Listen to us talk about ‘undercorns,’ IPOs and what going public is really about

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Kate and Alex were here yesterday to dig into the Uber IPO filing; for today’s episode, we put that aside and discussed everything else that happened this week. Lucky for us, for the second half of our Thursday podcast-a-thon, the excellent Phil Libin joined us. He was the perfect guest for an IPO-heavy week.

You may know Libin as a co-founder of Evernote, or part of General Catalyst, a venture shop. What’s he up to now? We took the time to let him explain it, so listen up and you’ll find out.

This week we talked about a few other IPO results, including what’s going on with Lyft’s stock price (it’s going down and Uber’s expected IPO price range isn’t helping) in the wake of the company’s own hugely successful IPO (in terms of capital raised). Lyft may be losing altitude due simply to hype wearing off but at least now we understand how important its first earnings call will be.

We turned next to Pinterest, the buzzy visual search engine that’s now being called an ‘undercorn.’ We didn’t spend too much time mocking the phrase, interestingly, instead, our guest explained his philosophical stance on IPOs, in general. He spoke for a while and Alex and Kate nodded their heads in agreement. They especially agreed with his claim that companies shouldn’t have to sacrifice culture for profits, amen!

Staying on the IPO theme, PagerDuty was next. It’s IPO performance has been huge, and big, and impressive. And in a wave of appreciation towards everyone who has listened to the show for a long time, we did not spend 14 minutes arguing about IPO pricing. You’re welcome!

We ended with Kate doing a rapid-fire review of all the venture capital funds that announced closes this week because there were a lot, including Slow Ventures, Defy.VC and Texas’s LiveOak Venture Partners.

If you’re already itching for more Equity, we have a feeling next week will be another heavy news week with Pinterest and Zoom’s IPO on the docket.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.