Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
Today Katie Roof and I were joined by James Hardiman, a partner at Data Collective (DCVC). If you want to tell him how he did, he’s on Twitter here.
It was good to have Hardiman on board as there was an ocean of news to swim through. Indeed, we are in the middle of earnings season, companies can’t stop from buying one another and the IPO window is stuck wide open.
So we decided to just do everything. Here’s how it broke down.
Earnings
Facebook’s earnings had two purposes. First, the company showed the world that its run of financial feats is not at an end. The company beat on top and bottom lines and kept growing around the world. That second result is our second point: The company is not taking material slings and arrows — at least in terms of lost users — from its recent privacy scandals.
Staying on the social side of tech, Twitter’s earnings were strong as well. The company also beat on top and bottom lines, turning in GAAP profit and some modest user growth. For Twitter, which has spent much of its time as a public company in the public penalty box, has seen its share price more than double from lows.
And then a few more of the big three, which we tried to hit quickly:
- Amazon had a great quarter, and AWS continues to kick out huge numbers.
- Alphabet had a solid quarter, and we also know now how Nest is doing.
- Microsoft beat too, also managing to have all its operating groups beat as well.
It’s a lot of numbers. But now at least you know.
$1 trillion?
All the above sums to an interesting question regarding value. Those companies we just touched on (with the exception of Twitter) are in the running to be the company that first reaches an inflation-unadjusted market cap of $1 trillion.
Which might be the first to make the grade? We had some ideas.
Square-Weebly
Next up we tackled the Square-Weebly deal, in which the public payments company bought the private website-builder corp for hundreds of millions of dollars. The downside is that the company was worth more than $100 million more the last time the private markets valued it.
But, exactly who won out isn’t clear, and it’s not hard to see why VCs made the bet. There are two Weebly competitors in the Unicorn Club!
IPOs
And finally, the thing nearest and dearest to our hearts: public offerings.
This week Ceridian went public, shooting 42 percent higher in its first day of trading. That’s good. But, as we discuss, the total deal might not be super hot for the company’s owners.
(Note: Never feel bad for private equity.)
All that and DocuSign and Smartsheet are probably trading by the time you read this.
Stay cool!
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