Friday, May 11, 2018

Equity podcast: Robinhood raises, Flipkart exits and MoviePass is running out of cash

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-themed podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Matthew Lynley, Connie Loizos and myself were joined by Villi Iltchev, a partner at August Capital.

It was good that we had a full crew on deck, as the news flew thick and varied this week. In honor of the news cycle, we took on as much of it as we could inside a single episode.

And as we’re sure that you guessed, we had to talk about the Flipkart-Walmart deal first. The staggering transaction sees the American IRL commerce giant with a proven appetite for e-commerce players bring the India unicorn into its fold. This is the second multi-billion-dollar startup deal for Walmart in recent memory. (Jet.com was the first unicorn to find new nest in the Walton’s rafters.)

Amazon, naturally, was the loser in the final deal. Now it will have to win alone if it can.

But we couldn’t repine, as there was more to do. Next up we talked our way through the new Robinhood round. Raising more than $350 million for a valuation of more than $5 billion, Robinhood has put itself nearly out of the range of acquisition, instead seemingly betting its future on independent success. Does the firm have a shot at growing into its valuation?

One company that did manage precisely that, Dropbox, reported its first quarter’s performance as a public company this week. In fact, it happened about 37 minutes before we hit record. But despite beating known expectations, it seems that the public markets were really hoping for a bit more. Dropbox shares sank in after-hours trading after besting both top and bottom lines.

To take us out, we riffed on MoviePass’s continued troubles. Sparing you the details, things look bad. Again.

We had to leave the Glassdoor deal behind so that we didn’t run too long, but we’ll be right back. Stay cool!

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple PodcastsOvercast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/11/equity-podcast-robinhood-raises-flipkart-exits-and-moviepass-is-running-out-of-cash/

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