Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Today’s episode was especially fun, coming during what we might call “IPO Week” for obvious reasons.
Happily, the whole crew was around the table to chew over the latest: Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself — Alex Wilhelm. We were joined by Megan Quinn, a general partner at Spark Capital, who helped us get through the week’s mix.
Up first we went into the big HTC-Google deal that will see the American search company give the hardware giant $1.1 billion in exchange for a cut of its staff and use of certain pieces of intellectual property. Google is now part of Alphabet, a holding company that it gave birth to.
This is not Google’s first massive hardware-focused spend, but as we discuss, the sums in question are far smaller this time around.
Moving on, we dug through Roku’s epic first day as a public company. Shares in the hardware-software digital media streaming shop flew nearly 70 percent in their first day of trading, after pricing at the top-end of its $12 to $14 price range. For a company in the midst of a business model change, it was an impressive result.
Next up is the MongoDB IPO filing, which presents an interesting mix of revenue growth, persistent — if stable — losses, and a New York pedigree. We examine it from the perspective of other open source-centered companies, and Lynley was even kind enough to namedrop a number of acronyms.
Moving along, we dialed into the Rovio IPO pricing, which came in at the upper-end of lowered expectations. You can score that one as you will.
All that and we managed to not discuss Uber. We hope that that makes you as happy as it made us.
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