Equity Monday: Scandal, one IPO and the Indian startup market

@alex / 6:49 am PDT • June 29, 2020

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 week-starting primer, in which we go over the latest, look to the week ahead, talk about some neat funding rounds and dig into the latest on the health of the startup market.

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OK, let’s get into what we talked about this morning:

The Rothenberg VC scandal is moving toward what feels like a conclusion, with the Department of Justice filing criminal charges against its founder. As TechCrunch reported, “the U.S. Department of Justice has brought two criminal wire fraud charges against him, charges that he made two false statements to a bank and money laundering charges, all of which could result in a very long time in prison depending on how things play out.”
Q2 is coming to a close this week, and many American companies are taking Friday off. Expect news to slow into the end of the week.
But, this week, South Korean gaming company DoubleDown Interactive is looking to raise $200 million by going public this week in the United States. That’s going to be exciting to watch.
Instead of picking individual funding rounds, we covered some notes on the Indian startup market. LiveMint, Times of India and Entrackr all covered recent venture data, showing a booming India edtech market amidst a weaker VC landscape. If it turns out that the rest of the world’s VC scenes are in similar straits, we could be entering something similar to a VC recession.
Finally, Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal is writing about how the stock market actually is tracking the economy. This is counter to the cliche that the stock market isn’t the economy. But his argument helps explain something about the startup market that has stuck out for a while, namely why did startup layoffs drop sharply and churn decline quickly in Q2? Well, maybe things got better?