Welcome back to the Transcribed edition of the popular Equity podcast. This week, Canvas Ventures general partners joined the studio with TechCrunch writers Kate Clark and Connie Loizos. Rebecca Lynn.
This week, the team talked about the big rounds raised by shoe resale market StockX, which raised $ 110 million with a valuation of $ 1 billion. And Cameo, which provides personally recorded messages by celebrities and influencers to whom it will pay them, raised $ 50 million with a reported $ 300 million valuation.
The group then discussed Brandless and the amount of money SoftBank poured into it. Receiving large amounts of money at a young age adds a lot of pressure to produce.
Kate Clark: … Brandless raised this $ 240 million round, just one year after launch. So they are a very young company. And now, one more year, SoftBank is pushing them to be profitable. But now they are only two years old. So I mean, what two-year-old startup is it even at that time?
Rebecca Lynn: Well, what other SoftBank company is profitable?
Clark: Yes.
Connie Loizos: Right.
Lynn: So when I look at this, I think that for me as an investor, I don’t know the details of exactly what is happening here. But for me, this really highlights the importance of having a very aligned set of goals, missions, values, and everything else, when you sign up to work with an investor, right? I mean that the company and the investor have to be in a kind of lockdown. And when you have an investor who hasn’t been around for a long time and you don’t know how they will actually behave in a recession or when the company runs into trouble.
And I think that kind of behavior through the highs and lows is a really important thing that founders and other investors need to look at very closely.
And finally, they talked about WeWork’s latest acquisition, Waltz, a smartphone app and reader that allows users to enter different properties with a single credential.
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