Equity Monday: Welcome to crypto game day

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. Today we had were reeling in the wake of the American football championship, and the fact that is once again snowing where Alex lives. Alas.

But snow or not, the news was fascinating:

• We chewed on the Just Eat delisting situation, which appears to be a cost-cutting move. Delivery Hero is also struggling, and the value of Deliveroo is in the toilet. So it’s not clear that European food delivery will wind up being the business that many expected it to be. What about in America? We get DoorDash earnings in due time, so we’ll learn more but the news doesn’t augur well.
• And shares of Splunk are set to rise sharply this morning in the wake of late Friday news that Cisco is interested in buying Splunk for around $20 billion. Normally such a deal wouldn’t excite us much as Splunk hasn’t been a startup for a long time, but the deal possibility does say that anti-trust concerns aren’t stopping some major firms from pursuing big deals.
• From the startup world, two rounds: $20 million for Gaia, which Alex thinks has a brilliant idea, and TripleDot, which raised $116 million for its causal games. Don’t sleep on the gaming market. It’s just flat huge.

And to close we yammered about crypto ads in the football game, which were expensive, but appear to be having a nice effect for the companies in question. More soon!