Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the startup business, where we unravel the numbers and nuances behind the headlines.
Mary Ann And Alex were a dynamic duo this week, dealing with a blizzard of tech news, startup updates, and questions that linger over hundreds of billions of dollars in venture capital investments.
Here’s what the show got into today:
- Checkmate’s Fascinating Funders and the Future of Online Shopping: Mary Ann reported on a very interesting Series A for Checkmate, a startup that has shown real legs not only in the competitive App Store, but on social media platforms far and wide.
- Cava’s IPO won’t save the IPO market, but it could still help: Alex is so IPO-deprived that he’s making connections between everything stocks and the startup market. This time it’s not even that long!
- Daylight stops: From the “no big surprise” category comes the end of Daylight, a neobank aimed at the LGBTQ+ market that has been struggling for a while. This raised the question: Will themed neobanks survive?
- Fired, fired, fired: SoundCloud is cutting staff to become profitable, which we can understand. Meta is cutting staff because it wants to, well, conserve capital for more share buybacks?
- Anthropic’s massive funding round and who could win the AI war: When is $450 million not that much money? When you build foundational AI models that compete against OpenAI and others. Also in this section: Metaphors from the Cold War.
And with that we enter a holiday weekend here in the US, so Equity is back on Tuesday.
For episode transcripts and more, visit Equity’s Simplecast website.
Equity drops every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 7 a.m. PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, and all casts. MinRegion also has a great show about crypto, a show that interviews founders, a show that chronicles how our stories come together, and more!