Equity Monday: A good time for ambitious startups to take on Big Tech

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 big news, chats 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 don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

This morning we had a bit of a detour, wandering into the world of Big Tech to wonder what is going on with those megacorps. Too big for their own good, or too big to be good, here’s what’s up with the incumbents:

• Germany is taking on Amazon at the very same time that Canada is taking on Amazon, meaning that the Seattle giant is taking shots from two key markets at the same time.
• Google is having a war of words with Australia, after a ruling in the country didn’t go its way.
• Walled gardens are seeing their walls come under heavy fire, which means that Apple and Google are fighting both sides of their marketplaces (producers, consumers) at once at the moment, which isn’t great.
• And Microsoft might buy TikTok.

All told it seems that the biggest tech companies are busy defending their market position instead of re-earning it with great products. A good time for startups? I think so. When incumbents are busy fighting with governments, themselves and each other, it’s a great time to show up, steal a march and build neat products that take away their momentum.

On the funding front, we peeked at the neat Help Lightning round, the Agiloft investment and the Vertafore exit.

And then there was this report concerning Asana, which is growing nicely for a company of its size and could actually be cheap at its current price. Anyway, we want the company to get on with getting public so that we can read its S-1 filing. Give it to us!

All that and we had some fun, chat soon!