Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
As with yesterday, Kate and Alex were both on-site at TechCrunch’s San Francisco headquarters to chat over the latest. Unlike yesterday, however, Equity brought along a guest: Sean Dempsey from Merus Capital. (Merus writes Seed and Series A checks, with a focus on enterprise companies.)
And thus the three dove into the news. Early-stage first, to shake things up.
Early-Stage
Kate wrote a story this week about a startup you might have forgotten about but who’s name probably rings a bell. Bodega! The company now goes by Stockwell, actually, and they’ve raised a whopping total of $45 million in VC funding. But what’s in a name after all? We debate.
Next we turned to an interesting company called Kapwing. What’s that you ask? “It’s a laymen’s Adobe Creative Suite built for what people actually do on the internet: make memes and remix media,” says TechCrunch’s Josh Constine. We’re intrigued.
Late-Stage And Beyond
This week Peloton priced and went public. The firm’s $29 per-share IPO price was top of its proposed range ($26 to $29). The public markets, however, decided that the unicorn had reached too high.
So, shares of the high-end exercise company dropped, wrapping the day down about 11 percent. A good IPO first day this was not, though the company did manage to raise more capital than it might have with more conservative pricing. (Peloton has a yucky multi-class share structure that we touched on as well; it seems that all the big companies these days are opposed to regular governance.)
Next we turned to the Vox-NYMag merger. It’s a bit out of our territory but its a digital media deal, so we were interested. After all, the two of us have spent our entire careers in digital media and we have a vested interested in these companies surviving.
WeWork (Redux)
We honestly tried to get all the WeWork out of our system yesterday. We wanted to include zero WeWork content on this episode. But WeWork keeps doing things, so here we are.
Keeping things as brief as we can, WeWork is going to divest some companies that it bought (more on what we thought it was up to, here) including its jet, and the firm is looking to take on more capital. Unsurprisingly.
All that and we’re done for this week. Chat you all at Disrupt!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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