Podcasts
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Media fragmentation is annoying consumers
Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications division published its 13th-annual Digital Media Trends survey, focused on identifying changes in the ways US consumers engage with various types of media.
Led by an independent research firm, the survey had roughly 2,000 consumer respondents across demographics – with the report categorizing respondents based on age (Gen-Z: ages 14-21, Millenials: 22-35, Gen-X: 36-52, Boomers: 53-71, and Matures: 72+).
While already accompanied by a succinct 13-page executive summary, the report can largely be summarized in just a couple of sentences: more people are using streaming or alternative media services than ever before, largely due to more user freedom and customization, though the growing quantity and fragmentation of platforms are becoming more frustrating for users to manage.
The survey results directionally echo already well-discussed dynamics, which we’ve previously dug into such as here, here and here. Instead, the most poignant aspects of the report were not the answers or conclusions themselves, but the immense level of support many of them received.
Somewhat interesting:
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Podcasts, smart speakers soar as social media stalls, based on new survey
The 2019 edition of a popular annual survey shows usage of social media by Americans is stalling while ownership of smart speakers and tablets has soared over the last year, as has consumer engagement with podcasts. The results are promising for Amazon and Spotify in particular.
Earlier today, Edison Research and Triton Digital presented their Infinite Dial report with findings from a phone survey of 1,500 Americans (age 12+) during January and February. Since 1998, the report has tracked the adoption of mobile devices, social media services, and online audio.
Here are my key takeaways from it:
1. Social Media: Consistent with the trend from last year, the market for social media users appears to be saturated. The percent of Americans who say they have ever used social media is 79%, up from 78% last year but down from the 80% peak in 2017.
Among Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, LinkedIn, and Twitter, only Instagram saw an increase in the percent of the population who say they use it (39% compared to 36% in 2018). Facebook lost roughly 15 million users since 2017 based on this survey data. While the majority of people age 55+ now say they use Facebook, that doesn’t make up for the drop in usage among those age 12-34 from 79% in 2017 to 67% in 2018 to 62% now.
Pinterest, which recently filed to go public, also appears to be losing popularity among that key demographic. Now only 31% of Americans in the 12-34 age group say they use the social pinning platform, compared to 36% last year, and only 1% say Pinterest is their most used social app (compared to 3% in 2015). In this context, potential competition from Instagram looks especially threatening.
2. Smart Speakers: 23% of Americans now own a smart speaker, with 16% of them owning an Amazon Alexa device (that’s more than twice the percent who own a Google Home device). Just two years ago, only 7% reported owning a smart speaker. The percent of those owners who have 3 or more devices has more than doubled from 11% last year to 26% this year as well. Many consumers are crossing a threshold from testing these speakers to making them a ubiquitous presence throughout their home.
3. Tablets: While ownership of smartphones is flat, there was a 12% year-over-year increase in the population of tablet owners from 50% of the population to 56%. According to Triton president John Rosso’s commentary, Amazon’s Fire tablet led the pack with 23% year-over-year growth.
4. Online Audio: 24% of respondents said they used Spotify and 12% said they used Amazon Music in the last month. That compares to 20% and 9%, respectively, last year and places Amazon Music on equal footing with Apple Music.
5. Podcasts: 32% of Americans are monthly podcast listeners compared to 26% in 2018, representing the largest year-over-year growth in that statistic since Infinite Dial began. The format saw a 33% surge in popularity among young people (age 12-24) from 30% listening monthly to 40% doing so.
A full 22% of Americans are weekly podcast listeners and those people consume an average of seven episodes per week. Also, in a notable symbolic shift, the majority (51%) of Americans now say they have listened to a podcast at least once.
Amazon’s gains: The explosion in smart speaker ownership is disproportionately benefiting Amazon with its Alexa devices and the same scenario is occurring in tablets with the Amazon Fire. The company is the most immediate winner in the growth of these markets.
Moreover, people who own a smart speaker are dramatically more likely to use Amazon Music as their primary music streaming service (16% vs. 9% for the general population of people who have used online audio).
This could be a mere correlation that Amazon Music has an older demographic (according to this data, it does) and smart speakers are bought by an older demographic; on the other hand, it may suggest causation that people who buy smart speakers often adopt the default Amazon Music streaming service. If the latter is true to a substantial degree, it suggests Amazon Music’s momentum against Apple Music (and other streaming services) is likely to only pick up.
Spotify’s podcast push is working: Spotify is making a big play into podcasting. Its market share is growing substantially, it surpassed Apple’s podcast app in popularity in several countries, and just announced a major commitment to the format that included acquiring Anchor and Gimlet.
According to the Infinite Dial survey, the percent of Spotify users aged 12-24 who listen to podcasts monthly jumped from 32% last year to 54% this year. That’s 69% year-over-year growth. This shows Spotify’s users are buying into its new promotion of podcast content. It also lends credibility to the argument that Spotify is expanding the market of podcast listeners, not just poaching users from other podcast apps.
As I argued in my analysis about the entry of music streaming services and Hollywood into podcasting, Spotify has the ability to rapidly ingrain podcast listening among its 207 million monthly active users and to make premium (subscriber-only) podcasts mainstream by bundling them into a music subscription that 96 million people already pay for.
You can review the the full Infinite Dial deck here.
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Spotify’s increased focus on podcasts in 2019 includes selling its own ads
Having established itself as a top streaming service with now more than 200 million users, Spotify this year is preparing to focus more of its attention on podcasts. The company plans bring its personalization technology to podcasts in order to make better recommendations, update its app’s interface so people can access podcasts more easily and broker more exclusives with podcast creators. It’s also getting into the business of selling ads within podcasts as a means of generating revenue from this increasingly popular form of audio programming.
In fact, Spotify has already begun to dabble in podcast ad sales, ahead of this larger push.
Spotify, we’ve learned, has been selling its own advertisements in its original podcasts since mid-2018 year, including in programs like Spotify Original “Amy Schumer Presents: 3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “The Joe Budden Podcast,” “Dissect,” “Showstopper” and others. With more exclusives planned for the year ahead, the portion of Spotify’s ad business focused on podcasts will also grow.
The company appears to be taking a different approach to working with podcasters than it does with working with music artists.
Today, Spotify gives artists tools that help share their work and be discovered — it invested in distribution platform DistroKid, for example, and now lets artists submit tracks for playlist consideration. With podcasters, however, Spotify wants to either bring their voices in-house, or at least exclusively license their content.
“Over the last year, we become very focused on building out a great podcast universe,” said head of Spotify Studios Courtney Holt, speaking at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this week. “The first step was to make sure that we’ve got the world’s best podcasts on Spotify, and integrated the experience into the service in a way that allowed people to build habits and behavior there,” he said.
“What we started to see is that the types of podcasts that really were working on Spotify were ones where they were really authentic voices… so we just decided to invest more in those types of voices,” Holt added.
Spotify’s collection of originals has been steadily growing over the past year. Last August, for example, Spotify nabbed an exclusive deal with the “Joe Budden” podcast, which is aimed at hip-hop and rap culture fans, and launched its first branded podcast, “Ebb & Flow,” focused on hip-hop and R&B. Its full original lineup today also includes “Dissect,” Amy Schumer’s “3 Girls, 1 Keith,” “Mogul,” “The Rewind with Guy Raz,” “Showstopper,” “Unpacked,” “Crimetown” (its first season was wide, the second season is exclusive to Spotify), “UnderCover” and “El Chapo: El Jefe y su Juicio.”
At CES, Spotify announced the addition of one more — journalist Jemele Hill is coming to Spotify with an exclusive podcast called “Unbothered,” which will feature high-profile guests in sports, music, politics, culture and more.
In growing its collection of originals, the company found that podcasters who joined Spotify exclusively were actually able to grow their audience, despite leaving other distribution platforms.
For example, the Joe Budden podcast had its highest streaming day ever after joining Spotify.
This has led Spotify to believe that influencers in the podcast community will be able to bring their community with them when they become a Spotify exclusive, and then further grow their listener base by tapping into Spotify’s larger music user base and, soon, an improved recommendation system.
There are other perks for Spotify, too — when users come to Spotify and begin to listen to podcasts, they often then spend more time engaged with the app, it found.
“People who consume podcasts on Spotify are consuming more of Spotify — including music,” said Holt. “So we found that in increasing our [podcast] catalog and spending more time to make the user experience better, it wasn’t taking away from music, it was enhancing the overall time spent on the platform,” he noted.
While chasing exclusive deals to bring more original podcasts to Spotify will be a big initiative this year, Spotify will continue to offer its recently launched podcasts submission feature to everyone else.
With this sort of basic infrastructure in place, Spotify now wants to help users discover new podcasts and improve the listening experience.
One aspect of this will involve pointing listeners to other podcast content they may like.
For instance, Spotify could point Joe Budden fans to other podcasts about hip-hop and rap. It will also leverage its multi-year partnership with Samsung to allow listeners to pick up where they left off in an episode as they move between different devices. And it will turn its personalization and recommendation technology to podcasts — including the ads in the podcasts themselves.
“Think about what we’ve done around music — the more understanding you have around the music you stream, the more we can personalize the ad experience. Now we can take that to podcasts,” said Brian Benedik, VP and Global Head of Advertising Sales at Spotify, when asked about the potential for Spotify selling ads in podcasts.
The company has been testing the waters with its own podcast ad sales since mid 2018, Benedik said. The sales are handled in-house by Spotify’s ad sales team for the time being.
Benedik had also appeared on a panel this week at CES, where he talked about the value of contextual advertising — meaning, ads that can be personalized to the user based on factors like mood, behavior and moments. This data could be appealing to podcast advertisers, as well.
But to scale its efforts around podcast ads, Spotify will need to invest in digital ad insertion technology. We’re hearing that Spotify is currently deciding whether that’s something it wants to build in-house or acquire outright.
Spotify’s rival Pandora went the latter route. It closed on the acquisition of adtech company Adswizz in May 2018, then introduced capabilities for shorter, more personalized ads in August. By November, Pandora announced it was bringing its Genome technology to podcasts, which allowed for a recommendation system.
Now Spotify aims to catch up.
The addition of podcasts has reoriented Spotify’s focus as a company, Holt said.
“We’re an audio company. We’re trying to be the world’s best audio service,” he told the audience at CES. “It’s a pure play for us. We’re seeing increased engagement; there’s great commercial opportunities from podcasting that we’ve never seen on the platform… and, obviously, exclusives are to give us something that makes the platform truly unique — to have people come to Spotify for something you can’t get anywhere else is the sort of cherry on top of that entire strategy,” Holt said.
Image credits: Spotify
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Podcast industry aims to better track listeners through new analytics tech called RAD
Internet users are already being tracked to death, with ads that follow us around, search histories that are collected and stored, emails that report back to senders when they’ve been read, websites that know where you scrolled and what you clicked and much more. So naturally, the growing podcast industry wanted to find a way to collect more data of its own, too.
Yes, that’s right. Podcasts will now track detailed user behavior, too.
Today, NPR announced RAD, a new, open-sourced podcast analytics technology that was developed in partnership with nearly 30 companies from the podcasting industry. The technology aims to help publishers collect more comprehensive and standardized listening metrics from across platforms.
Specifically, the technology gives publishers — and therefore their advertisers, as well — access to a wide range of listener metrics, including downloads, starts and stops, completed ad or credit listens, partial ad or credit listens, ad or credit skips and content quartiles, the RAD website explains.
However, the technology stops short of offering detailed user profiles, and cannot be used to re-target or track listeners, the site notes. It’s still anonymized, aggregated statistics.
It’s worth pointing out that RAD is not the first time podcasters have been able to track engagement. Major platforms, including Apple’s Podcast Analytics, today offer granular and anonymized data, including listens.
But NPR says that data requires “a great deal of manual analysis” as the stats aren’t standardized nor as complete as they could be. RAD is an attempt to change that, by offering a tracking mechanism everyone can use.
Already, RAD has a lot of support. In addition to being integrated into NPR’s own NPR One app, it has commitments from several others that will introduce the technology into their own products in 2019, including Acast, AdsWizz, ART19, Awesound, Blubrry Podcasting, Panoply, Omny Studio, Podtrac, PRI/PRX, RadioPublic, Triton Digital and WideOrbit.
Other companies that supported RAD and participated in its development include Cadence13, Edison Research, ESPN, Google, iHeartMedia, Libsyn, The New York Times, New York Public Radio and Wondery.
NPR says the NPR One app on Android supports RAD as of now, and its iOS app will do the same in 2019.
“Over the course of the past year, we have been refining these concepts and the technology in collaboration with some of the smartest people in podcasting from around the world,” said Joel Sucherman, vice president, New Platform Partnerships at NPR, in an announcement. “We needed to take painstaking care to prove out our commitment to the privacy of listeners, while providing a standard that the industry could rally around in our collective efforts to continue to evolve the podcasting space,” he said.
To use RAD technology, publishers will mark within their audio files certain points — like quartiles or some time markers, interview spots, sponsorship messages or ads — with RAD tags and indicate an analytics URL. A mobile app is configured to read the RAD tags and then, when listeners hit that spot in the file, that information is sent to the URL in an anonymized format.
The end result is that podcasters know just what parts of the audio file their listeners heard, and is able to track this at scale across platforms. (RAD is offering both Android and iOS SDKs.)
While there’s value in podcast data that goes beyond the download, not all are sold on technology.
Most notably, the developer behind the popular iOS podcast player app Overcast, Marco Arment, today publicly stated his app will not support any listener-tracking specs.
Yes. I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app-makers.
I won’t be supporting any listener-behavior tracking specs in Overcast. Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes. https://t.co/mplhnrmCsc
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) December 11, 2018
“I understand why huge podcast companies want more listener data, but there are zero advantages for listeners or app-makers,” Arment wrote in a tweet. “Podcasters get enough data from your IP address when you download episodes,” he said.
The developer also pointed out this sort of data collection required more work on the podcasters’ part and could become a GDPR liability, as well. (NPR tells us GDPR compliance is up to the mobile apps and analytics servers, as noted in the specs here.)
In addition to NPR’s use of RAD today, Podtrac has also now launched a beta program to show RAD data, which is open to interested publishers.
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Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project goes live for all
Last month, Pandora announced it would soon be bringing its “Genome” technology to a new space outside of music: it would leverage a similar classification system to make podcast recommendations, too. Initially, the feature was only available to select users on mobile devices, ahead of a broader public launch. Today, Pandora says its Podcast Genome Project has gone live for all users.
Like Pandora’s Music Genome is its music information database capable of classifying songs across 450 different attributes — Pandora’s Podcast Genome Project is a cataloging system designed to evaluate content. But its focus is on audio programs instead of music.
The Podcast Genome Project can currently evaluate content across more than 1,500 attributes, including MPAA ratings, production style, content type, host profile and more, alongside other listener signals, like thumbs, skips, replays and others. It uses a combination of machine learning algorithms, natural language processing and collaborative filtering methods to help determine listener preferences, the company says.
Pandora then combines this data with human curation to make its podcast recommendations.
These recommendations are live now in the Pandora app’s “Browse” section, under the banner “Recommended Podcasts For You.” Podcasts will also be discoverable throughout the app in the Now Playing screen, search bar, in the podcast backstage passes and in the episode backstage passes.
At launch, the app is aggregating more than 100,000 podcast episodes in genres like News, True Crime, Sports, Comedy, Music, Business, Technology, Entertainment, Kids, Health and Science, the company adds.
Podcasters can also now ask to be included in Pandora’s app by filling out a form here.
Longer-term, a better recommendation system for podcasts could help Pandora as it becomes more integrated with its acquirer SiriusXM. The deal will likely bring SiriusXM’s exclusive programming to Pandora’s subscribers, which would greatly increase the number of audio programs available on its service. Putting the right programs in front of the most interested customers could then drive more people to upgrade to a paid subscription, impacting Pandora’s bottom line.
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Koo! is a social network for short-form podcasts
Alexandre Meregan says that music, and audio in general, has always been core to his life. But one day on his five-minute commute to work, trying to listen to a podcast for the first time, he realized that by the time he arrived at work he had only heard an introduction and a commercial jingle.
He immediately went to work on Koo!, a short-form podcast app aimed at young people. Koo! lets users record up to one minute of audio, add “sound stickers” like a drum roll or a poop sound, and share the “Koo” in a feed with their friends and followers.
Meregan believes that some young people are hesitant to share their thoughts on social media, which is mostly picture or video-based, because of the quantification of their self-worth through Like counters. With Koo! users can simply speak their thoughts without having to share a picture or video.
“At Koo! we believe a lot of great content is being held back by teenagers due to insecurities that comes with photo and video,” said Meregan onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin on the Startup Battlefield. “We feel that what you say should be more important than how you look.”
Like most social networks, Koo! is primarily focused on acquiring new users before focusing on a revenue model. Ad-supported revenue is the most obvious option to make money, but Meregan says that the team has been floating around a few other ideas, as well.
One user-acquisition tactic, according to Meregan, is to target YouTube content creators and give them a complimentary service to share their thoughts and voice.
A handful of startups have tried their hand at audio-based social networks, but few have managed to gain much traction.
Koo! is backed by Sweet Studio, though Meregan declined to share the amount of funding the company has received to date.
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Audioburst turns the best part of podcasts into personalized news briefs
Tel Aviv-based Audioburst has been developing a search engine for audio news, which allows users to locate audio content within podcasts and other talk radio programs. Today, the company is capitalizing on its technology to launch personalized playlists that deliver custom news briefs that get better over time the more you use the product.
The feature has been built using deep AI learning, the company says.
The content itself is drawn from top podcasts and the radio stations in Audioburst’s index, and will alert you to new information based on your chosen keywords and topics.
To use the feature, you first sign up on the Audioburst website, then select from a set of interests or add your own. When you’re finished with the selection process, you just hit the “I’m done” button to be taken to your personalized playlist of audio clips.
The end result is being able to listen to the parts of the podcasts or other audio programs you would actually care about, rather than slogging through half an hour or more of chatter for the one tidbit of news you were interested in.
For example, when testing the feature this morning, I chose a variety of topics like “tech news,” “movies,” “entertainment,” “science,” “parenting” and more, and was delivered a set of audio clips that included a discussion of Disney’s “Star Wars” spin-off series starring Diego Luna; a chat about the 2018 MacBook Air overhaul; an assessment of the smog in L.A.; and a lot of other clips I chose to skip (but will hopefully train the AI further).
You can try the feature yourself at search.audioburst.com by clicking on “Personalized Playlist” in the top left.
The results were hit or miss, which is expected — to some extent — fresh out of the gate. But there were also times when the clips didn’t actually serve up too much information. That is, you’d still need to turn to the podcast itself for the full story.
However, the feature itself isn’t necessarily going to be used by consumers directly on Audioburst’s website. Instead, its development came about thanks to requests from partners using its API.
The company says you can expect to see the personalized playlists integrated into its partners’ products in the smart speaker, mobile, in-car infotainment, and wearable tech spaces in 2019.
Audioburst currently has partnerships with ByteDance, Nippon, Bose, Harman, Samsung and more.
“Our mission is to deliver the most interesting news and audio content to our users wherever they are and personalization is the key ingredient. Through this feature, Audioburst is changing the way people consume audio in the same way that users consume music on Spotify,” said Assaf Gad, VP Marketing and Strategic Partnerships at Audioburst. “Expanding this experience through our partnerships with top OEMs, media companies and content creators means this has the power to reach users wherever they are,” he added.
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Twilio shops, Uber and Lyft IPO scuttlebutt, and Instacart raises $600M
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week we had the Three Excellent Friends (Connie Loizos, Danny Chrichton, and Alex Wilhelm) on hand to kick things about with Scale Venture Partner’s own Rory O’Driscoll.
As I’ve written the last few weeks, what a pile of news we’ve had recently. And like the last few episodes, we had to pick and choose what to drill into. This week: Twilio-Sendgrid, Palantir, Uber, Lyft, and Tencent Music IPOs, Instacart, and Saudi Arabia.
In order, I think? First, we tackled the week’s biggest venture-themed M&A: Twilio buying SendGrid. Keep in mind that they are both recent IPOs; Twilio went out in 2016, and SendGrid in 2017.
The $2 billion-ish all-stock transaction is effectively Twilio using its rich market cap (rich in terms of its revenue and profit multiples) to snag an obvious (though intelligent) extension of API-powered communications toolset.
Next up we dug into the chance that Palantir is worth $41 billion. Spoiler: It isn’t. Then we chatted the two other recently-floated IPO valuations for Uber ($120 billion) and Lyft ($15 billion). They probably make more sense, depending a little on how you add and then divide.
All that and we also touched on the recent delay in the Tencent Music IPO, a profitable company.
Then we riffed through the Instacart round ($600 million more at a $7.6 billion valuation; wow), and re-touched on Silicon Valley’s currently least popular dinner party topic: how much Saudi money has recently gone to work powering tech startups.
A big thanks to you for not only sticking with Equity for so long, but also for making it quite literally as popular as it has ever been. It’s super fun to have the biggest crew with us every week that we’ve ever had.
You, yes you, are a delight.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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Crypto’s second bubble, Juul has 60 days and three Chinese IPOs
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
After a long run of having guests climb aboard each week, we took a pause on that front, bringing together three of our regular hosts instead: Connie Loizos, Danny Chrichton, and myself.
Despite the fact that there were just three of us instead of the usual four, we got through a mountain of stuff. Which was good as it was a surprisingly busy week, and we didn’t want to leave too much behind.
Up top we dug into the latest in the land of crypto, which Danny had politely summarized for us in an article. The gist of his argument is that the analogies relating crypto as an industry to the Internet may work, but most people have their timelines wrong: Crypto isn’t like the Internet in the 90s, perhaps. More like the 80s.
On the same topic, crypto companies formed a team lobbying effort, and a high-flying crypto fund is struggling to once again post strong profit figures.
Moving along, Juul is back in the news. Not, however, for raising more money or posting quick growth. Well, sort of the latter, as the government is after it. The Food and Drug Administration has put Juul on a countdown to get its act together regarding teens and smoking. That the financially impressive unicorn is in as much trouble as it is, is nearly surprising.
Finally, we ran through the three most recent Chinese IPOs that hit our radar. Here they are:
- Meituan Dianping: The Tencent-backed group buying, delivery, and everything company raised over $4 billion in its debut, which was impressive, but also short of expectations. The firm won’t begin trading until the 20th, but it’s one more massive deal that got done in 2018.
- 111: We spent a minute on the show discussing what counts as a technology company thanks to 111. We voted that the Chinese online-to-offline pharmacy startup did in fact count. So, it’s in our list. Some notes on its debut can be found here.
- NIO: Finally on our list was NIO, a Chinese electric car company with, as we have discussed on Equity before, a shockingly short history of revenue generation. Whether the company is a gamble or not, it did raise $1 billion in its own offering. And its stock is off like a rocket to boot.
And that was the end of things. Thanks for sticking with us, as always. Speaking of which, our 100th episode is coming up. Who should we bring onto the show to celebrate?
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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Lyft goes biking, Airbnb is going public (eventually), big money for software robots and Juul
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week we were back in the studio with Connie Loizos and myself hanging out with Jai Das, a managing director at Sapphire Ventures. Our beloved Matthew Lynley was off this week, but he’ll be back for the next episode.
This week we had an excellent list of things to get to, first of which was Lyft’s latest shopping run. This time Lyft accreted to itself Motivate, a bike-sharing company that operates various programs in cities like New York City and San Francisco.
The context for the transaction is threefold. First, Lyft just raised a bundle of money for effectively diddly dilution. Second, Uber bought Jump and there is no FOMO in the market today like ridesharing FOMO. And third, scooters now lurk in the background of any and every ridesharing conversation, so the big shops are on a bit of defense.
The sum is that Uber and Lyft now own bike companies, which feels a bit 2017.
But moving along Unicorn Row we quickly found ourselves at the door of Airbnb, which is prepping for a 2019-2020 IPO and a change to its personnel comp cadence, the latter due to its age and a market trend that Das noted concerned employee comp and shareholder dilution.
In other news, Airbnb needs a CFO, so if you are in the market, that’s who to call.
Next up was Automation Anywhere’s epic $250 million Series A, which brought the software process-automation company to a valuation of $1.8 billion. The firm helps companies execute repetitive software tasks at a fraction of the cost of having humans click the buttons.
And we wrapped with Juul, everyone’s favorite e-cigarette company that has simply beautiful financials. Whether it’s ethical is something that we spent a moment talking about.
So fire up your vape or just hit play and we’ll be right back in seven days.
Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts.
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