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• Pinterest and Lyft move closer to IPO, and LPs question the Vision Fund’s investment strategy

  Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines. What a week. It had looked a bit quiet with just a few big rounds to cover. I was looking forward to a relaxed episode, frankly. But no, as Kate and I were prepping the show notes, the News Gods opened the heavens and dropped a fifty-weight of mana right on our heads. It was a lot of news. In quick order, here’s what we tried to run through while keeping it brief: Pinterest has filed to go public, albeit privately. At long last, Pinterest’s IPO is underway. The social company is gunning for liquidity this year, could go public in June and is not targeting a down IPO. It’s looking like $12 billion and up for Big Pint. Lyft’s IPO is racing along. Lyft filed to go public back in December, dropping private filings neck-and-neck with Uber. The two ride-hailing companies are both slated to get out this year, but it seems that Lyft is going to lead the way. Even more, it’s tipped to get out at a $20 billion to $25 billion valuation. As grounding, here’s the best math I could come up with concerning those numbers. DoorDash gets $400 million more. The rumored DoorDash round has landed, though it’s shaped a bit differently than we expected. DoorDash did not raise $500 million at a $6 billion valuation, it instead picked up $100 million less, but at a stronger $7.1 billion valuation. And, of course, the Vision Fund was involved. More Vision Fund largesse lands on Clutter and Flexport. What’s a week with just one Vision Fund round? A waste, of course. So, here are two more. Clutter picked up $200 million while Flexport raised a much more impressive $1 billion. Clutter has now raised around $300 million while Flexport’s capital sheet is flush now to the tune of $1.3 billion. As we touched on during the show, the two companies are now going to have more money than they have ever had before to use; let’s hope that that goes well. Speaking of which, what about those valuations? Two quick things to wrap up here. First, discontent among Vision Fund investors. The Vision Fund’s LPs (the sources of its capital) aren’t perfectly happy with some of its choices. That, and what happened to people not taking blood money? We asked that again, probably shouting into the wind while we do so. As it turns out Silicon Valley capitalism isn’t a New Man; it’s just the same old capitalism in a sweater vest. All that and it was good to be back. Chat you all in a week’s time! Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Downcast and all the casts. ... Read More

• Japanese internet giant Recruit has a new $25M blockchain fund

  Crypto market prices may be down significantly, but new investors continue to enter the blockchain space. The latest is Recruit Holdings, the $45 billion Japanese internet giant that owns Glassdoor among other things, which quietly launched a $25 million fund. The fund is based out of Singapore and it closed in November 2018, but its existence was only made public this week following the announcement of its maiden deal, an undisclosed investment in Beam. Recruit has been very vocal about its intention to offer a crypto fund — I interviewed SVP Youngrok Kim at a Coindesk event in Singapore last year — while it has made equity investments in blockchain companies through its central corporate fund, Recruit Strategic Partners (RSP). The current RSP fund is $100 million and it is the company’s sixth. Now, with the crypto fund, Kim — who operates within both RSP and the new fund — said that Recruit is free to do deals in both tokens and equity and generally dive deeper into blockchain. “When we had an equity fund we weren’t as flexible as we wanted to be,” Kim told TechCrunch in a phone interview this week. “We weren’t in a position to buy tokens and assets. We will continue to have two vehicles, we will use the crypto fund and the RSP fund in tandem as needed.” That’s all well and good but, with the bubble popped, the number of ICOs is down but not quite out. The dynamics have certainly changed, with token sales now almost universally conducted privately rather than publicly, and for full-time investors and professionals rather than anyone. Still, Kim still sees ample reasons to operate a token-based fund. “We still see a lot of ICOs, the relative number is smaller but we still see a good amount of deal flow for token and equity raising. We are positive with the outlook,” he explained. “We’re a strong believer in blockchain and decentralized technology.” Beyond direct investments, the fund will also invest in other funds as an LP to help spread its reach. “Our investment area is broad, covering deep tech to the application layer too,” Kim explained. “We’re still conducting research to understand core technology and its potential. “We’re going to very cautious spending the fund, we seek to discover companies that will have a real impact and society and where we can contribute as Recruit,” he added, claiming that there are a number of upcoming deals in the pipeline. Recruit came on the radar for many in the U.S. through its acquisition of Glassdoor for $1.2 billion last year, but it is already a major name in digital space in Japan, as a recent Bloomberg profile story explained in some detail. Founded in 1960, it is listed on the Toyko Stock Exchange and valued at over $45 billion. It isn’t just big in Japan, though, and Recruit has some 45,000 employees across 60 countries worldwide. Its core services are recruitment and HR, but it also operates in the real estate, travel, dining and other segments. It has a history of acquisitions, some of which have included U.S-based Indeed.com (2012) and  Simply Hired (2016) as well as European services restaurant site Quandoo (2015), hair and beauty service Wahanda (2015) and education technology company Quipper (2015). Despite that, Kim said that he doesn’t anticipate that Recruit will acquire blockchain companies that the fund invests in because it is still early days for the technology in terms of development, adoption and monetization. But, with the fund, Recruit is determined to keep an eye on developments to ensure it doesn’t miss out on potentially significant innovation. Recruit isn’t the only corporate to start a crypto token fund. Line, another Japanese company that’s best known for its messaging app, launched a $10 million crypto fund last year while Korean rival Kakao has a blockchain consultancy and it is actively doing deals. Kakao made its first blockchain investment in December when it backed Israeli-based Orbs in an undisclosed deal. Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life. ... Read More

• MWC 2019: foldable phones, 5G, and other news from Mobile World Congress

  Our faster, more flexible mobile future is about to be revealed Continue reading… ... Read More

• When did cutscenes start looking worse than actual video games?

  I started playing video games around the time when they were transitioning to 3D and making use of CDs, which meant that the capacity to store beautiful visuals far outstripped the hardware’s ability to render them in real time. The upshot of this was that big-budget games often didn’t look great while you were playing them, but every now and then, you’d be treated to a lavishly rendered cutscene that would not only blow you away with its detail and artistry, but provide crucial context for what the regular graphics were actually meant to look like. The canonical example of this is Square Enix’s Final Fantasy games for the original PlayStation. Last week, Final Fantasy VIII celebrated its 20th anniversary, while IX was re-released for... Continue reading… ... Read More




• The GamesIndustry.biz Podcast: What does success mean for Crackdown 3?

  Latest episode available to download now, also discusses Google's GDC tease and the woes of Starbreeze... Read More

• JustGiving launches Gaming for Social Good hub

  Online platform will offer tools and resources to encourage gaming for good causes... Read More