Equity Monday: Everyone is going public so what’s wrong with your startup?

NelsonG · February 22, 2021

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

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 and myself here — and be sure to check out our last main ep, in which Natasha coins a slogan for a16z that I both hate, and became the headline of the show!

But enough of all of that, we have a lot to get through this morning. Here’s what we talked about:

The Weekend: Coinbase at $100 billion? More on that to come. Toast is going public! Probably! Wait Toast the company that laid off staff last year? Yep that Toast! It’s not toast! And new rules on online lending in China.
This Morning: Oscar Health put together an IPO price range that is interesting, and Apex Clearing is going public via a SPAC.
Funding Rounds: Gophr raises money! Ageras Group raises money! Promise raises money! It was hard to pick just three, but each of those rounds has something notable about it. Enjoy!
Deeper Dive/Riff: If the public markets will float even the most leaden of startup via a SPAC-balloon, any late-stage startup that doesn’t take the ride out of the private markets must either be perfect or too heavy to lift. And if it’s the second, we can write it off? Maybe?

And, finally, this is precisely what I feel like this Monday morning. Chat soon and stay safe!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.