Singapore-based venture firm Jungle Ventures is digging deeper into Southeast Asia and India with the close of its fourth fund. Fund IV totals $600 million, with $450 million for new investments and $150 million earmarked for follow-up investments in its portfolio companies. The fund’s close brings Jungle Ventures’ total assets under management to over $1 billion, which it says makes it the first independent, Singapore-headquartered venture firm that invests across Southeast Asia and India to hit this milestone. 

Fund IV’s limited partners are split equally between returning investors and new ones. Returning backers include Temasek, IFC, FMO and DEG, while new LPs include StepStone Group. TechCrunch covered the fund’s first close of $225 million in September 2021.

Jungle Ventures was founded in 2012 by Amit Anand and Anurag Srivastava, launching with a $10 million debut fund. Jungle Ventures has about 60 portfolio companies and says its enterprise value is over $12 billion on $250 million of invested capital, with a loss ratio of less than 5%. 

Some of Jungle Ventures’ most notable investments include unicorns Kredivo, Livspace and Moglix. It looks for companies that can expand between Southeast Asia and India; for example, Livspace was founded in India and now operates in Southeast Asia, too. 

Fund IV will continue Jungle Ventures’ “concentrated portfolio” approach, making a projected 15 to 18 key investments out of India and Southeast Asia. It makes many follow-up investments and has invested about $30 million to $40 million in some companies, across multiple rounds. 

“We’ve been investing with that philosophy since our inception in 2012. It’s driven by two major factors that influenced our thinking. Factor number one is that most founders in this region, are first-time founders, and you need a lot of help and support to give to these founders to help them grow their business, help them grow as a leader as well,” Anand told TechCrunch. “From a founder to becoming a CEO is a very long journey, a very painful journey, and not many people become successful CEOs.” 

He added, “This region has been completely under-penetrated in every sector and we would rather focus our time and energy and our capital on fewer investments an make them larger.” 

Fund IV has already backed Vietnamese digital bank Timo; Singapore back office operating system Sleek; Indian D2C consumer electronics brand Atomberg; Web3.0-based social-crypo-community platform for women Eveworld; and inFeedo, an employee retention SaaS platform. 

“If I take a step back and just think of one singular overarching thesis, I would say we are now very, very inspired by the whole decentralization and equitable internet movement that’s happening around the world, whether it’s concepts like Web 3, whether its concepts like even social commerce, whether it’s the SME technology digitalization,” Anand said. “Essentially, bringing the power of the internet to that smallest participant in the internet economy is what’s the most exciting aspect of this fund.” 

While valuations of public software-as-a-service businesses have been taking a hammering of late as investors cool on the sector amid a wider, post-pandemic tech stock sell-off, SaaS startups still need to raise funding to scale their budding businesses — or, well, they hope they’ll be able to do so on reasonable terms despite these wider market bumps.

Today, London-based Legl — a 2019-founded SaaS startup that sells tools to law firms wanting to digitize processes and automate workflows in areas like client onboarding, payments and compliance to support a more modern customer experience — is announcing the close of an $18 million Series B round, just over a year after it raised a $7M Series A.

The Series B was led by several technology investors, including existing investor Octopus Ventures (which led its Series A), although Legl isn’t specifying the round’s other backers. Previously disclosed investors in the business include Backed, Samaipata and First Round Capital, plus a number of angels.

The startup says it has grown its customer base from around 100 UK-based law firms back in March 2021 to 170+ now — which it specifies includes 20 of the Top 200 firms in the country.

It’ll be using the Series B to kick off planned international expansion, focusing on other markets where its UK client base has offices and ploughing cash into product dev and hiring.

“There is a global opportunity for law firms to run their businesses in a more modern, efficient, revenue-driving and client-friendly way. We are working with our client base to start expanding out to their international offices which lie across multiple different geographies,” says founder and CEO, Julia Salasky.

“Over the past year, we’ve built out our vision of a new category in the legal space — client lifecycle management — by investing in the underlying CRM that enables law firms not only to digitize previously manual business workflows across the client lifecycle but to understand their client base better. We’ve leaned into our core competencies in risk management, compliance and payments and finance, enabling law firms to both undertake activities that touch on their regulated business processes but also improve cashflow and drive better client experience.

“With the new funding we will expand our workflow driven approach to managing business operations and in particular focus on how law firms can drive faster revenue, better and de-risked financial management and a better client experience. We already enable law firms to manage a large proportion of their client base and payment stack and plan to drive more capabilities for more firms over the coming months,” she adds.

Salasky, whose name may also be familiar as prior founder of the CrowdJustice platform, tells us Legl has seen 3x revenue growth over the past year and 150% net revenue retention, suggesting its SaaS is proving a sticky hit with law firms.

She declines to disclose the startup’s valuation for the Series B but confirms the raise was certainly not a down round.

“This is a big up round for us! Last round, last year we raised $7M and this is an $18M round (closed in this new funding climate!), building on the revenue growth and momentum we’ve had,” she notes.

Discussing whether the SaaS startup is feeling any impact from a wider market cooling on tech and SaaS stocks, she adds: “Law firms are notoriously counter-cyclical businesses, so they don’t tend to suffer as much as traditional corporates in a downturn. But in general what we see is that as we demonstrate increased value to law firms and drive better core business operations, we become more, not less valuable, irrespective of market conditions.”

Legl founder and CEO, Julia Salasky (Image credit: Legl)

Legal and compliance tech has been an increasingly active category for startups in recent years. But Salasky suggests most of the action has focused on contract management or other targeted ‘point solutions,’ whereas Legl aims to stand apart by offering a more holistic platform for law firms to power up their ability to serve clients by providing them with a suite of digital tools that can automate and support their business operations. This frees up in-house expertise to focus on more of the core legal work.

“There is an explosion of investment in contract management and other areas where the substantive legal work could be improved. But what we are doing at Legl takes a different approach — we are focused on the business of law, on the running of a complex regulated business that has clients at its heart, and where to date there has been very little in the way of cloud-based technology,” she suggests.

Commenting on the Series B in a statement, Malcolm Ferguson, investor at Octopus Ventures, added: “We’re delighted to continue to support Julia and the team on their mission to free up lawyers’ time so they focus on creating value for their clients.  The company has grown really strongly over the last 12 months, and is positioning itself to become the go-to solution for law firms looking to modernise and automate their non-core work. Not only does this improve a law firm’s revenues, and margins, but [it] also means they can deliver a meaningfully better experience to their clients.  We’re excited to see what Julia can achieve with this funding over the coming years.”

There are more than 1,000 private companies with billion-dollar valuations backed by venture capital that need to go public. Fewer than one in six are IPO candidates, however.

Data from Bessemer Venture Partners’ State of the Cloud 2022 report breaks the unicorn market into two categories. (Notes here on TechCrunch+ from Bessemer partner Mary D’Onofrio.)

The first comprises unicorns that have reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) threshold, which Bessemer dubs “centaurs.” The other group contains unicorns that have not yet reached that revenue marker.

Per Bessemer, the number of centaurs is growing over time — last year, we had 60 companies cresting the revenue benchmark, up from around 40 in 2020 and 35 in 2019. Those numbers may appear impressive, but when contrasted with the fact that more than 500 unicorns were minted last year, there is a yawning gap between companies valued as IPO-ready and those that actually are.

Doing some loose math, 60 companies reaching the $100 million threshold last year compared with 520 new unicorns works out to around 11.5%, or fewer than one in eight. However, Bessemer estimates that there are 150 private startups with $100 million in annual recurring revenue or similar, out of around 1,000 unicorns, meaning that around 15% of unicorns have met the mark — just under one in six.

(For reference, I am using $100 million as an IPO-ready revenue benchmark, which I don’t think will prove controversial, and $1 billion as a valuation indicative of public-market scale value, which, again, should not engender too much argument. More on both in a moment.)

How did we wind up with so many unicorns and so few IPO-ready private technology companies with IPO-scale valuations?

For SaaS companies, growth may no longer be enough.

Venture capitalist and SaaS sage Jason Lemkin shared notes yesterday on Monday.com’s recent earnings report. Highlighting the positives he saw from the team productivity service’s Q1 results, Lemkin noted that the company announced strong growth and 125% net revenue retention in its most recent quarter.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Monday.com’s quick growth, per Lemkin, is an indication that in business terms, “times are still very, very good in SaaS,” regardless of whether the stock market agrees. The point about the market is a good one. The change in the value of public technology companies has taken six months to reach its current point, and the ripples are still working their way through the startup market in the wake of last year’s private-capital bonanza.

Lemkin considers SaaS fundamentals still strong, despite the sector finding itself as far outside of investor favor this year as it was in their hearts back in 2021. It’s not hard to see why. Monday.com’s first quarter had a lot to like in it, and yet the company’s value is down from an all-time high of $450 per share to a few bucks over $100 this morning.

Monday.com is a therefore good example of how companies in the SaaS market are being graded along a much steeper curve than they once were. So let’s unpack its actual results against Q1 expectations, the company’s guidance against analyst forecasts, and how to read the market’s view on its current health.

The resulting picture is one that unicorns should pay close attention to. After all, how many unicorns wouldn’t love to post the following results?

Monday’s Q1 results, 2022 guidance

In the first quarter of the company’s fiscal 2022, Monday.com reported revenue of $108.5 million, up 84% compared to the year-ago period. Per the company’s release, its aggregate net dollar retention was 125%, a figure that rose to 135% “for customers with more than 10 users” and to 150% for “customers [worth] more than $50,000 in annual recurring revenue.”

In growth terms, then, Monday.com had a whip-ass first quarter.

When The New York Times got its hands on some of Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter, a company that he is in the process of purchasing, you would have been forgiven for thinking that Musk knew what he was buying.

Per the Times’ reporting, we learned that Musk expects to bolster Twitter’s revenue to “$26.4 billion by 2028, up from $5 billion last year,” while growing the company’s user base from “217 million at the end of last year to nearly 600 million in 2025 and 931 million six years from now,” boosting average revenue per user by nearly $6 over the same time frame.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

Those numbers might have made SPACs blush, but they showed something critical in the Musk pitch: that Twitter had huge amounts of value that he, Musk, could unlock with his plan.

Since then — the Times broke the Musk investor pitch 11 days ago — matters between Musk and the social media company have become tenuous as its potential acquirer took to the company’s service to complain, prod, and backtrack.

Musk’s displeasure with Twitter has centered around the issue of bots. Not all bots on Twitter are malicious or bad; some are even entertaining. But too many bots, or even the wrong sort, matter because they can dilute the user experience on the social service by spamming real users, and inflate the company’s advertiser-focused metrics.

On May 13, Musk threw the financial world into a frenzy by stating on Twitter that his deal to buy the company was “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.” Whether he was able to make such a decision is not clear based on the deal documents.

Although he said he was still “committed” to the deal, Musk ran an experiment involving a set of 100 users to see how many were bots.

Business cards feel almost as outdated as Victorian calling cards, but they are still a networking staple. Melbourne-based Blinq wants to do away with them altogether. The app generates a QR code that shows your professional info, including social media links, as soon as someone scans it, even if they don’t have the app installed. The company announced today it has raised $5 million AUD (about $3.5 million USD) from Blackbird and Square Capital.

Blinq profile can also be shared through NFC cards, short links, email signatures and video call backgrounds. Users have the option of creating multiple profiles so they can control who sees what information, like their company websites, Calendly and LinkedIn. It integrates with CRM platforms and directories like Salesforce, HubSpot and Azure AD.

Founder and CEO Jarrod Webb was an early Uber Eats operator and software engineer when he created Blinq in 2017 as a hobby. At that time, Uber Eats had changed its logo a couple of times, Webb told TechCrunch, and his job title also changed twice, so he had stacks of different business cards on his desk. “It made me realize paper business cards have two big flaws,” he said. “Information is static and you had to carry them around.”

Around the same time, iOS 11 was released, giving iPhones the capability to scan QR codes natively through the camera. Over a weekend, Webb built the first version of Blinq, a simple app that allowed users to create a digital business card and add a QR code that they could add to their iPhone widget screen.

While Blinq worked between iPhone users, it was only in late 2019 that most Androids could scan them natively, Webb adds. QR codes saw more adoption during the COVID pandemic, and in January 2021, Webb left his job to focus on Blinq after several businesses contacted him, asking for a way to manage cards for all employees.

“Prior to QR code scanning from native phone cameras, there have been many digital business card apps, but none have really stood the test of time because they weren’t able to serve a great experience the first time two people met, either because they relied on both people already having the app installed to be able to receive details or because the transfer time was too long,” Webb said.

Blinq relies on a product-led growth strategy. Most of its growth is from users sharing their Blinq card with people they meet, including at conferences, who then in turn create their own Blinq cards.

In a prepared statement, Blackbird partner Rick Baker said, “The last time Square Peg and Blackbird co-invested in a seed-stage startup, the result was Canva. With many social networks leading to a fragmentation of identity, Blinq is creating a way to help people manage, control and share their identities in one place. We see such an exciting opportunity with what Blinq is building.”

Startup layoffs are back, and the damage is starting to add up.

Back in early 2020, an online layoff tracker — Layoffs.FYI — was built to collect and tabulate startup layoffs. Cribbing from media reports and other sources, the data source was a hot property during the early-COVID startup downturn.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

As quickly as it rose in prominence, however, it seemed to fade. Startups and their backing investors realized shortly after cuts swept the industry that most upstart tech companies were going to be at least all right during the pandemic, slowing the rate of layoffs. Software companies wound up enjoying record demand, from both customers and investors, eventually fueling the 2021 SaaS bubble.

Now the bad times are back, if in a different form.

Back in 2020, we saw the startup market crumble in what felt like days; the current downturn, in contrast, has been building since late 2021. With that in mind, the gradual rate of layoffs this year is not a huge shock.

Layoffs.FYI data indicates that after reaching a trough between Q4 2020 and Q4 2021, staff cuts at startups have risen off a very low floor. And the same dataset indicates that the second quarter has already matched the first quarter’s cuts; in numerical terms, Layoffs.FYI counted just under 9,300 startup layoffs in Q1 2022 and around 8,700 thus far in Q2.

Neither number is anywhere near the more than 60,000 job cuts that the same source counted up in the second quarter of 2020.

But don’t let those comparisons save you from worry — the trends aren’t looking good.

From hot to not

Looking at the data on a per-month basis makes it clear that the pace of startup layoffs is accelerating. May is already ahead of April and March results by the midpoint of the month, while March 2022 was previously the worst month since the start of 2021.

If the current trend continues, we could see startup layoffs persist throughout the summer.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

What was on our minds this morning? The following:

• Global markets are generally down, albeit nothing too terrifying. The American stock market is trying to regain its footing after weeks of selling.
• What’s ahead for crypto startups in the wake of the Terra/Luna meltdown? Bloomberg wonders about a general slowdown, and we look at the Crunchbase data of who backed the ill-fated stablecoin.
• Startup layoffs are accelerating — not as bad as before, but enough to warrant our attention. Layoffs.FYI is back, y’all!
• The Topship round, invested in by Y Combinator and Flexport, has our recent look at CVC hitting just right.

It was an awful weekend in America, which leaked into the show somewhat. Take care of one another.

A few housekeeping notes before we go: This is not a live-show week, so Equity will simply come out on Wednesday and Friday mornings. And this week is our TC Sessions: Mobility event, which you can learn more about here.

Curious Thing founders Dr. Han Xu, Sam Zheng and David Mckeague

Sydney-based Curious Thing is an aptly-named startup. The voice AI communication platform can call people and ask them questions like “How are you feeling today?” and then follow up with “how does it feel compared to yesterday?” Used primarily by health and financial companies, Curious Thing announced today it has raised $7 million AUD (about $4.8 million USD) in pre-Series A funding led by Hawkstone with participation from Blacksheep Capital, January Capital and returning investors Reinventure and Qualgro. 

Curious Thing was founded in 2018 by CEO Sam Zheng, CTO Dr. Han Xu and chief strategy officer David Mckeague as a HR tech company, before pivoting to voice AI this year. The company says its platform has processed more than three million minutes of AI-human conversations so far. Its clients include Foodpanda, Quitline, Calvary and Medibank, Brighte, Humm Group and several state and local governments. 

Zheng told TechCrunch “instead of answering questions like ‘what’s the weather today?’ we thought, can we can build an AI that is designed to ask open-context questions and importantly derive insights from people?”

“It’s a voice AI because the voice phone call carries the right characteristic of being proactive and prompt to encourage customers to share more,” he added. “We know that for the same question, people are more likely to share if they are talking.” 

Zheng said he usually describes Curious Thing to clients as “proactive customer care.” In the health sector, it is used for daily check-ins on patients. For example, the company worked with multiple state governments in Australia to call COVID patients about their situation and symptoms, so clinicians could give them the right kind of support. In the financial services and fintech industries, Curious Thing’s use cases include onboarding assistance, information validation, payment reminders and lapsed customer feedback collection. 

Some other examples of questions Curious Thing can ask include: “you have an appointment on Friday, can I please confirm that you are coming,” followed by “do you need to reschedule” if a patient says no. In the financial services industry, it can ask people things like “Your membership has expired, would you reconsider renewing if we give you 10% off?,” “Can I please understand why you decided to stop using our service?” and “Thanks for using our service. Is there any feedback you can share with us?” 

About 85% of Curious Thing’s revenue currently comes from Australia, and part of its new funding will be used to expand in Southeast Asia and the United States, Zheng said. It also plans to hire for its tech team. 

While stocks looked for a comeback on Friday after another torrid week of selloffs, it’s a fact that software valuations are testing new levels of price depression.

There’s widespread damage as a result of all of those red charts plummeting down and to the right: The decline in the value of public software companies has been a key leading indicator for the present slowdown in venture capital activity, for example, and the ability of startups to push their own valuations higher.

Day-to-day coverage, however, can provide snapshots instead of more complete images. So this fine Saturday, I want to slow down and take stock of where are regarding software (SaaS, effectively) valuations.

The smaller reality of SaaS valuations

There’s no need at this point to gloat about how much investors got things wrong last year. Markets have a way of teaching their own lessons; we don’t need to add to the lecture notes provided by public-market immiseration of recent tech IPOs or the panic that overpriced unicorns feel as they compare their revenue base to their sticker price.

Because no one parties harder than I do, I spent a portion of my week reading through Coinbase’s investor call after its earnings report. The U.S. crypto exchange pulls in some questions from non-analysts during its chats, which makes for a slightly more entertaining set of prompts and responses. You can read it all here.

I bring it up because someone asked Coinbase if the company could spot a “strategic advantage in acquiring or merging with Robinhood.” You might be shocked to learn that Coinbase wasn’t entirely effusive about the idea.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money.

Read it every morning on TechCrunch+ or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

And then, yesterday, the CEO of Coinbase rival FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, disclosed that he had purchased 56,273,469 shares in Robinhood, representing around 7.6% of common stock in the company.

Shares of Robinhood are up hugely in pre-market trading, rising nearly 24% in the wake of the news. Why? Because investors are hoping that FTX will scoop up Robinhood for a premium. If FTX was to buy Robinhood, investors would likely expect an exit price far above its depressed share price. Therefore, as the FTX CEO moved into the stock, its potential near-term exit value shot higher, making it a buy.

Per Bankman-Fried’s filing, he thinks that the Robinhood shares “represent an attractive investment.”

There is an interesting tension between the Coinbase and FTX news that we should unpack. It’s Friday, and we deserve a bit of a think. Let’s have some fun!

If equities go crypto, will crypto go equities?

A running joke at TechCrunch is that all fintech companies, regardless of where they start, wind up looking about the same.

A good example of this is SoFi, best known for its student loan refinancing work, which now offers credit cards, mortgages, business products, checking accounts, and more. SoFi even offers crypto investing to a degree, which might seem like a pretty big stretch from its origin point.

The fact that SoFi went broad is not a diss; instead, it’s a reminder that acquiring users in the fintech market is expensive. That high cost makes it good business to try to get every user at your fintech company to use as many products as possible after they are acquired. The logic here is simple: CAC is CAC, so if you want to bolster customer leverage, tack on more LTV. (In venture-speak, CAC means “customer acquisition cost,” while LTV refers to the lifetime value of a customer.)

This is also why we’ve seen Square become Block and spread its wings across the fiat and web3 economies, why you can buy and sell crypto with PayPal, and so forth.

And yet when Coinbase held its earnings call, president and COO Emilie Choi said the following response to the question about possibly buying Robinhood (emphasis TechCrunch):

TechCrunch is more than just a site with words. We’re also building a growing stable of podcasts focused on the most critical topics relating to the startup and venture capital worlds. To help you find the right show for your interests, we’ve compiled our audio output from the week here.

Embedded below is the latest from Chain Reaction, our new and stellar crypto-focused podcast hosted by Lucas and Anita. You will also find Found, a long-form bit of work that goes deep on the real saga of company formation from Jordan and Darrell. There’s an audio-only version of TechCrunch Live hosted by Matt that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Finally, there’s Equity, TechCrunch’s long-running, Webby award winning, podcast focused on venture capital and the latest startup news, hosted by Natasha, Mary Ann, and Alex.

We have more coming, so stay tuned. And if you are more into the written over the spoken word, well we have newsletters on the above topics as well.

Chain Reaction

Episode 5: Moonbirds founder talks crypto crash and where NFTs go from here (with Kevin Rose)

Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita discuss turmoil and heartbreak in the crypto markets as Bitcoin and Ethereum get hit hard, a number of other popular tokens get crushed, and crypto-aligned public stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood see their share prices tank. What caused this bloodbath? Well, a major catalyst was the disastrous implosion of Terra’s Luna token as a result of ongoing stablecoin woes.

In their interview this week, Lucas and Anita chat with Kevin Rose. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur who founded Digg in the early 2000s and is now an investor at True Ventures and a co-founder of the Proof Collective. His startup recently raised $10 million from Seven Seven Six and launched its NFT project Moonbirds, which has quickly become one of the most popular NFT efforts out there. Listen along as we discuss the crypto crash and its fallout, and the challenges up ahead for NFTs.

Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper.

The TechCrunch Live podcast

Episode 5: Raising monster rounds for self-driving mobility startups

Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop the an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised a $83.5 million Series A with Khosha Venture’s Sven Strohband leading the round. Both will speak to Urtasun’s unique (and commanding) perspective, and what allowed the company to raise the massive Series A.

This event is also available on YouTube. See upcoming events here!

Found

Episode 56: Sassie Duggleby, Venus Aerospace

Sassie Duggleby is leading the team at Venus Aerospace to develop a spaceplane that could go from LA to Tokyo in an hour. As CEO, Sassie sets the tone that her team doesn’t have to adhere to the typical startup-up grind to solve some serious deeptech issues. She talks with Darrell and Jordan about honoring the company’s namesake–Venus, the goddess of love–and loving her customers and her employees well, all while working to bring the world closer together with greener, more efficient travel.

Equity

Episode 513: The dominoes are falling

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

Happily once again we did not start the day by talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, though the news was not really very good:

• Stocks are down sharply around the world. And crypto prices, which track larger asset prices, are also sharply lower in the last day, and week.
• Uber’s CEO told his company that things are changing. Adjusted EBITDA is out, FCF is in. Hiring? Going to slow. Capital expenses? Those will get harder looks, and so on. During the show, we asked about the slowdown, and how it may, or may not impact the bouyant crypto startup market.
• Neat funding rounds from Pyramid, which raised $120 million, and Paymob, which raised $50 million.

Episode 514: Tech layoffs don’t happen to companies, they happen to people

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked: What does the most recent wave of layoffs mean for tech workers?

The question comes after Natasha’s recent Startups Weekly column, “The Great Resignation, meet the Great Reset.” In the piece, which included a round up of recent tech layoffs, she explored the idea of employee whiplash, and why this moment in pullback is different than what we saw in March 2020.

The goal of the episode was to humanize the tech layoffs we’ve seen ripple across the startup ecosystem, from buzzy, big names like Cameo, On Deck and Robinhood, to B2B platforms like Workrise and Thrasio. As our piece last week notes, the common thread between most of these layoffs, according to founders, is that there’s been a shift in the market and a serious pivot in business is required. A pivot, that is, that hurts the employees that built your product up after high demand.

Episode 515: How close are we to understanding what’s going on?

This week we recorded live, which is always good fun, meaning that we took some questions from the audience. If you want that version of the show, we have a YouTube archive of it here.

For those of you more into audio, we have you covered here. Natasha, Alex, and Grace teamed up with Julio and Yashad to host the shindig, allowing us to cover the following:

• The end of iPod, a time to reflect on technology trends.
• The exit of a Modern Fertility co-founder, and the MARA round bringing more money to Africa’s fintech scene.
• From there it was onto the Terra crash, Coinbase’s earnings, and the general sentiment shift in the crypto scene.
• Next up was Tiger and the downturn in startup valuations.
• And we closed on some personal notes.

And that’s the rundown from the week — send us a tweet if you have suggestions, or questions. Onward!