China, the country's central bank cut its one year loan prime rate by 10 basis points today, the second cut to that key rate in just three months. Concerns about the Chinese economy are running rampant at the moment. It is something to keep at least one eye on. Over in Europe, shares are up and they are also set to rise in the US as well, though after a pretty rough week last week. So, early gains should prove more of a recovery than any sort of real advance. Now, on the earnings front, we are really getting close to the end. On Monday, we'll hear from Zoom. We'll hear from Baidu on Tuesday. Wednesday

• 1:27Speaker 00

  brings us Nvidia, Snowflake, Autodesk, Splunk, and Zora. And then on Thursday, we'll hear from Intuit, NetEase, Workday, Weibo, and Domo. Next up is crypto. Well, friends, I whined for weeks that not much was happening in crypto prices. The good news is that something has happened. The bad news is that what happened was bad. So, in the last week, the price of Bitcoin is off around 11.4% to around $26,000. And in the last seven days, the price of Ether, Ethereum's token, is off 9.4% to around $1,672. Elsewhere in crypto, Binance's BNB token is off 12.3% in the last week, and XRP is off 12.3%.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  16.3%. The list goes on. So what's happening? Well, on the biggest day of the recent crypto drop, the conversation inside the crypto community was around the Chapter 15 bankruptcy filing of former Chinese property heavyweight Evergrande, but that was a hypothetical connection at best. No matter the cause of the news, it's tough times in crypto land. News came late last week, for example, that Recur is shutting down. The company most recently raised a $50 million Series A back in mid-September of 2021, and that was at a $333 million post-money valuation, according to PitchBook. The goal at Recur was to help other companies get into Web3

• 2:53Speaker 00

  by helping them bring digital assets to gaming and loyalty programs. That seems to have not worked, or at least not worked well enough, and the platform will shutter on November 16, 2023, so a couple of months from now. Why bring this up? We're not trying to be rude, but we are starting to see companies that raised big rounds in late 21 run short of funds. That could become a trend everywhere in the startup world, not just crypto. Not all the crypto news is bad, however. One thing that I am tracking is Base, Coinbase's L2 chain that has seen some very interesting early traction, and that in turn could drive potentially tasty fees for the American exchange. More on the site when I get a chance, but something to keep your eyes on.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  Next up is my favorite part of the show, what I call "big news that matters", and we're going to start with self-driving cars. Cruise, the self-driving car subsidiary of GM, has been asked to reduce its robotaxi fleet by 50% in San Francisco following a crash late last week with a firetruck. Now, recall that it was only around 10 days ago that California regulators gave the green light to Cruise and Waymo to offer their commercial robotaxi services in the city for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Now, on one hand, self-driving cars do have a huge challenge in front of them, and thus having some caution around their deployment really is pretty reasonable, especially when we're seeing very visible issues like crashes.

• 4:22Speaker 00

  On the other hand, though, have you seen humans drive? I mean, dear God, it's not like we're actually very good at this. So here's hoping that the Waymo and Cruise situation gets sorted out very quickly, and we can all get back to the important work of getting humans out from behind the wheel ASAP. And then suddenly IPOs are back on the menu. Financial results from Instacart and Databricks have been reported in recent weeks, while ARM is also preparing an IPO, and that has led to a delusion of coverage about how the tech IPO market could be coming back to life. Word is that Instacart is going to file very soon. Let that happen, please, because I so, so need it. And Databricks is in the mix as well, though I would say that debut seems less pressing

• 5:07Speaker 00

  if the company is going to raise more private cash. Still, though, I wouldn't be shocked if Databricks did file in Q1 2024 with 2023 numbers in hand. Conventional wisdom is that the IPO market needs a tech player that is unimpeachably strong to kick the door open and lift that IPO window, if we're going to mix our metaphors. And a few champions do appear to be stepping up. Let's see who is the bravest. If it is Instacart, I will have watched yet another company go from tiny to public. And that means little, other than the fact that I'm getting older and time passes along. But I still do recall when the grocery delivery company's erstwhile CEO used to send me Facebook messages when it added another Bay Area city to its early platform reach.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  Very different times, but hey, whoever goes public first is my favorite.

• 5:58Speaker 00

  Before I let you go, two shorties. The first is that The Wall Street Journal reports that Meta is bringing its Twitter competitor Threads to the desktop web. This is good, because a lot of Twitter power users are actually on their desktop environment, though I'm worried because Instagram's current web app is crap. It's very clear that Meta is a mobile-first company, so how well can it really do here? I'm going to be curious to find out. Now, in the bigger picture sense, does it not seem that Meta is more and more serious about Threads? Sure, it built it quickly, but it seems to have kept up the product momentum. Zuck is active over there, for example, and thanks to his almost-but-never-really-happening fight with Musk, Threads has retained at least some of its attention.

• 6:42Speaker 00

  And it seems to be eating into Twitter. One thing that I am noticing is that my personal growth on Twitter has flat And I am now fluctuating in a tight 100 to 200 follower band. Even more, I am noticing that some of my old Twitter favorites really have left the service for good and have made new digital homes elsewhere. This sucks because they used to all be in one place, which was very lovely for me. And now I have to go hunting. But all this work by Threads and other competitors is having an impact. In related news, TechCrunch reported recently that Blue Sky suffered from too much demand when Twitter's new owner Elon Musk announced that his company might delete its blocking functionality. So Threads and Blue Sky, maybe they actually really are here to stay.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  And next up, a company called Enough. It's based in Scotland and it just raised 40 million euro for its mushroom-based protein work that it wants to use to help make more fake meat. I am very glad to see money still flowing into the sector despite what happened to a couple of companies in the space that went public and struggled. Because I eat way too much meat and I'm helping murder the planet, which is bad. So what I would like is a cool alternative protein that tastes good and can actually pass for bacon. Let's see if Enough is enough.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  And that is our show for this fine Monday morning. If you need even more equity in the interim, however, you can check us out on Twitter and Threads where we tweet under the handle EquityPod. And don't forget, this show is going to kick off this year's TechCrunch Disrupt, September 19th through the 21st in San Francisco, live. So if you want to heckle, throw tomatoes, whatever, come and do that. Of course, we also have two sister shows, Chain Reaction on the crypto beat and Found on the founder front. They are excellent. Give them a try. In the meantime, Equity is back on Wednesday and Friday. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  Equity is hosted by myself, editor in chief of TechCrunch Plus, Alex Wilhelm, and TechCrunch senior reporter, Mary Ann Azvedo. We are produced by Teresa Locan Solo with editing by Kel. Bryce Durbin is our illustrator. And a big thank you to the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch Audio Products. Thank you so much for listening and we'll talk to you next time.