Chain Reaction, Found, Equity, and The ProWellTech Live Podcast

ProWellTech is more than just a site with words. We’re also building a growing stable of podcasts focused on the most critical topics relating to the startup and venture capital worlds. To help you find the right show for your interests, we’ve compiled our audio output from the week here.

Embedded below is the latest from Chain Reaction, our new and stellar crypto-focused podcast hosted by Lucas and Anita. You will also find Found, a long-form bit of work that goes deep on the real saga of company formation from Jordan and Darrell. There’s an audio-only version of ProWellTech Live hosted by Matt that features founders and investors discussing successful pitch decks. Finally, there’s Equity, ProWellTech’s long-running, Webby award winning, podcast focused on venture capital and the latest startup news, hosted by Natasha, Mary Annand Alex.

We have more coming, so stay tuned. And if you are more into the written over the spoken word, well we have newsletters on the above topics as well.

Chain Reaction

Episode 5: Moonbirds founder talks crypto crash and where NFTs go from here (with Kevin Rose)

Welcome back, this week Lucas and Anita discuss turmoil and heartbreak in the crypto markets as Bitcoin and Ethereum get hit hard, a number of other popular tokens get crushed, and crypto-aligned public stocks like Coinbase and Robinhood see their share prices tank. What caused this bloodbath? Well, a major catalyst was the disastrous implosion of Terra’s Luna token as a result of ongoing stablecoin woes.

In their interview this week, Lucas and Anita chat with Kevin Rose. Kevin is a serial entrepreneur who founded Digg in the early 2000s and is now an investor at True Ventures and a co-founder of the Proof Collective. His startup recently raised $10 million from Seven Seven Six and launched its NFT project Moonbirds, which has quickly become one of the most popular NFT efforts out there. Listen along as we discuss the crypto crash and its fallout, and the challenges up ahead for NFTs.

Subscribe to the Chain Reaction newsletter to dive deeper.

The ProWellTech Live podcast

Episode 5: Raising monster rounds for self-driving mobility startups

Raquel Urtasun founded Waabi in 2021 after spending nearly three years as Uber’s R&D head of Advanced Technology Group (ATG). Waabi’s mission is to develop the an AI-first approach to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. To do so, her company raised a $83.5 million Series A with Khosha Venture’s Sven Strohband leading the round. Both will speak to Urtasun’s unique (and commanding) perspective, and what allowed the company to raise the massive Series A.

This event is also available on YouTube. See upcoming events here!

Found

Episode 56: Sassie Duggleby, Venus Aerospace

Sassie Duggleby is leading the team at Venus Aerospace to develop a spaceplane that could go from LA to Tokyo in an hour. As CEO, Sassie sets the tone that her team doesn’t have to adhere to the typical startup-up grind to solve some serious deeptech issues. She talks with Darrell and Jordan about honoring the company’s namesake–Venus, the goddess of love–and loving her customers and her employees well, all while working to bring the world closer together with greener, more efficient travel.

Equity

Episode 513: The dominoes are falling

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines. Every Monday, Grace and Alex scour the news and record notes on what’s going on to kick off the week.

Happily once again we did not start the day by talking about Elon Musk and Twitter, though the news was not really very good:

Stocks are down sharply around the world. And crypto prices, which track larger asset prices, are also sharply lower in the last day, and week.
Uber’s CEO told his company that things are changing. Adjusted EBITDA is out, FCF is in. Hiring? Going to slow. Capital expenses? Those will get harder looks, and so on. During the show, we asked about the slowdown, and how it may, or may not impact the bouyant crypto startup market.
Neat funding rounds from Pyramid, which raised $120 million, and Paymob, which raised $50 million.

Episode 514: Tech layoffs don’t happen to companies, they happen to people

This is our Wednesday show, where we niche down to a single topic, think about a question and unpack the rest. This week, Natasha and Alex asked: What does the most recent wave of layoffs mean for tech workers?

The question comes after Natasha’s recent Startups Weekly column, “The Great Resignation, meet the Great Reset.” In the piece, which included a round up of recent tech layoffs, she explored the idea of employee whiplash, and why this moment in pullback is different than what we saw in March 2020.

The goal of the episode was to humanize the tech layoffs we’ve seen ripple across the startup ecosystem, from buzzy, big names like Cameo, On Deck and Robinhood, to B2B platforms like Workrise and Thrasio. As our piece last week notes, the common thread between most of these layoffs, according to founders, is that there’s been a shift in the market and a serious pivot in business is required. A pivot, that is, that hurts the employees that built your product up after high demand.

Episode 515: How close are we to understanding what’s going on?

This week we recorded live, which is always good fun, meaning that we took some questions from the audience. If you want that version of the show, we have a YouTube archive of it here.

For those of you more into audio, we have you covered here. Natasha, Alex, and Grace teamed up with Julio and Yashad to host the shindig, allowing us to cover the following:

The end of iPod, a time to reflect on technology trends.
The exit of a Modern Fertility co-founder, and the MARA round bringing more money to Africa’s fintech scene.
From there it was onto the Terra crash, Coinbase’s earnings, and the general sentiment shift in the crypto scene.
Next up was Tiger and the downturn in startup valuations.
And we closed on some personal notes.

And that’s the rundown from the week — send us a tweet if you have suggestions, or questions. Onward!