A ping-pong match between bulls and bears

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

Happily we were once again at full strength this week, with Alex Wilhelm, Natasha Mascarenhas and Mary Ann Azevedo chatting, and Grace handling production.

You can tell from the topic list today that we are in an odd time. There are myriad signals that the startup market is slowing down. And there are some counter-narrative data points that paint a more complex picture. Where do you stand in your own viewpoint? Well, read on for some data to consider:

• Natasha gave us a brief update on All Raise’s annual VC summit, but she’ll get into more on an upcoming Wednesday show (stay tuned!)
• Monte Carlo just raised a unicorn round, worth $135 million at a $1.6 billion valuation. On the other hand, Bolt is laying off staff amidst a correction in the larger startup market, and perhaps its own space.
• If startup news is pointing in two directions, so too are data from the venture capital world. While Sequoia is warning founders about a downturn, a16z just raised a king’s ransom to pour into the web3 market. Parse that as you will.
• There were other bits of news to consider as we work to understand where the startup world truly is today, including news from Zip and Nowports — two newly-minted unicorns that Mary Ann recently profiled.
• And we closed on, what else, drama in fintech. As Stripe and Plaid gear up to battle, Finix is either in the fray, or about to jump in, depending on your perspective. What’s clear is that increasingly overlapping fintech giants are going to rub up against one another. You can read more about that in The Interchange, out on Sunday.