Pod Insights Equity Podcast You are the most influential person we know About this episode To close out the year, Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex headed to the mic with Grace and Chris behind the scenes. We got to our favorite topics, and honestly, got a chance to just laugh our way through the final innings of the year.
Here's what we got to:
Factor raised a Seed round for up-chain logistics work, Phylagen is working to track airborne illness, and Notus wants to help you find the right influencer to buy.
We also dove into the How Big Can Y Combinator Really Get discussion that Haje kicked off. We don't all agree on this one, so talk it through with us.
Then we chatted about Course Hero, edtech, and when it can -- and may not! -- make sense to raise venture capital.
To close we dove into Alex's SPAC story about the metaverse, touched on the Reddit IPO, and made fun of whatever garbage this is.
And that's our last news round up of the year. Stay tuned for our 2021 look back episode that comes out on Friday, December 24 and our 2022 predictions-meets-manifestations episode that comes out on Friday, December 31st. You can check out our Twitter account for when they go live. Happy Holidays from the Equity family to you and yours. May your days be merry, even if they're in the metaverse.
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 Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and the nuance behind the headlines. My name is Alex and I'm here with the team and we are all in a very festive mood, not because it is the holiday season, though it is for a great many religions and festivals and so forth, but also because this is the very last Equity recording of 2021. Our holiday eps are in the can for the next couple of weeks. Guys, this is it. So the producers can't stop us. Anything to get off your chest before we start the actual show? This is a chance to air the grievances and so forth.
0:41 Speaker 01 I feel like this whole year was really spent yelling into a mic with all of you. So I'm on an earnest note, really grateful.
0:48 Speaker 00 Also, Mary Ann, thanks for joining the show this year. You've been a great addition to the planning process, the recording process. I've known you forever, but you've been a great fit and thank you for your time and effort.
0:57 Speaker 02 Thank you, guys. I'm excited to be here with you.
1:00 Speaker 00 Okay, one more time, once more around the sun. Ladies and gentlemen, today we are talking about funding rounds from Factor, Filogen, and Notice. I think it's pronounced Notice, might be Notus, we'll see. And then we have Y Combinator's batch size and the implications thereof. We have Course QRO and the question of venture capital and when it's appropriate to raise it and then how much. And then also, we're going to wrap up with a little bit on the metaverse because how can we possibly avoid the hottest topic of Q4 2021 on the last show of the year? To kick us off, though, Factor. Natasha, this is a company that I'm actually kind of excited about because we hear so much about shipping containers outside of LA stuck on ships, but people don't talk enough about the other end of the supply chain, the start of it.
1:42 Speaker 01 I feel like when we think about supply in general, to your point, we think about those ships. We don't think about a manufacturer ordering supplies. So I really liked how the startup is focusing on what they're calling the first mile part of the supply chain. They are using AI to automate a lot of those core processes, whether it's figuring out payment tools, order tracking, getting data about these suppliers. And they just raised $6 million from Gradient Ventures and a bunch of others to do it better and do it more.
2:10 Speaker 00 What I like about this is that we now have seen startups kind of at every single point of the supply chain process, Mary Ann. We have these guys right at the front. We have companies like Shippo at the far other end of this, helping with like consumers get stuff delivered to them. We have rapid delivery startups. We have logistics companies. It's everywhere now.
2:25 Speaker 02 They're really trying to get in very, very early in the process. So rather than reacting to situations, they're trying to prevent the situations from happening to begin with. They can do what they say they're going to do well. That can prevent a lot of other problems down the road.
2:39 Speaker 01 A lot of the way we work is reactive, and I think COVID caused a lot of startups who had the money to bring their supply chain operations in-house or to at least have more control over it. But that probably created a divide of sorts between the startups that could afford that and the ones that couldn't. I don't know if it's a fair read, but with Factor, I was like, maybe this is them somewhat leveling the playing ground.
3:00 Speaker 00 They do have 250 customers, so they're not selling just a three mega corpse. I don't think they're big enough yet, given that they just raised 6 million, which is a relatively modest venture round, to break down their customer makeup for us and such. But the next time we hear about them, because I'm sure they'll raise money, January 15th, give or take, we should ask them who they serve mostly and if they are actually helping smaller companies do better, or if this is really just helping kind of the upper class of manufacturing firms.
3:23 Speaker 02 It's yet another example of everyone's a fintech. Part of what they're doing is helping these suppliers with getting payments on time. That can be a bottleneck in this whole process. Fintech is becoming a part of like everything.
3:36 Speaker 00 Well, I mean, why wouldn't it? There's money in everything. Money is how we kind of like grease the global skids for all interactions between humans, which is all of business. And so, you know, fundamentally, it almost feels weird that, you know, finance was was more separate from certain processes. Maybe I'm kind of butchering that explanation, but to me, it feels thematically obvious in retrospect.
3:57 Speaker 02 And also, they're saying they're going to use their capital in part to develop their financial services capabilities. So, you know, further to that point.
4:05 Speaker 01 My worry here is that first mile is such a great branding move. It's accurate, but it's also a great branding move. So this is definitely going to be a theme next year. We're going to see a lot more last mile delivery startups start to jump to this world. So damn it.
4:17 Speaker 00 Well, now we need middle mile startups and then we can have the full. All right.
4:21 Speaker 01 End to end. Damn it.
4:22 Speaker 00 No, Natasha, don't. Okay, this, by the way, is why the equity team is not a collection of brand consultants. It turns out, I'll just say that customer order volume of the company did grow 10x in the last nine months, explaining the venture capital around, and we can scoot along to, I'm going to go with Filogen, I think, right? Is that, is that everyone's read of how to pronounce this?
4:42 Speaker 01 That feels legit. Yeah, it sounds smart and futuristic, which is exactly what it is.
4:46 Speaker 00 Hey, Natasha there. And speaking of branding, never mind, we are going to take on that role. Filogen does something very interesting, which is that it tracks indoor microbiomes. And when I think about the word microbiome, I think about all those kind of gut startups that were like working on the insides of you. This is not that. This is trying to figure out what's in the air in different rooms and offices, I think.
5:07 Speaker 01 I have so many thoughts on this startup because maybe the first few months of the pandemic, we saw this wave of sanitizing companies pop up, promising to help companies adapt to being in person eventually. But then soon later, we learned cleaning surfaces isn't how you stop the spread of COVID. It's in the air. So those startups got really quiet and they couldn't use that as a pitch anymore. This one feels more legit because like you said, Alex, they're focusing more on air than surfaces. To me, that is a COVID-19 pivot, but one that I have a little bit more faith in. Before they were focusing on COVID, they were basically tracking how companies' products went through the supply chain.
5:49 Speaker 01 So kind of going back to our last funding round and they would track if like a product had a detour, because if it has a detour, then it could have gotten tampered with. And that could be deadly for a consumer. And so that's what kind of gave them this first bank of understanding microorganisms.
6:04 Speaker 00 So maybe I lost a lot on this before we note that it has grown its revenue 10x year over year. So they're at least finding some sort of market fit. Let's think about a post-COVID. Well, sorry, that's not the right way to phrase that. I don't think post-COVID just seems like wishful thinking now. Let's, let's imagine a future in which COVID is less of a thing that we care about minute to minute. There's going to be other. Airborne things that are worth tracking that are not just COVID-19, right? So to me, the idea of building a, I don't know, a scanning system for overall air quality, not just tracking particulate matter and pollution, but also possibly airborne respiratory illnesses. It makes good sense to me. It sounds dystopian. It sounds like the bad start to a kind of schlocky sci fi novel,
6:47 Speaker 00 but I can kind of see this, you know, building saying, hey, you know, there's ambient tracking for pathogens and you know.
6:53 Speaker 02 Yeah. And I think that's cool. To me, that the bigger picture of that is more interesting because yeah, like you're saying, there's definitely things out there other than COVID. So when you look at it that way, definitely cool. But if you look at it just from the COVID perspective, I'm less like.
7:06 Speaker 01 The outcomes feel harder to prove. So I completely agree with that. I think like it'll be much more of like that nice to have for some sort of companies at this stage, or at least how much they've told us on the website. But Alex, you were saying revenue information wise, they're doing pretty good.
7:20 Speaker 00 Yeah. I mean, look, anytime I start up, that's seven years old, grows revenue 10x in a year. You know, they've, they've found something that has pushed them into a new kind of like frame of growth. And then all of a sudden they become, I don't mean this in a crass way, but much more venture backable. And so the company probably could go out and raise a bunch of money if it wanted to. It has raised 30 million to date, including from people like 3M, which is a, gosh, I mean, hard to explain. 3M was kind of like baby GE back when GE was good. And then we found out that industrial conglomerates were bad and then they're all kind of selling off assets now. But 3M used to be cool. They're an investor, along with breakout ventures. And here's a new one to me, the cultivian sandbox, I think. Cultivian, cultivan. I don't know how to pronounce that, but that company also is in there.
8:03 Speaker 01 One last question before we go to the last funding round of the year. I can't believe I'm, I'm just going to keep saying that throughout this.
8:08 Speaker 00 That's fine. That's fine.
8:10 Speaker 01 Both of you are people who want to work from home for the long term. Would it help you to go to a tech ranch event next year or just more in-person work events? If you had something that told you air quality or does that not feel like the dealmaker for you? Just getting a temp check.
8:26 Speaker 02 I'm just fully expecting the air to be full of stuff.
8:29 Speaker 00 Yeah.
8:30 Speaker 02 You know, like not great stuff. So I think if I were to try to avoid that, it would never leave the house.
8:36 Speaker 00 I just want to throw in a thing about the remote work thing. If there was a tech ranch office near to where I lived. I would go occasionally. You know, I used to live in San Francisco. I would go to the TC office. I mean, there are times I went a lot, times I went less, but like, you know, you show up occasionally. There's work things. We used to have mandatory fun time on Thursdays. We had a little alcoholic craze. We'd do vodka shots in the kitchen. It was fun. But I mean, like, most of the time TC wants me to be writing, you know, and so like, they don't want me commuting to Boston to go visit the, well, it used to be the Verizon Media Group office, but now the Yahoo office up there, because it would just burn all my time. So I mean, not like mortally opposed to go into an office. I just don't have time to do that and meet my expectations. So anyways, Natasha, let's go to the last funding round of the year.
9:22 Speaker 01 The year.
9:24 Speaker 00 Which is notice.
9:26 Speaker 01 This company had one of the coolest cold emails that I've gotten all year. So they reached out saying that our notice algorithm identified you as the most impactful journalist for our audience when it came to announcing their funding round. And I'll be honest, of course, part of me was like, are you just doing this so I cover you? But the second part of me, because I think I'm a narcissist, is that I was like, I need to know why my name came up and how. And so I didn't tell you guys this, and it's not in the story, but it came up because of Equity. Their algorithm knew that they wanted to tell their story to a specific type of person. I'm guessing it was founders and investors. So they were seeing what a lot of their audience was tweeting about, following, listening, caring about. And Equity came up. And so that's kind of how they found my name through kind of that algorithm process. And that's just a snapshot
10:11 Speaker 01 into what the product does. A lot of what it does is just trying to help companies get better at speaking to their target audience through helping them secure external media. And that algorithm I explained in the beginning just helps them figure out who's the best person, an influencer, or journalist to target when sharing those messages.
10:26 Speaker 00 So just to kind of break this down to a practical example, let's say that I found a high fructose baby food company, right? And that's the goal. High fructose corn syrup, baby food, it's going to be big. It can help me figure out which influencers are the best at pushing unhealthy baby food, and then say, these are the three Instagram accounts that you want to work with to poison the children of America.
10:48 Speaker 01 You know, it's everything except Instagram. Right now, they only work on Twitter. So they do a deep scan of Twitter and tweets and what people are talking about in our public square. So I think it definitely worked really well for tech companies, especially fintechs, fintech people like, oh, my God. And so, yeah, right now, it's only on Twitter. They definitely are going to need to expand to other social media platforms because that baby food needs somewhere to go.
11:10 Speaker 00 Well, Twitter, Twitter's pretty open. I mean, they fundamentally, Twitter is a public feed, right? Like, and most Twitter accounts are available, whereas Instagram is much more locked down and kind of more walled garden, walled meta garden. I don't know. So I'm not shocked to see them start with Twitter, but it'll be fun to see what's next. Is it Instagram? Is it, you know, the old Facebook app? Is it Reddit, for example, and so forth? Because a lot of people aren't big on Twitter, but are big elsewhere. I know that in our little niche, you're on Twitter or you're dead. But I mean, other places like people are huge on Instagram and then like, don't even tweet at all. So it'll be fun to see how that expands. Natasha, they just raised a little bit of money, I think?
11:44 Speaker 01 They raised 1.25 million. The round was led by Alexis Ohanian, 776 Ventures, and they had angels from Glossier, Ashley Mayer, and Tesla as well. Bigger takeaway from this company is definitely like they're one of the newer ones that are trying to help how to have more influence. And I think it's interesting for us to talk about it because we unintentionally slash intentionally can help a company become well-known and have influence. And so I feel mixed about it. Mary Ann, when you were reading this, like, how do you feel about it as a journalist?
12:15 Speaker 02 I mean, honestly, I'm wondering about how it comes. How are they going to quantify that what they're doing is leading to something specific?
12:23 Speaker 00 The thing that caught my eye, based on kind of what you just said, Mary Ann, is that I am relatively outside of traditional influencer culture because I'm not on Instagram. I do use Instagram to check on some artists that I like when they're on tour, but that's really about it. So I don't have like a feed of influencers, per se. But I think that it's a bigger market than people think. And so I think what Notice wants to do, which is generally speaking, look at the haystack and find the needle. I think that is an enormous benefit to companies that don't have their feet deeply in social media, but still want to reach people in a mass basis. And so I can see Notice really unlocking a lot of spaces for brands and so forth, long term, if they can have their algorithm work as well as it should. That's the question to me, but I don't think there's a lack of demand. It's kind of a technology question.
13:08 Speaker 01 Thinking about like Notion, for example, a separate N startup, like Notion would have benefited so much of it before it became the notion we all know and have memes about. There are so many power users and I think that's like the long term too of notice is that they're going to help find the power users of companies and it goes back to community, which was a big theme this year of like, how do you identify your community and then give them a lot of attention? So yay for attention.
13:31 Speaker 00 And speaking of community and how community is scale and can they scale too large, ladies and gentlemen, let's talk about why Combinator, because our dear friend and coworker, Haya, kicked over the hornet's nest by kind of writing a blog, if you will, about why 1,000 companies per YC batch is in his mind, equivalent to RIP or rest in peace, Y Combinator. Let's do some quick reactions. Mary Ann, when you saw the headline, did you just like close Twitter? Or what was, what'd you do?
14:01 Speaker 02 First of all, he did a great job with this piece, in my opinion, and I think he has some valid points. Y Combinator, over the years, has earned this reputation. It gives a startup a certain credibility, whether it be with investors or the media. But I think his point is like, if you have a thousand companies per batch, then all of a sudden, it makes the startups participating a little bit less special. I can kind of see his point, but I can also see the point of being a startup and that it's also a little more accessible to other startups. So, you know, I have like mixed, mixed emotions about this whole topic.
14:33 Speaker 00 In my mind, Natasha, the, the gatekeeping aspect of YC has been fully diluted already. And so to me, the idea of adding a bunch more companies to the resource base that YC can offer in the community actually feels pretty good. And so to me, I think, not to be rude to Haya, a person who I very much appreciate and enjoy, to me, he was almost like complaining that the stable door was being opened when the horses were already gone, if that makes sense.
14:56 Speaker 01 I think that's a fair characterization. I agree in that, like, the exclusivity of it, even though people aren't ready to fully let go of YC being a stamp of honor or badge of honor is probably the more correct phrase. It's, it's been gone for a while. Even the VCs I talked to haven't paid attention to it the same way they have in the past. My issue, though, was a lot of people who are like, yeah, it's okay. Look, let's open the doors. YC for me was always about the network and not the exclusivity, is that like networks inherently support and thrive on exclusivity. YC mentors and advisors.
15:31 Speaker 01 When they're dealing with bigger batches, we'll have to water down some of their advice, or just how many people they can have on speed dial because we're all human. So I think that's more my worry with like the bigger batches long-term is like, sure, benefit from the branding of no longer being exclusive, but you also can't still promise now the network that someone got batch two or three. The value might not be as great.
15:51 Speaker 00 Right. And in the old days, there were like YC apartments down in, I think it was Mountain View, and they handed down from like YC generation to YC generation. I mean, can you, first of all, oh, but like it used to be a much smaller thing. I mean, I, I, not to beat this drum, but I used to go to YC demo days in the past when they were down in the South Bay. And like, you know, you could just about fit everyone in a room, you know, and founders would wear T-shirts that were like all green so investors could go find them afterwards and so forth. And it was.
16:20 Speaker 01 It was more intimate.
16:21 Speaker 00 It was, it was on the far edge of intimate. It was like, yeah.
16:25 Speaker 01 Too intimate, perhaps.
16:26 Speaker 00 No, no, the other way around. It was losing that already. And so to me, like this idea of like YC as like a tight-knit group has been untrue for a long time. A thousand companies does seem extreme, but at the same time, where did people think this was going? That it was going to decline in size? No, because YC has access to unlimited money and they want to have more shots on gold because every time they score a goal, they make a billion dollars. So I think they're going to write a lot of checks, right?
16:54 Speaker 01 I think this was also them totally admitting that they're staying remote forever. There's no way that they're bringing 1,000 companies to San Francisco. So I definitely think that they're staying. Yeah, there, there's no way.
17:04 Speaker 00 And thank, and thank gosh, because it seems to be that in YC in the last couple of batches has been increasingly geographically diverse, more founders from more places. Tej and the TechCrunch team has written about how we've seen more African startups than ever in YC, you know, about time.
17:18 Speaker 01 Gender diversity, though, I think would be like the thing that they need to fix if they're going to scale to 1,000. That has been something that they've like very like slowly improved on, but the moment Africa blows up as a place to have investment, they've been able to find a lot of entrepreneurs there. So I feel like that disconnect is still something that's haunting them. And if they're ever going to be that big of an accelerator, then they have their work cut out for them.
17:40 Speaker 00 I'll, I'll just say this, the demo day setup has to go. If they're going to have more companies because the TechCrunch team with like four or five of us watching live and swapping back and forth between who's covering what is brutal. It's a multi-day slog. And if you're going to have a thousand companies, no one is going to sit through them. A hundred is too many to sit there. You got to segment them down. And then the issue for startup founders, I guess, would become, are you in a hot category that people show up to watch? Because right now, because they're all in one big parade, everyone kind of gets the same shot. But at a thousand, if you're not in the crypto fintech metaverse segment, you know, who cares? One last thing before we move on, which is that the responses to Hyas piece have come in three different categories. There has been the yes responses. There has been the, well, where else can I go? And then there's also been the, you're full of shit.
18:26 Speaker 00 And I, I, I respect that he managed to get the full spectrum of things from indifference to anger and everything in between. Um, we need more of this on TC. We need to piss more people off, I think.
18:36 Speaker 01 The only thing that pisses off people more than Y Combinator is the impacts and incentives of venture capital, which is exactly what Course Hero had to talk about this week, or actually didn't have to talk about because they didn't pre-brief me on their funding round, which I was very annoyed about.
18:53 Speaker 00 Not mad at all.
18:53 Speaker 01 Not mad at all. Okay. So Course Hero is an ed tech startup that I've covered since I joined TC. They've had a really interesting, like many ed tech companies, relationship with venture capital over the years. Course Hero launched in 2006. It waited eight years to raise a 15 million Series A. Then after going another six years without raising VC money, it closed two rounds in 2020. And then yesterday, it announced that it's raised a 380 million Series C at a $3.6 billion valuation, which is a 227% valuation increase year over year to Course Hero. So I'll pause there. Are we talking about ed tech or are we talking about fintech? This feels like a fintech.
19:32 Speaker 00 I just, I want to pause and say 227%, but who's counting?
19:36 Speaker 01 It was wild. And I think it was specifically wild to me. And I will be completely honest about this is that I do have different standards for education companies because venture capital and education have historically have to explain themselves when they hang out with each other. But the CEO and co-founder Andrew Grauer in 2020 actually spoke to me about the risk and reward of raising capital. And he, he was saying that if you raise much money early on, you can get misaligned expectations. So I think seeing those back-to-back raises was surprising to me. I will caveat it though, and I want to hear your guys' thoughts on this, is like their explanation for raising so much venture capital is that they want to become like a mass consolidator in ed tech. So they basically need the capital to acquire a lot of the startups.
20:16 Speaker 00 And Mary, and the way that I think about that is if you raise a bunch of capital at a higher valuation, you get paid twice because you get a higher amount of stock to play with to use in acquisitions at a higher price point. And also you have more cash. So it probably unlocks a lot of potential deals.
20:29 Speaker 02 I spoke with a founder recently who was like, I actually don't want VC money right now because I don't want investors trying to tell me what to do at the early stages of my company. What I think Andrew's trying to say is like, we're advanced enough, we're mature enough, we've proven ourselves enough that we know what we're doing. So now we feel better about accepting VC money so we can move forward and do more of what we want to do.
20:51 Speaker 01 And to be fair, this company is strong from a business perspective. They've been cash flow positive and profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis for over five years. It's not like they're raising money off of nothing. And I'm sure their investors are smart for doing so. It just is something to watch as we see a lot of companies that historically stayed away from VC. Bring it on.
21:08 Speaker 00 Isn't this the company that said that their market just got a lot bigger in the last couple of years and they really want to go after it?
21:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think they used to think that their TAM was in the millions and now they think it's in the tens of millions. So they have a goal that I would love to hold them to where they think that they're going to be able to add, instead of 2 million subscribers per year, add 50 million subscribers.
21:25 Speaker 00 Yeah, I was gonna say, not millions to tens of millions of dollars, but millions to tens of billions of people, which means many, many more dollars. Yes. Okay.
21:32 Speaker 02 This is a 15 year old company. While this is certainly an impressive round in valuation, it's kind of refreshing to see a company that's been around for more than a decade reaching this point in their financial value. Whereas we're getting companies that were founded a year and a half ago, being valued at billion or $2 billion. You know, this one really worked hard over the past 15 years. So that's kind of cool.
21:55 Speaker 00 Yeah. And that's how I feel about Filogen being seven, I think seven, eight years old itself. Like we're seeing companies that have been at the grind for a long time, hit inflection points and scale their worth in capital base. And that's always fun to see. Speaking of companies that haven't hit their inflection point though, ladies and gentlemen, the last topic of the day is the metaverse, but through the lens of everyone's favorite financing vehicle. Natasha, can you spell SPAC?
22:21 Speaker 01 Oh my God.
22:22 Speaker 00 S P A C. It means special purpose acquisition company, AKA a blank check company, AKA the thing you take to the public markets if traditional IPO is not for you. And when is that the case? Well, when you don't have a lot of revenue. And that brings us to Infinite World, which is a collection of blockchain things that only is going to do about a million dollars in revenue this year, but it's going public. What do we think?
22:44 Speaker 01 Marian, please start actually, because I don't want to pick it up.
22:48 Speaker 02 This contains so many things that we like routinely make fun of.
22:52 Speaker 01 The headline of the year somehow in the last few weeks of the year goes to you because just to read it out loud dramatically, Metaverse startup with 1 million in 2021 revenues going public via SPAC. I mean, that is like the bingo board in one sentence.
23:06 Speaker 02 Exactly.
23:07 Speaker 01 And I loved to see it. I honestly wasn't even mad to see it. Like, I wasn't grumpy. In fact, I was like, we need this as a benchmark because we need to now have it as a headline to cite for the rest of all time when people ask us about the news cycle in 2021.
23:20 Speaker 00 Yeah, here it is in a nutshell. So here's my, my thought about this company. One, it does have very aggressive growth expectations. It expects, I think, to scale to 19 million in revenue next year, which is still pretty modest, but definitely much greater than a million. And if memory holds up, somewhere around 70 million for 2023. And then in 2024, it'll actually hit kind of public company scale. So it's got a ways to go, you might say. But it does have a lot of NFT plays and we have seen NFT marketplaces do pretty well. OpenSea has been on the show quite a lot lately. That's all of the nice things I have to say about it. On the other side of this, it's going to raise a bunch of money via its SPAC. But we have seen through the BuzzFeed blank check company combination that many of those dollars can disappear at the last minute.
24:04 Speaker 00 So it'll be very curious to see how much cash is actually raised by Infinite World, which I hadn't heard of.
24:09 Speaker 01 Never, never heard of them. It does sound fitting for the world that they are trying to build. So nice branding on that, bro. Metaverse, Infinite World, sure.
24:18 Speaker 00 Last story of the year from us is that Reddit filed to go public this week. And I'm pretty excited about this, to be totally honest, no BS. I've been a Reddit user since, I haven't had an account since 2008. I've been using it slightly longer, so I've been a Redditor for more than a decade. I still use Reddit a lot for video games and music subgenres. And I'm a big fan of the Stop Drinking subreddit. And I can't wait to see like revenue mix and how much government comes into play here and new product impacts. So eventually, we're going to get the Reddit S1 probably first couple of weeks of next year. And I'm stupendously excited. Mary Ann, how do you feel about it?
24:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, I think Reddit has a lot of influence. And even though it's gotten a lot of flack over the years, it's a place that people go. A lot of people go for information and for community. And I think it's got its important place.
25:05 Speaker 00 And just before we wrap up the last show of the year, we do have stuff coming on later on about predictions and kind of look backs and so forth. But an enormous thank you to the Equity production team. You don't get to see them much. You don't get to hear from them much, but they are working tirelessly to make the show good, to handle ad reads, to handle production notes and just making the whole thing actually work. So to Grace and to Chris, an enormous thanks. And also a shout out to Kel, who helped out this year. And I would thank Danny, but he quit, so I'm not going to. Anything else before we go, guys?
25:37 Speaker 01 Yeah, thank you guys for listening. It has been so fun to do this with you, Alex and Mary Ann. Definitely the highlight of the week, every week, because it is the only time where we get to unpack the craziness of this year. And I'm excited to do it all over again next year.
25:50 Speaker 00 Yep, Equity is coming back next year. Expect around 150 episodes from us and we may even make one or two good jokes during that process. But we have some pre-recorded stuff that's coming up, so stay tuned. But in the meantime, the Equity team is out of here. Bye.
Previous Equity Monday: Crypto hacks and a scuttled AI IPO Next Memes, money and madness: 2021 in tech Page updated October 14, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
