This week, Natasha, Mary Ann, and Alex were all on board, accompanied by Chris and Grace, ensuring that we had the entire team. And, speaking of teams, Mary Ann is now a weekly guest on the Friday show. She’s been a friend for years, and now she’s a coworker twice over for Natasha and Alex, and we’re overjoyed. Aside from that personal news, here’s the schedule for today’s show!
- Funding rounds in the logistics and infrastructure markets: This week, we went physical with our funding roundup. BridgeLinx raised the largest seed round in Pakistani history, Releaf is working on some fascinating agtech in Nigeria, and Stord’s massive round earlier in the week took us to Atlanta.
- And Atlanta has had a week to remember. Extra Crunch performed a thorough dive into the city’s stellar startup fundraising in recent quarters, and one of its homegrown businesses, of course, was just sold to Intuit for $12 billion. Even though we attempted to stay away from material we’d already covered, we had a few views on the Intuit-Mailchimp deal. Business Insider talked on how some Mailchimp employees are reacting to the deal for more information on the dispute.
- We then moved on to a layoff narrative. Casper, the publicly traded DTC mattress firm, announced another round of layoffs, this time affects three C-suite executives. It sparked a discussion on how Apple’s tracking upgrades are affecting startups in this space more widely, and whether more layoffs are on the way.
- Then there were the initial public offerings to consider. We had to talk about edtech for a minute after Natasha informed us that Quizlet may go public shortly. Notes on Toast and Freshworks rounded out the Going Public discussion. We hasten to note that Alex makes no apologies for his clumsy joke.
- If the news cycle becomes hazardous before Disrupt, expect some modifications to the typical Equity program lineup. Hugs!
- We then moved on to a layoff narrative. Casper, the publicly traded DTC mattress company, announced another round of layoffs, this time affects three C-suite executives. It sparked a discussion on how Apple’s monitoring updates are affecting startups in this category more widely, and whether more layoffs are on the way.
