Terra Protocol’s successful DeFi and stablecoin launch were followed by a 66% rally that brought LUNA’s market cap to $200 million.
Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov explains why a decentralized oracle network is needed to ensure trust in the DeFi ecosystem.
Welcome back to Mixtape, the TechCrunch podcast that looks at the human element that powers technology.
For this episode we spoke with Meredith Whittaker, co-founder of the AI Now Institute and Minderoo Research Professor at NYU; Mara Mills, associate professor of Media, Culture and Communication at NYU and co-director of the NYU Center for Disability Studies; and Sara Hendren, professor at Olin College of Engineering and author of the recently published What Can a Body Do: How We Meet the Built World.
It was a wide-ranging discussion about artificial intelligence and disability. Hendren kicked us off by exploring the distinction between the medical and social models of disability:
So in a medical model of disability, as articulated in disability studies, the idea is just that disability is a kind of condition or an impairment or something that’s going on with your body that takes it out of the normative average state of the body says something in your sensory makeup or mobility or whatever is impaired, and therefore, the disability kind of lives on the body itself. But in a social model of disability, it’s just an invitation to widen the aperture a little bit and include, not just the body itself and what it what it does or doesn’t do biologically. But also the interaction between that body and the normative shapes of the world.
When it comes to technology, Mills says, some companies work squarely in the realm of the medical model with the goal being a total cure rather than just accommodation, while other companies or technologies – and even inventors – will work more in the social model with the goal of transforming the world and create an accommodation. But despite this, she says, they still tend to have “fundamentally normative or mainstream ideas of function and participation rather than disability forward ideas.”
“The question with AI, and also just with old mechanical things like Brailers I would say, would be are we aiming to perceive the world in different ways, in blind ways, in minoritarian ways? Or is the goal of the technology, even if it’s about making a social, infrastructural change still about something standard or normative or seemingly typical? And that’s — there are very few technologies, probably for financial reasons, that are really going for the disability forward design.”
As Whittaker notes, AI by its nature is fundamentally normative.
“It draws conclusions from large sets of data, and that’s the world it sees, right? And it looks at what’s most average in this data and what’s an outlier. So it’s something that is consistently replicating these norms, right? If it’s trained on the data, and then it gets an impression from the world that doesn’t match the data it’s already seen, that impression is going to be an outlier. It won’t recognize that it won’t know how to treat that. Right. And there are a lot of complexities here. But I think, I think that’s something we have to keep in mind as sort of a nucleus of this technology, when we talk about its potential applications in and out of these sorts of capitalist incentives, like what is it capable of doing? What does it do? What does it act like? And can we think about it, you know, ever possibly in company encompassing the multifarious, you know, huge amounts of ways that disability manifests or doesn’t manifest.”
We talked about this and much much more on the latest episode of Mixtape, so you click play above and dig right in. And then subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts.
Twitter is shutting down Periscope, the video app it acquired several years ago when Facebook Live threatened to lap the field. When we stream the Gillmor Gang sessions, we send them to Facebook, Twitter, and an unlisted embed on YouTube. At one point, we planned to stream the sessions live on TechCrunch, but for now we’re posting the edited version there.
In the weeks leading up to January 20th, the live Telegram feed at https://t.me/Gillmorgang has been dominated by the Trump focus on overturning the election results. Each failed attempt to alter the outcome dilutes Trump’s leverage as his Republican allies struggle with his threats and Twitter rage. In just a few weeks of this, the mechanics of vaccine distribution has overwhelmed the political story as people start calculating the number of days to getting access to the medicine. What Trump does in 2024? Who cares.
Pardons are also losing traction as White House staff jockey for access to the vaccine. With a couple of weeks to the New Year and then a sprint to Biden’s installation, the cable networks are retooling for ratings fodder in the new normal. Tech companies are rejiggering their real estate and tax implications of where the home office is located in a Work from Anywhere environment.
Handicapping the Georgia special elections will fill most of the cable news schedule until January 6th, but no matter what happens in the Senate, the real action shifts to corporate and economic imperatives to control the pandemic through behavior around masks, distancing, real testing, and contact tracing to isolate the pockets of virus resistance to herd immunity. While government mandates are difficult to install at a national level, corporate requirements are more likely to succeed.
Week two of the streaming realignment features some talent lashback from big movie directors. It’s reminiscent of last year’s brief Spielberg attack on Netflix and Oscar politics. This year it’s the Oscars that are losing credibility. It’s still a ways to go before the Best Picture category is all streaming but the audience out there is in no hurry to see Dune on the big screen. As with the election, facts are a trailing indicator. The move to streaming is not if but when.
Less certain is when I upgrade to the next iPhone. Part of the problem is the competition for mindshare with the M1 MacBooks. Instead of one device I don’t need there are two. It’s clearly a one percent mental crisis on the surface, but beneath lurks a serious debate on what we do as the twin viruses recede. The phone is the new MTV, the Star Trek communicator, and the Get SmartShoe rolled into one. The laptop is a different story, a bold harmonizing of the suite of services across the desktop and mobile platforms.
The new phone offers iterative advances — a better camera, 5G support, a bigger battery. M1 jumpstarts a software surge across all Apple devices, pushing professional video editing and post-production tools to a prosumer customer base that seriously threatens Windows and Intel as the dominant platform for a post pandemic economy. Those still amortizing the last generation of the MacBook Pro 16 will hold out, but resistance will fade. The move to Apple Silicon is not if but when.
Still I don’t have a rationale for buying one. I’ll just have to do it anyway.
By the way, I’ll pretend to fund the M1 by cutting back on my newsletter subscriptions. Smart writers like the Ben’s Stratechery and Evans are caught behind the paywall of their shiny new newsletters, which trade reach for revenue. Then the very special long form pieces they used to justify the subscription cost start showing up a few weeks later in the clear. It’s the newsletter version of the Hollywood windowing system that Jason Kilar and WarnerMedia are blowing up with HBO Max.
This piece by Ben Thompson is a hybrid of the form. It’s got plenty of quotes from his Daily pay newsletter mixed with a less methodical but more supple set of semi-ideas that actually make me want to subscribe. Like this:
On the flipside, to the extent that v2 social networking allows people to be themselves in all the different ways they wish to be, the more likely it is they become close to people who see other parts of the world in ways that differ from their own. Critically, though, unlike Facebook or Twitter, that exposure happens in an environment of trust that encourages understanding, not posturing.
This is M1 fodder, I’ll call it. Lost in the social network lockdown miasma but somehow potentially transcendent of the big fish in a small pond quandary where the newsletter eco system derails. 10 bucks a month times 3 or 4 adds up to real money I won’t be funneling to Cupertino, or Disney + or Whatever + for that matter. But a bundle of cooperating newsletters that promote a certain type of work that aggregates useful data about a strategic influential audience — you betcha.
from the Gillmor Gang Newsletter
__________________
The Gillmor Gang — Frank Radice, Michael Markman, Keith Teare, Denis Pombriant, Brent Leary, and Steve Gillmor. Recorded live Friday, December 11, 2020.
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
@fradice, @mickeleh, @denispombriant, @kteare, @brentleary, @stevegillmor, @gillmorgang
Subscribe to the Gillmor Gang Newsletter and join the backchannel here on Telegram.
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook … and here’s our sister show G3 on Facebook.
Welcome back to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s broadly based on the daily column that appears on Extra Crunch, but free, and made for your weekend reading. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Subscribe here.
Ready? Let’s talk money, startups and spicy IPO rumors.
Sweet dreams are made of IPOs, so merry f****** Christmas
We’re all very tired but there’s still so much news to go over I am sorry
Can you IPO sneakers? Also, this is the last Exchange roundup of the year
Hello everyone, hope you are well. This is the final Exchange newsletter of 2020. There will be a handful of columns next week before I take some time off. Equity will publish episodes throughout the termination of this accursed annum, as well.
And now that we’re done with housekeeping, our two focuses of the week: Who is going public and how fast a particular cohort of startups are growing.
Sure, the two topics aren’t incredibly related issues, but I am not going to let unending IPO news ruin what I wanted to talk about. So, SEC broccoli first, and then we get to have some fun.
IPOh-no-they-didn’t
IPO news was busy this week, with Coinbase and UIPath filing privately, Poshmark filing publicly, and Bumble reportedly filing privately. In short, we’ve added four names to our IPO roll-call, that already included Affirm and Roblox, which have delayed their own offerings.
And with names like Chime, Robinhood, Expensify, and others already of sufficient scale to go public at-will, the brand-name IPO crop of 2021 could rival what we saw this year.
Thanks to unicorns looking to graze public pastures, and public markets near all-time-highs, it appears that we’re going to see it rain liquidity over the coming months. This means that aggregate venture capital DPI and TVPI metrics will scoot higher, making the entire asset class even more attractive than it was in today’s yield-hungry world.
The music continues.
Just how big is the software business?
Earlier this week, TechCrunch covered Ramp’s new round. Ramp launched in February, and was dismissed by some as a Brex clone at the time. Ramp and Brex compete with Divvy and other startups (more on two others in a moment) to help other companies manage their spend through a combination of real and virtual cards, and software.
Along with some new software features, Ramp announced growth metrics as part of its news bundle. When reached to Divvy for similar numbers, the company supplied them. Brex declined to share results, which was fine. And I failed to mention a few competing companies, namely Airbase and Plate IQ.
Airbase I should have included as I covered it in March, 2020 when it raised $23.5 million in a Series A-extension (the new capital came in at a trebled-valuation, so you could call it a Series B, frankly). Regardless, Airbase matters not only because it is a competitor to Ramp and Divvy and Brex, but because while it offers similar products to its rivals, it also charges for its software.
This is in contrast, as far as I can tell, with Divvy and Brex and Ramp, companies more focused on signing up great masses of companies and driving revenues from interchange incomes. (Not charging for software that is wrapped around commodity cards is a way to keep sales-friction low, and thus, in theory, customer-growth high.)
But while Airbase wants corporate customers to pay for its software, it’s still growing like all heck. According to an email from Airbase CEO Thejo Kote, the startup’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) has grown by 2.5x this year, and payment volume has “grown 7X on an annualized basis.”
Those are super-good numbers. Adding another company to the success mix, well-known investor Garry Tan said on Twitter that Plate IQ, a company I have yet to meet, is “doing more than $500M in annual transactions and is profitable (real earnings).” For contrast, the relatively young Ramp just announced that it had cleared $100 million in aggregate managed spend.
My takeaway from this spate of reporting is not that any single company is going to win, or that one company is the clear leader. Instead this week’s poking around a single software niche reminded me of just how big the software market is.
How is there room for all of these competing startups to grow so quickly at the same time? The answer is that the global economy is huge, and software is still merrily grinding its way into more and more of its heft. I bet we wind up with three of our five companies in this piece surviving to public-scale, and just two being snapped up by private rivals or public giants.
I suppose this makes me long cloud. Whatever. Just don’t tell VC Twitter.
Market Notes
This week to make things easy, I’ve broken up the rest of the things you need to know into two groups. The first is everything that was not a round. The second is all the rounds. Let’s go:
- Slack’s venture capital fund is back for more, the parent company is self-funding the project, and the capital pool has doubled in size to $50 million.
- StockX has reached IPO scale. TechCrunch covered its fundraising news this week, writing at the time that the marketplace for used clothing goods was an IPO candidate. So we took a look. Yep. It’s an IPO candidate.
- The Information reported this week that SoFi did around $200 million in revenue during Q3, and was EBITDA-positive.
- Axios reported on the growth of the creator economy. Stop rolling your eyes. It’s more than big enough to take seriously, so get on board. We also chatted about the situation on Equity, if you are into podcasts with jokes.
- Crypto is back in the headlines, and recent price gains amongst the asset category are not based on pure hype.
- Robinhood had a tough week. The company’s shot at an IPO if it wants one probably won’t come under siege — it wouldn’t be the only company to go public in recent quarters with some legal matters underway — but it was still not the week that the stock trading company wanted. And its rival Public.com raised precisely as much money as Robinhood had to pay in fines. Ouch.
- Startup valuations are, in Silicon Valley at least, on the other-side of the COVID-depression.
Now, a stampede of megarounds.
Huge and Important
Our Various & Sundry section this week is anything but. So I renamed it for this final newsletter of the year. Here they are, the rounds both huge and important:
- Brazil’s Creditas raised $255 million. TechCrunch placed the round amongst a larger wave of Latin America-focused fintech rounds.
- Zenoti, based in Bellevue near Microsoft, raised $160 million, a round that made it a unicorn. What does it do? Per The Seattle Times, it “makes cloud-computing software for managing spas and salons.” Don’t laugh. Vertical SaaS is huge. Barbershop focused vertical SaaS player Squire was valued at $250 million the other week.
- Adding another payments-focused round to the newsletter, GoCardless is nearly a unicorn after raising more money this week.
- And sticking to fintech, France’s Lydia, which “aims to be an all-in-one, in-hand platform for any financial needs” of younger consumers, according to Tech.EU, extended its Series B by $86 million this week. (Accel led that round, and Public’s latest as well. Big week for that firm.)
- TechCrunch reported that ClickUp has put together a new $100 million round that values the company at $1 billion. It raised $35 million in June. Why do we care about ClickUp? It’s part of a wave of companies that closed two rounds in 2020. Ramp. Welcome. SkyFlow. The list goes on.
- In the Insurtech world, Bestow raised $70 million for its digital life insurance product. Insurtech has been hot lately, with AgentSync, a player in the space, raising two rounds this year alone.
- Finally, Paxos, which does crypto work for PayPal among other things, raised $142 million in a mammoth Series C. Chalk this one up to the crypto boom.
And now I shall disappear in a cloud of JUUL mist to lose some more games of Civ 6 to my nemesis, Hugs and and all the best.
This was quite the week for Pinterest and not in a good way. While the company settled the gender discrimination lawsuit brought forth by its former COO, the hefty $22.5 million settlement highlighted some of the tech industry’s inequities.
Meanwhile, Airbnb outlined some new goals around diversity and inclusion, despite having not produced a diversity report since last year, when it disclosed its 2018 data.
All that and more in this week’s edition of Human Capital. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox every Friday at 1 p.m. PT.
Pinterest settles gender discrimination lawsuit for $22.5 million
Pinterest announced it had settled the gender discrimination lawsuit brought forth by former COO Francoise Brougher. In August, Brougher sued Pinterest, alleging gender discrimination, retaliation and wrongful termination.
As part of the settlement, Pinterest will pay $20 million to Brougher and her attorneys, and both Pinterest and Brougher will commit $2.5 million toward “Advancing women and underrepresented communities” in the tech industry, the company wrote in a filing.
On Black women laying “the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress’”
Before Brougher filed suit against Pinterest, former Pinterest employees Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks publicly alleged racial and gender discrimination while working at the company. I spoke with Ozoma and Banks about the settlement and how it compared to their outcomes.
On a call with TechCrunch earlier this week, Ozoma and Banks described a double standard in their experiences compared to Brougher’s. While Brougher received a $20 million payout, Ozoma and Banks received less than one year’s worth of severance. Here are some pertinent words they shared on the settlement:
Banks:
This follows the time-honored tradition in America where Black women come forward, blazing a trail, revealing injustice and white women coming in and reaping all the benefits of that.
Ozoma:
So we, like in many, many, many other cases, Black women put ourselves on the line, shared absolutely everything that happened to us, then laid the groundwork for someone else to swoop in and collect ‘progress. No progress has been made here because no rights have been made with people who harm has been done to.
Pinterest agrees to adopt DEI recommendations
Pinterest committed to adopting the recommendations from its special committee of the board of directors. The committee formed earlier this year in June, shortly after two former employees, Ifeoma Ozoma and Aerica Shimizu Banks, went public with their allegations of racial and gender discrimination while working at Pinterest.
Here are a few of those recommendations:
- mandatory unconscious bias training for every employee, including managers and executives
- offer additional trainings on inclusivity and unconscious bias
- include “diverse employees” in interview panels with job candidates
- reward employees for their efforts to support and promote DEI
- publish a diversity report twice a year for at least two years; after two years, publish the report annually
- establish criteria for promotion eligibility
- enhance Pinterest’s harassment and discrimination policy
- create a centralized workplace investigations team to ensure consistent and fair outcomes
Gig workers are ready for battle as we enter the new year
Over on Extra Crunch, I did a deep dive into what’s next for gig workers and companies in light of the passage of Prop 22.
The gist is that Prop 22 does not mark the end of the battle of the status of gig workers. Companies are looking to pursue similar legislation in other places while gig workers are gearing up for another battle.
Moving forward, it’s hard to predict where companies like Uber and Lyft will go next, Brian Chen of the National Employment Law Project said, but it’s likely they’ll want to go to big markets.
“Places where they know there’s been on-the-ground workers organizing and activists they’d finally like to stomp out, and where enforcement has been strong against the company,” he told TechCrunch.
Chen pointed to New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Colorado, Pennsylvania, Washington, Oregon and Michigan. Wherever these companies bring the battle next, Chen says NELP will be heavily involved in fighting back. As will workers.
“We already know companies are doing this proactively, so we need to be doing this proactively as well,” Bain told me. “I think there is a lot we are going to be up against. It depends on some of the people who are appointed in labor positions and what their actual principles and values are, but I’m a little more optimistic. Things that were not possible to do under Trump will just be really difficult to do under Biden, but not impossible.”
You can read the full, 2,318-word story here.
Gig Workers Rising to launch app to help workers understand their rights under Prop 22
Gig Workers Rising is gearing up to release an app to help gig workers understand their new rights and benefits under Prop 22.
“[…] workers know that gig companies have a history of making and breaking promises to workers,” the site states. “These corporations depend on you not knowing your rights and being unable to advocate for the benefits you are owed.”
Earlier in the week, Lyft outlined the benefits that are now available to drivers.
Airbnb sets new DEI goals
Airbnb, which recently went public and became a $100 billion company, recently set two goals to try to improve diversity at the home-sharing and experiences company because it “is nowhere near satisfied with the status quo,” the company wrote in a blog post.
By the end of 2025, Airbnb is aiming for 20% of its U.S. workforce to be underrepresented minorities, which includes folks who self-identify as American Indian or Alaska Native, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latinx, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander. Currently, underrepresented minorities make up just 12% of the company’s employee base.
The second goal is to increase the representation of women to 50% by the end of 2025.
Intel’s diversity report breaks out underrepresented women data for first time
Some highlights from the report:
- Representation of Hispanic employees increased from 10% to 10.5% year over year
- Representation of underrepresented minorities in the exec level decreased to 8.4% from 8.8%
- Underrepresented women in exec roles increased from 1.8% to 2.4%
TechCrunch Sessions: Justice 2021 tickets on sale
Lastly, tickets are now available for TC Sessions: Justice 2021. Don’t worry, it’ll be an entirely virtual event and tickets are just $5 a pop.
The event is taking place from your living room on March 3, 2021. Already, we’ve lined up speakers like Backstage Capital founder and Managing Partner Arlan Hamilton, Kickstarter Union co-organizer Clarissa Redwine and Ethel’s Club/Somewhere Good founder and CEO Naj Austin.
More to come!
I often begin calls with founders by asking why they’re willing to bet their livelihoods on an idea that will most likely fail. It’s a small hack that lets me see how vulnerable a founder is, and how much conviction they have behind their ideas. Sometimes, if they answer, it’s the lede of my story. And sometimes, if they don’t answer, it’s the reason I don’t write the story.
As blunt as the question sounds, it can spark the best answers — especially when the founder is working on an idea that is a moonshot in and of itself.
Speaking of wild bets, our own Kirsten Korosec caught up with Zoox co-founder and CTO Jesse Levinson about his electric robotaxi, a six-year effort that was unveiled this week, outpacing competitors. Levinson was heads down on an idea that wasn’t just likely to fail, it almost did: Zoox’s Series C fell apart in March due to the pandemic.
Korosec: What was your trick or how did you remain focused for six years on something that is futuristic, expensive and possibly could fail? What did you personally do to keep that focus?
Levinson: Well, doing something like this is definitely challenging and it requires patience. I think the advice I would give is first to convince yourself that what you’re doing makes sense and is important and worth doing. If you’re starting a company because your goal is to make as much money as possible, if it turns out to be hard it’s going to be really difficult to convince yourself and your team and investors to stick with the idea.
One of the great things about Zoox is that the idea itself just makes a lot of sense. From first principles, there’s really a compelling reason to solve the problem the way we’ve been solving it and the market opportunity is unquestionably enormous. So armed with those facts and a team of wonderful employees and investors who strongly believed in that, we were able to weather some of the ups and downs of the industry, even though it’s not always been an easy ride.
It didn’t hurt that Amazon saved Zoox after its failed Series C, considering deep pockets and futuristic technology go well together. Still, Zoox’s ability to turn failure into focus is impressive, and part of what makes startups successful.
Before we jump into the rest of the newsletter, I wanted to formally introduce myself as your new Startups Weekly author. Thanks in advance for reading along and trusting me to bring you startup-relevant news each week. This should be fun, and the absolute expected dose of existential. Want it in your inbox every Saturday morning? Sign up here.
And from now on, you are invited to send me tips and thoughts to natasha.mascarenhas@techcrunch.com or tweet me @Nmasc_. TechCrunch also launched a secure and anonymous way to submit tips to our staff that you can start throwing information at.
The Palantir ‘Diaspora’
Everyone wants to invest in the next big tech mafia. This year, given the number of successful IPOs on the market, newly minted and cash-rich thinkers are entering the startup landscape from legendary companies, including Snowflake, Airbnb and Palantir. Stripe engineers, even pre-IPO, seem to be the hottest commodity out there.
So, investors are hoping to bet on exiting talent – and one has had the upper edge for a while now. Ross Fubin of XYZ Ventures introduced Palantir’s first business hire to its first engineer, which he describes as “the highest-value thing” he’s ever done. Now, after helping Palantir scale up its senior talent (and pocketing some advisor shares for himself) he invests in the Palantir diaspora out of his fund.
Connie Loizos, TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor, has the story, including where XYZ is looking for startups outside of the once-secretive public company’s staff.
Loizos also profiled Lux Capital’s Deena Shakir, who sees space and frontier tech going mainstream right now. Anyone else feel a moonshot theme arising in 2021?
Further reading:
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin
Why Singapore might become Asia’s Silicon Valley
In this Extra Crunch story, Catherine Shu argues that Singapore might become Asia’s next Silicon Valley. The long-time global financial hub will expect hundreds of new jobs in the next few years as ByteDance and Alibaba reportedly plan regional offices in the city-state. The interest comes as Google, Facebook, and Twilio already have operations in Singapore.
The spotlight comes with pressure on companies to find the best tech talent in Singapore, which has a population of 5.6 million.
Kuo-Yi Lim, co-founder and managing partner at early-stage investment firm Monk’s Hill Ventures, detailed the talent dynamics:
“My view is that there will always be the need to bring in folks who are not from Singapore because we’re just not big enough,” he said.
“The competition is more on a global basis, because even local startups will always be looking at global talent, from the region, Australia, India, China or beyond,” he added. “I think it actually cultivates the instinct for startups to really compete for talent in a thoughtful way. I think startups will have to become more creative and sharper in terms of how they position themselves as an attractive employer to spend time with, as opposed to the big companies.”
Singapore Skyline Business District Panorama at Night
Quick IPO update
After Roblox and Affirm pushed their IPOs because market conditions were too hot, the delay proved to be an opportunity for others. Bumble, UiPath and Coinbase filed to go public confidentially, meaning that the intent is now known but there are no numbers for us to go through. Finally, Poshmark filed its S-1 and StockX raised a round that Alex Wilhelm thinks could be pre-IPO money.
Image Credits: Bumble
Around TechCrunch
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Across the week
Seen on TechCrunch
PrivacyGrader is a free tool to help companies get smarter about data and disclosures
With Bambee, Allan Jones wants to give small businesses HR services their employees can trust
The venture firm SOSV has hired former TechCrunch COO Ned Desmond to help grow its startups
From India’s richest man to Amazon and 100s of startups: The great rush to win neighborhood stores
Seen on Extra Crunch
Startup valuations have recovered from summer lows
Dear Sophie: How did immigration change for startup founders in 2020?
An even bigger battle for gig worker rights is on the horizon
From startups to Starbucks: The embedded API opportunity
@EquityPod
There have to be some users that want to use Bitcoin for their OnlyFans, right?
In this week’s rare Danny-less Equity episode, Alex and I teamed up to chat about Public’s latest raise, Substack’s newest tool, and Bitcoin’s busiest week. The conversation devolved, as it usually does, into books, snow, and startups that prepare you for life before and after death.
Take a listen here, and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts if you’d like to support the show!
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.
As a developing tech power, China is one of the fastest countries in adopting blockchain technology.
Analysts debate whether the U.S. Treasury Secretary’s new rule about self-custodied wallets could place the current bull run in peril.
Many have called the long-rumored rules an existential threat to peer-to-peer transactions.