Equity Monday: Ola, DeFi and how to turn cooler cabinets into ads

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.

Starting the day, American stocks are set to rise despite the country’s president spending the weekend in a military hospital to combat his COVID-19 infection. The weekend itself was marked with national turmoil as information was incomplete, and shifting when it came to the health of the current administration.

Over the weekend a few stories caught our eyes:

• The Ola-London dustup that shows what regulatory risk remains for ride-hailing companies.
• This DappRadar report on the boom in DeFi that is boosting Ethereum.
• Facebook’s leaked plan to combat a push by government to break it up into smaller pieces.

And there were a number of interesting funding rounds to look into. We selected two for your pleasure this morning:

• Einride raised $10 million for its autonomous freight system. The company has a big reveal coming on the 8th.
• Cooler Screens raised $80 million for a technology that I already hate.

What else was on our minds? We’re getting mentally ready for Q3 earnings. Now that it is Q4, that’s what’s coming up. What will the cycle bring? A clearer image of what happened in the quarter to companies that are not COVID-accelerated. What has happened to them, and can their results match investor expectations? The v-shaped recovery is actually a k-shaped recovery and, in time, it’s going to show. So, buckle up for one hell of an earnings cycle.