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

This week was a good week because we had the full team back together. Natasha Mascarenhas was on hand, Mary Ann Azevedo was on the mic and Alex Wilhelm was around as well. Grace, our ever-trusty producer and lead on the Friday show, was on the dials.

As with nearly every week this year, we had to cut and cut to make the show fit into its allotted time. This is what we got into:

• Brief updates on SoftBank, Better.com and Elon’s quest to buy Twitter.
• On the deals front, we talked about Mary Ann’s coverage of Kindred, the latest from the Indian crypto scene and Chipotle. Why Chipotle? Because it turns out that it is cooking up more than lunch!
• From there we dug into Natasha’s coverage of the latest early-stage effort from a16z, and what it could mean for competition with Y Combinator, among other entities. The theme of large funds going earlier and earlier-stage will be with us forever, it seems.
• Shares of Netflix took a hammering this week. Why? Growth at the company is on hold, at least from a user perspective. We took the chance to chat about the pandemic’s tailwinds tailing off. This impacts a host of startups, both big and small.
• From there we kept the cheery note afloat by talking about live audio apps and their future. There are some tremors afoot, even if everyone likes to talk.

And with that we are back next week!