Production note: Alex’s mic was a bit whack until the 16-minute mark. Please forgive the issue, we noticed and fixed it as fast as we could. Hugs and love!
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week was a corker. We had Alex Wilhelm in-studio with our guest Minal Hasan, founder of K2 Global, and TechCrunch’s Danny Chriton jumped in from New York to help the crew dig through the biggest and best stuff from the last seven days.
It’s been busy, to say the least. First, we took a look at the Elon-Musk-taking-Tesla-private-situation, which has kept Markets Twitter in suspense for days. We didn’t really get to talk about the Grimes-Azealia Banks stuff, but, hey, stay in your lane and what not. Don’t forget that the latest Telsa upheaval comes on the heels of the firm’s pretty good earnings report.
Next, we took a look at earnings. Not of public companies, mind, but two unicorns that have become so large as to require regular financial disclosure. So, we took a peek into what Uber and WeWork had cooking. In short:
WeWork loses a lot of money, and despite its impressive growth we have some concerns;
Uber loses a lot of money, but due to its impressive growth our group was (on average) not too worried.
Put into simple terms, WeWork’s long-term lease situation has us worried, while Uber’s losses compared to its net revenue seem kinda alright given other financial metrics. Place your own bets, of course.
Moving along we took a dig into the NIO IPO, which you probably haven’t heard about yet. It’s another electric car company, but this time from China. And it’s raising a lot after having essentially zero history as a revenue-generating company. What could go wrong!
And finally, crypto and all that has happened to your favorite coin recently. Hasan was on hand with a grip of good points on the matter. She was a pretty damn great guest.
That’s it for this week, hang tight and come see us at Disrupt.