Schools are closing their doors, but OpenDoor isn’t

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This week Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and myself hosted a live taping at Disrupt for a digital reception. It was good fun, though of course we’re looking forward to bringing the live show back to the conference next year, vaccine allowing.

Thankfully we had Chris Gates behind the scenes tweaking the dials, Alexandra Ames fitting us into the program, and some folks to watch live.

What did we talk about? All of this (and some very, very bad jokes):

• The Great American SPAC-Off: As both Opendoor and Desktop Metal approach the public markets on the wings of SPACs, we ask why. And why we have to keep talking about SPACs, which we do not want to do.
• But the public markets are hot and active, with companies like JFrog and Snowflake going public to great effect. JFrog had a great IPO. Snowflake had an insane IPO.
• But there was a lot of action from the private markets as well, including Airtable raising $185 million, ApplyBoard raised a $55 million extension, and Tonal raised $110 million, because connected fitness is hotter than SaaS at the moment.
• We also riffed on Natasha’s venture trends’ piece, digging into how to get to conviction in a remote-only world. As it turns out, we have notes on video games.
• And there were two new funds, including one from the Chainsmokers (hot, fun, great) and another from Greylock (traditional, Victorian, and huge). In more serious commentary, the Greylock raise continues the mega-fund era.

And then we tried to play a game that may or may not make it into the final cut. Either way, it was great to have Equity back at Disrupt. More to come. Hugs from us!