Welcome back to the transcribed edition of the wildly popular TechCrunch podcast, Equity. This week Kate Clark and Alex Wilhelm convened in the new studio to discuss the biggest venture capital news of the week.
There was a lot of news to get to so they started with some quick hits about Thumbtack, Bird, Scoot, Mirror and Looker. Then they got down to business and went in-depth on SoftBank’s Vision Fund and whether the money has dried up.
And folks from Social Capital are back with a new firm called Tribe Capital that looks a lot like … Social Capital.
Kate: I think the TLDR here is, if the Vision Fund doesn’t raise a Vision Fund Two, we will feel changes in the market. I think we will see deal sizes come back to earth a little bit, and I think we may see at least not increasingly large valuations, because I think that people may, especially now that it’s been a couple of years, people may underestimate the force that is a Vision Fund. We don’t have the Vision Fund, you know that obvious force that dark cloud is gone.
Alex: You’ll feel the lack. Yes. Couple of quick notes about why this might be. It isn’t just that people like Kate and I think this way. I mean, there’s been structural problems with the Vision Fund. There’s been some discussions about opacity and how it operates. How its decisions are made, and I would throw in there, there’s probably some questions about the prices it has paid. Uber managed to claw back above it’s IPO price for a hot second, and is back under it today.
Kate: And didn’t last long.
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Kate Clark: Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast where we discuss everyone’s favorite topic, venture capital.
Alex Wilhelm: Yeah.
Kate: I’m here this week with my cohost Crunchbase News Editor in Chief, Alex Wilhelm. Alex, welcome to the new studio. What are your first impressions?
Alex: Y’all need to finish unpacking. No, you can’t see this on the recording, but we are in a very beautiful rectangularish room, with lots of soundproofing, and lights, and boxes of camera equipment. So, eventually we will live tape the show on video, and put it on Facebook Live.
Kate: Oh, will we?
Alex: And I just made that up, so we might not. But anyways, the point is it’s a great space, and I’m glad to be here.
Kate: Yeah, it’s nothing glamorous, but it does the job.
Alex: Yeah. Okay, compared to the last room we were podcasting in, this is like Versailles.
Kate: That’s a good point.
Alex: Yeah.
Kate: All right, well we got a lot to talk about this week, so let me just jump in, and let’s do a quick rapid fire of some of the big deals of the week, and also some of the big M&A transactions. I’m starting off with the most recent, which is news that Thumbtack, which is an online marketplace for easy-to-do, simple neighborhood jobs. They are raising up to $120 million in series H funding. So, we’re making our way through the alphabet here.
Alex: That’s deep. Yeah, this is the type of round you — it’s a super late stage round, and now is the valuation going up as part of the transaction?
Kate: No. According to Delaware stock filings, and they are raising a flat valuation, so they are selling the shares at the same roughly $8 share price, that they sold their series G shares in 2015.
Alex: That’s a long time ago.
Kate: That’s not only four years ago. Yeah. So, that’s bad news on a few counts, like given the fact that it’s been so many years, and they are not seeing a premium. It also kind of suggests that their investors are not confident in the prospects of Thumbtack. So, a couple of interesting details, I’ll be fast, is that Thumbtack, according to sources, was looking for an acquirer and did not succeed. So, they turned back to their investors, and that’s why we’re seeing the flat valuation. So, we’ll see. This is not a closed round. This filing suggests they’ve authorized it, so we’ll see.
Alex: One more note though.
Kate: Yeah.
Alex: It’s not that no investors have no confidence. If you can raise $120 million, people still believe in yo, but maybe the optimism about short-term returns has been tempered by I think what we compliantly call market realities.
Kate: Absolutely, and one of the sources did say that they were pretty shocked that Thumbtack wasn’t raising that much. Anyway, let’s move on.
Alex: Sure.
Kate: Did you see news about the Bird and Scoot deal?
Alex: Yes, I did. This is a scoop that you, and I think Ingrid-
Kate: Yes.
Alex: Over at TC had, and my first impression was about time.
Kate: Yeah, I think we all thought that it would be a lot more consolidation and M&A activity in the scooter space, given that there were so many players and then you know a few really large players, and then several, maybe even a dozen smaller startups, but I think this may be, aside from Lyft’s acquisition of Motivate, and Uber’s acquisition of JUMP Bikes, this would be the first scooter M&A transaction.
Alex: Well, it’s the first MNA transaction that’s been kind of put together by Bird or Lime, the two leading American, and also in some ways, global scooter players, and the two most famous ones in the space. The first two scooter corns, back in the day.
Kate: In that group.
Alex: Now, Scoot is not the biggest company in the world, but Scoot is the one that also does the little electric mopeds.
Kate: Exactly. Yeah, I think a lot of us here in San Francisco are familiar with Scoot, because of the mopeds, and because scoot is one of two companies, Skip and Scoot, say that three times fast, that actually got a permit to operate in SF. So, companies like Bird and Lime, which are the most popular brands in the space, weren’t able to get permits. I think that’s because of the way that they entered the market, which was kind of like a, we don’t care about the rules, so here we are. We don’t need your permits. Whereas, Skip and Scoot were a little bit nicer in their approach and kind of went about it in a rule abiding way.
Alex: Yes, but if you’re a Bird, and you did not follow the rules, and you don’t currently have access to the SF market and someone else does, and they’re smaller than you, and you have both cash and stock, what can you do? Well, you can buy them, and then all of a sudden you have access to your home market.
Kate: That was a lot of the reaction I received from that story, was like, Oh haha, look at Bird just paying however much. We don’t know the price of the deal, just to get their way into the asset market, which is a big market, but is it worth, the tens of millions that they’re going to pay?
Alex: People pay a lot of money for stuff around their hometown. People do care a lot about geographic proximity, and I’d wager you, that it’s probably going to be a lot of stock. I don’t think they’re going to be shelling out 50 million cash for this deal, or whatever it ends up being worth, because Bird consumes a lot of cash, and they haven’t seen their valuation go up, as much as they would like in their last couple of funding rounds anyways. So, probably cash is a premium. Stock is free to go.
Kate: Yeah, it is a little interesting. Bird’s last valuation was $2.3 billion, but in researching for this story, I was not able to find anywhere, the exact amount of money they raised in that last round, and they have closed the rounds. It’s closed. They said. They confirmed. But there’s just no evidence of what exactly it was. There are stories saying it’s $400 million. There are stories saying it’s $220 million. It’s just no idea.
Alex: I have a hypothesis that in that situation, the lowest number is going to be closest to the truth.
Kate: Fair enough.
Alex: Yeah, but if it was 220 out of 2.3, and how long ago was that now? It was some time.
Kate: I think, news initially on that round broke around a year ago this time. It’s one of those rounds where, there were a lot of stories. There was a lot of conjecturing. There was a lot of anecdotes, and there wasn’t a lot of facts.
Alex: Okay, fair enough, but I mean my point is I doubt they had that much of that money left. A year ago, given their enormous CAPX with scooter, scooter developments, scooter deployment, how much of that 220 is going to be sitting in the bank account? Probably not a lot, so I’m presuming the Scoot deal will be stock, ergo the actual purchase price of getting their home market back, isn’t like they’re going to sell their left leg. There’s just going to promise all part of their future.
So moving on, Google is buying Looker for 2.6 billion dollars, and this morning I saw this news. I nodded my head and went, “Sweet, what’s that?” And it turns out Kate, that Looker is having to do with things in the cloud, and as we all know, Google is competing with both Microsoft Azure, and Amazon’s AWS cloud platform. That’s my entire take on this deal. It’s cool. Look at that.
Kate: I got nothing to add.
Alex: Okay, cool. Moving on, Mirror, everyone’s favorite meme, that’s actually a startup, is raising between 30 and 40 million dollars. We think at a valuation of about 300, and Kate, is that pre or post money? Do we know?
Kate: I believe it’s post money. I’ve been chasing this down for awhile, trying to figure out what was going on, because I had heard they were raising, actually I’d similarly heard they raising at a flat valuation, but according to the filings that I eventually got, they’re not raising at a flat valuation. They’ve actually seeing a quite a nice premium from $200 million to $300 million in valuation, and this is in a very short time period, since Mirror actually released their first product, which for those of you that aren’t familiar, it is a mirror that doubles as an interactive home gym, like a portal kind of thing.
Alex: That’s not a joke. That’s a thing. Yup.
Kate: Yeah, so when you’re not using it, it’s straight up a mirror, and when you are using it you can see yourself and there’s like a nice AI coach who can help you work out better.
Alex: Yup. A couple of things. One, this sounds kind of ridiculous. I actually think it’s kind of cool. I think that we’re seeing startups draft on the back of Peloton success, and we’ll get to the more of that later on, and also, don’t forget that a $300 million valuation is huge. I know in like today’s era of like Uber, $120 billion or $90 billion, we get kind of lost in the stratosphere, $300 million up from $200 million is an enormous success. That’s just a lot of competence on behalf of investors. It’s great for the company, not to be sniffed out even though it’s not the top of the pyramid.
Kate: Yeah, I think VCS are looking at Mirror, perhaps as one of the next big things in fitness tech, especially given the massive success of Peloton, which actually went through a long period, where people kind of thought that it was BS, and that no one would want to not only buy a Peloton for three grand or however much, but then continue to pay a monthly fee, in order to actually experience the content, which is really the upside of actually purchasing a product like a Mirror or a Peloton.
Alex: Yeah, people didn’t fully understand or grasp the TAM that is the yuppie market today, but I think the existence of Blue Bottle as a franchise, indicates that Peloton would in fact actually sell well in the market, and if you were a Twitter user, pretty much you’re just looking at the Peloton demographic right there. Speaking of which though, I’m going to throw it to you. The big news out this week from Big Bike, is that Peloton has announced publicly that it is filed privately to go public.
Kate: Unfortunately, there’s not much else to say, because when you file confidentially we don’t have access to the S-1 filing. Eventually, Peloton will reveal that. We don’t know when that’s going to be, so it’s a matter of just sitting tight, and knowing the IPO will happen in 2019, but just not exactly when.
Alex: Yeah, and this is an IPO that we’ve been waiting for for some time. We had been expecting it, and it’s going to have two main components that we’re going to dig into. First off, is the hardware side of the business. How much gross margin do they drive, if any, off the bikes themselves? There are costs with development, and production, and shipping and installation, and so forth. Then also, what is the margin like on the subscription side of the business, which is that $40 a month give or take, that people pay, and the hybrid of those will determine the valuation and we’ll see a lot of fun things, like is it valued as a pure software business, or is it valued as a hybrid hardware and software company?
Kate: Yeah, I think it will be valued as hybrid. I also think when we get the S1, we’re going to see a lot of their forward-looking I guess ambitions, of really focusing more on the media element of Peloton, because a lot of that is original content, like in the sense that Netflix has original content, because Peloton is creating so much original fitness content, and I think that they are going to focus a lot of their efforts in the future, on that side of the business.
Alex: Yeah, here’s a question. Just while you were saying that I had a thought, you know fitness content doesn’t go stale quickly, right? Presumably a bike class that you record, you can keep for five years and keep your reusing. So there probably is a pretty long shelf life.
Kate: On one hand, yes, but on another hand, Peloton users are, many of them are very committed to the individual instructors, and they’re watching each… I don’t know what you would call it, but I want to call it an episode.
Alex: Session?
Kate: Yeah, a session, and they’re treating it like an episode. Like would you want to rewatch the same episode of your favorite show? I mean sure, maybe a couple of times, but you don’t want to keep watching the same episode forever, so on one hand yes on one hand no.
Alex: Maybe no is your point then. So, maybe they have higher content costs than they might expect then. That could actually lower the margin of the subscription business. I was trying to paint the bull case, but after that I’ll dial it back in. But as you can tell, we’re excited about this one, because so many question marks. This is not just another B2B enterprise SaaS company, that we can kind of guess the numbers from a distance. I have absolutely no idea what we’re going to see.
Kate: Yeah, I mean this is not like any other IPO that I’ve covered in my time, reporting on tech. I think they’ll be one of the most exciting and interesting IPOs to cover. It is like a consumer company. It’s also a hardware company. It’s a media company. It’s a software company. It has so many different-
Alex: It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s a Peloton.
Kate: Yeah, it’s the intersection of so many different spaces that are all… and it’s also a subscription business. It’s just, it’s everything.
Alex: Yeah, that’s why if we’re not like bleeding or have broken legs, there will be an extra episode of Equity when that drops, because that’s going to be hella fun. I think that’s about it. Oh, one more thing. We just talked about Mirror, and the valuations of the Peloton effect. As with every IPO, if Peloton stumbles and the numbers are bad, if that will impact valuations down the chain, and into companies like Mirror are hoping for Peloton to do well and prove the market size, and the demand and all that good stuff. So, that’s the context for startups out there.
Moving along, I want to talk about the Vision Fund, which honestly, we haven’t had on the show that much in the last couple of months. I feel like it’s kind of fallen off as a topic, and maybe that’s because they’re running low on money, or maybe we just stopped caring, but there’s some speculation for gosh, about as long as there’s been one Vision Fund, that they will be a second and a third, and this has been stoked by comments from Masayoshi himself, and also kind of the media landscape that surrounds the hype of the vision finance market impact.
There are recent reports that, that might not happen, or at least the Vision Fund Two, if it does come to exist, might be smaller. Some cornerstone investors that help power Vision Fund One are reticent to pony up as much cash or any into the second fund, and the context for this, is that I heard from someone that I thought was quite smart back with a Vision Fund was first put together, that if it could show anything like a positive or respectable return, money was going to fly off the sidelines from sovereign wealth funds, and power multiple of these around the world. That person apparently had too much espresso that day, because it has not proven true, but my question then becomes, if there is no Vision Fund Two, does capital that might have gotten into it, still find a way into the startup market, therefore ameliorating the effect of no Vision Fund Two, or does that money not show up at all, and the late stage and market all of a sudden has its biggest benefactor kind of ripped out from underneath it, and that’s kind of where I’m torn, as I look at this.
Kate: Yeah, I think if there’s no Vision Fund Two… I mean, a lot of that damage, or I guess influence that the Vision Fund One had on the market, that’s still there. It’s already influenced so much of deal sizes and valuations, and I think there’s no going back, but I think if there’s no new $100 billion fund, the Vision Fund One was a $98 billion fund, right? Yeah, so without the presence of such a monstrous fund, yeah, I think things have to change, because there was a point in 2018, where the Vision Fund was making, just deal after deal, after deal after deal.
Alex: It was a machine gun fire, 6 and a half figure rounds.
Kate: Exactly, but I think without that we will see changes in the late market, but at the same time, I had read that Vision Fund Two might focus more on deal sizes in the range of $50 million dollars. Had you seen that?
Alex: Maybe, but is this really the Vision Fund, or was it the Vision Fund’s crappy little cousin? The whole point of the Vision Fund is that it… We can’t swear on the show, and to die, it gave no F’s about what we would call like logical progression of deal size of valuation increases of not investing in competitors. It just was wiling out, and that was what made it different. If it’s just another late stage fund, that makes relatively conservative bets, whatever.
Kate: Well, whatever what? In the sense that you’ll be bored covering it?
Alex: No, I don’t think it will have the same impact. The Vision Fund walked in, and single handedly created market froth and hype, and pushed a lot of companies to think bigger, maybe stupidly so, than they would have otherwise. If we’re just going to have another IVP in the market, that’ll still be a change one. It will be a shift in I think sentiment, and a lot of research companies that were expecting to have enough capital available, that they never had to go public.
Kate: Yeah, but I don’t think the Vision Fund was a net positive. There are a lot of things the Vision Fund did that may have screwed a lot of companies, like we’ve talked about this on many occasions, but they gave so much money to companies like Brandless, and was… It’s Wag! Right?
Alex: Wag!
Kate: Or is it… Yeah, and those companies, given how young they were, and the fact that they hadn’t raised that much before that, a lot of people question whether they are able to spend that cash in a way that benefited their business, or if it actually dragged them down. I don’t think we’re going to know that for a while.
Alex: True.
Kate: But I think that when you say, oh, just another IVP, well firms like IVP are seemingly more strategic and focused in their bets, and working with companies who sometimes they can perhaps potentially offer their services for. Whereas, the Vision Fund, it did seem like a little bit of a spray and pray mentality at times.
Alex: Right. It’s like if you sit at a blackjack table in Vegas, there’s like the guy to your left, who actually counts cards, IVP, and then there’s the drunk dude with a Hawaiian shirt that’s unbuttoned down to his navel, Vision Fund, and if you don’t have that guy, you playing with another dude who counts cards, it’s going to change. They’ll still be money at the table, but the sentiment will be different, and the climate will change, and if the climate changes in in a not emotionally driven, but sentiment driven business like private capital and property investing is, that will change things.
Kate: I think the TLDR here is, if the Vision Fund doesn’t raise a Vision Fund Two, we will feel changes in the market. I think we will see deal sizes come back to earth a little bit, and I think we may see at least not increasingly large valuations, because I think that people may, especially now that it’s been a couple of years, people may underestimate the force that is a Vision Fund. We don’t have the Vision Fund, you know that obvious force that dark cloud is gone.
Alex: You’ll feel the lack. Yes. Couple of quick notes about why this might be. It isn’t just that people like Kate and I think this way. I mean, there’s been structural problems with the Vision Fund. There’s been some discussions about opacity and how it operates. How its decisions are made, and I would throw in there, there’s probably some questions about the prices it has paid. Uber managed to claw back above it’s IPO price for a hot second, and is back under it today.
Kate: And didn’t last long.
Alex: Didn’t. Nope. People are concerned about Weaveworks valuation, or the We company’s valuation. These are two companies that the Vision Fund put a lot of money into, and perhaps people are less confident in it’s ability to pick winners and undervalued assets, that will then appreciate maybe, but the point is, what seemed to be a pretty likely occurrence, is now seemingly looked less likely and that’s a big thing to pay attention to. If you are working for a late stage company, you might want to hire an IP lawyer and start talking to them, because you might not be able to raise infinite money.
Alex: Let’s move on though, to some a little bit earlier in the stages. Well, it’s more of a metamorphosis, if you will. The caterpillars become the butterfly, and social capital is now tribe, I think.
Kate: Yes. It’s not as simple as a rebranding. Social capital, as you guys probably know, transitioned in to being kind of like a family fund, about nine months ago. It’s kind of a long story, so I’m not going to go in to that, but it no longer exists as a venture capital fund, but a bunch of it’s early-stage investors have decided to launch what is essentially Social Capital 2.0, known as Tribe Capital, and it is a fund made up of seven former investors to operators, at Social Capital. They’ve invested in a bunch of social capital portfolio companies, like I said, they’ve hired a bunch of former Social Capital employees, and they are operating with the exact same proprietary software platform, that Social Capital used, in it’s data-driven investing days, which is called the Magic 8-Ball.
Alex: The Magic 8-Ball is the name of their data-driven platform.
Kate: Exactly. So, it’s the tool for dual diligence to… Sorry, due diligence, for investing in startups. They’re relying heavily on data, but it’s not an exclusively data-driven strategy. Meaning, they don’t plug data into AI, into an AI platform, and have it spit out whether or not they should invest. They just inform their investment decisions with this data platform, which is called the Magic 8-Ball, which is a very venture capital thing.
Alex: It’s a very venture capital, it’s like, because it’s the opposite of what it is. Magic 8-Ball is a random number generator that gives you a wrong answer, and presumably this platform helps you make a good decision. Do you know how it works in any capacity? Does it generate like ratios in the SaaS market, to help you understand efficiency, or does it do things that are more exotic that we might not understand?
Kate: So Jonathan, who is a former partner at Social Capital, and who’s leading this effort at Tribe, he wrote a very extensive detailed blog post on this, so if you want to know up the details, I would go there, but-
But I will say, because they’re working with early stage startups, they’re not able to have the luxury of looking at the financials. So they’re plugging in data, like you mentioned, industry data on other potentially competing businesses, and the goal is for them to be able to determine early and rapidly, whether a company has product market fit, and whether it has a strong growth trajectory. So, yeah.
Alex: Because of the early stage, product market fit is the thing you want, as opposed to strong unit economics or whatever you look for in a later stage business.
Kate: Right, but the thing is about this fund is it’s a little complicated, because they’re raising $150 million, and given the fact that they’ve already invested in late stage businesses like Carta, they clearly are not focused only on the early stage, so it kind of seems to me like they’re going after the best companies, whether that’s a seed stage business, or whether that’s a series D business.
Alex: Yeah, that’s a range, but with seven people working on it, they probably have enough eyeballs to kind of keep tabs on many, many things.
Kate: Well, that’s the benefit of having a data platform though, is that their goal is to have this platform, look over 1,000 companies a year, and then help them to not have to look at a thousand companies per year.
Alex: So, what do they do in the meantime?
Kate: Well, they look closer at the companies they’re considering.
Alex: I was kidding. I think it’s cool.
Kate: Serious business, Alex.
Alex: Well, everything is serious business. The venture capital world is known for being very serious.
Kate: Indeed.
Alex: I want to grab a quote there from your story that caught some attention. You were a quote from Chamath, sorry, I’m talking about the new guys who are part of Tribe. He said, quote, those guys did a very good job working for me, and the quote goes on, but this was flagged to me by someone in my Twitter DMs, as like, hmm, and you said before the show, that the tone of that comment wasn’t as dismissive as it reads in print, and I wanted to kind of give us a chance to clear the air on that.
Kate: Yeah, so I chatted with Chamath and that was the statement he gave on what Tribe Capital is doing. In short, he said he was proud of them for going off on their own. He said that when he went off on his own to build Social Capital, it was an amazing experience for him. And I know I said I wouldn’t go into the Social Capital thing, but what had happened is Chamath, one day decided that he didn’t want to do venture capital anymore, because he wanted better returns, and he wasn’t seeing the returns that he wanted. And he made a call that was pretty bold and also a little bit like, yikes, those people are VCs and they no longer work at a VC fund. Like they’ll have to get lost, and they did. They all moved on, and that’s why I thought this story was interesting is, of course you have VC firms fall apart, people move on, but not so often do you have a few partners rebuild a firm that is in the exact image of the firm, that they spent several years at.
Alex: It feels like a reconstitution essentially.
Kate: Yeah, and in the quote that ends my story, one of the partners is, he’s like, yeah, well, we all had job offers, so why did we get back together? Well, we spent years building this thing, and we still wanted to build it. So, it makes absolute sense, and I think I recommend anyone go read that story, because I think it’s an interesting venture capital tale.
Alex: And as always, there’ll will be a link in the podcast piece attached to this very audio recording.
Kate: All right, so this is a tough transition, so I’m just gonna do it.
Alex: Go for it.
Kate: There has been a ton of female-founded companies entering the Unicorn Club in 2019.
Alex: Yeah, so if you think back to this show, gosh, I don’t know, four, six, eight, 10 weeks ago, there were two new female-founded companies, that reach the unicorn status on the same day. It may have been like Glossier and FabFitFun or something like that. It was two of them, and we went, darn, two in one week. Isn’t that an impressive what had changed from the pace that we use to see it? So, we did a little work on that, and found out that there were 12 female founded companies that, or that have at least one female founder that reached unicorn status in 2018 and there have been 10 so far in 2019, and we are, as you know, about halfway through the year, and so we are on pace, if more of this keeps happening, for the largest number of known female-founded companies reaching unicorn status in one year.
Alex: Now, is it a large percentage of the total? Not as high as it should be, but certainly it’s progress with a sword, and an encouraging note I think to hear, on the market.
Kate: Definitely. I think a few things are happening. So, what we’ve talked about in the past, and one of the biggest issues when it comes to funding female founders, is that there’s a really big hole in the market, when it comes to late stage rounds for these businesses. So female founders, you know, according to data, are able to raise seed rounds. They’re able to raise series A rounds, but as you work your way up that ladder, it becomes increasingly difficult for female founders, again, according to data, to close rounds, so I think what we’re seeing, which is really great, is a trend in which female founders are having an easier time closing these Series D rounds, and what we’re going to start seeing is an influx of female founded IPOs, and there still been so few.
Kate: I think, that’s the reason when when Katrina Lake took Stitch Fix public, it was this huge moment, because you just never… It was so rare to see a woman, ringing in. I don’t know. What that a NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange?
Alex: One of the two, but doing the bell ringing ceremony, the famous kind of ticker tape moment you get.
Kate: Right. Exactly. So I’m really excited. I think we will in a Rent the Runway, sorry, not Rent the Runway. The Realrail just filed to go public.
Alex: They did.
Kate: And they are a female founded, and female led.
Alex: Did you read that as S1?
Kate: I looked at it. Yeah.
Alex: We can talk about it some other time, but it wasn’t-
Kate: It wasn’t thrilling to look at. So I just… it’s a small business. They have $50 million in revenue in annual, right?
Alex: It’s actually bigger than that. They had just under $70 million in revenue, in the first quarter of this year. I think the thing that caught me was a growth question, or was it profitability question? There’s something in there kind of tripped me up. It’s not a SaaS business, but like 80% gross margins and so forth, but it’s just awesome to see, and I’m really excited to see more female founded companies go public this year, and hopefully in the future.
Kate: Definitely. I’m always excited about female founders.
Alex: It’s good that there’s good news, you know it’s better than just saying hey there’s one. Finally, it’s more like there’s a class, a cohort kind of a cadre, these companies moving forward. So, a shout out to companies like FabFitFun, Glassiere, Confluent, Away, Airwell, Rent the Runway and so forth.
To close off today though, we actually have a bit of a request to all of you listening out there, which is that as you may have seen from our tweets, we are planning out our summer, not season, but just set of shows, and we are kind of hoping to bring some new faces on as guests, especially underrepresented VCs. So Kate, why don’t you tell people what we’re hoping to get.
Kate: Yeah, so unfortunately we don’t have founders on Equity. Equity is a venture capital focused podcast, which means we have venture capitalists as our guests.
Alex: True.
Kate: So we want to hear from you, who you’re interested in having on the show, and just a reminder, when we have VCs on the show, we don’t interview them typically, unless it’s a very special occasion, but we just talk to them about this week’s news. They’re just essentially a third cohost. So, that’s what we’re looking for. We want to know who you guys want, which VCs are the most interesting to you, and again, we’d really love to have on some underrepresented VCs on the show, and yeah, just feel free to send your suggestions to our email, which is equitypod@techcrunch.com, or you can just reach out to Alex and I directly on Twitter.
Alex: Yup, and we want to hear from everyone. So, even if your ideas are terrible, send them in and we appreciate you guys to come to the show for, I don’t know, it’s like a 130th episode or something crazy like that. It’s nuts.
Kate: And that’s all for this week. We’ll see you again next week, and thanks for joining us.