Equity podcast: Dog-walking startup gets $300M, Airbnb isn’t going public and Amazon is fine

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

This week Matthew Lynley and Alex Wilhelm were joined by General Catalyst’s Steve Herrod, who helped us dig through the week’s biggest news.

As a group, we looked at Wag’s mega-round, a $300 million infusion from SoftBank’s Vision Fund. The scale of the capital was surprising, though the round had been rumored previously. What will the company do with the money, and why might it need so much were questions on the top of our minds.

Next up was Airbnb’s recent executive shakeup and its public notice that it has no IPO in the works in 2018. The company’s non-2018 flotation puts at least one unicorn outside of the year’s potential IPO crop. That said, there are other unicorns that should go public this year.

On the subject of public companies, we tooled over Amazon’s huge quarter and its subsequent share-price rise. Apple also reported earnings, giving us a host of questions around what counts as success for a company that is so big, so valuable, and so profitable.

All that and we are coming to you live next week from SaaStr. Listen to the end for details. We’ll see you next week!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.