Silicon Valley is built on immigrant innovation

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

We wound up having more to talk about than we had time for but we packed as much as we could into 34 minutes. So, climb aboard with Danny, Natasha, and myself for another episode of Equity.

Before we get into topics, a reminder that if you are signing up for Extra Crunch and want to save some money, the code “equity” is your friend. Alright, let’s get into it:

• Robinhood is back in the news this week after a New York Times piece dug into its history, product decisions, and more. Tidbits galore are to be had, but the Equity crew wanted to debate the morality of providing exotic financial tooling to less-experienced users.
• We followed that debate with a dive into immigration, the latest news from the government, and our takes on the matter. TechCrunch has covered the recent news, and provided some context on the broader concept. Our takeaway is that doing self-defeating things for no reason isn’t brilliant for the country as a whole.
• Postmates has a home! After winding up somewhere in the middle of the pack of the on-demand cohort a few years back, the rise of DoorDash put Postmates in a pickle. Happily, Uber was on hand to de-brine the unicorn for $2.65 billion in stock. That’s a bit more money than Postmates’ last valuation. What we want to know next is how the sale price impacted common stockholders. Email us if you know.
• Palantir has filed to go public, but privately, so that’s really all there is to say about that. Unless you need a history lesson.
• Finally, funding rounds. We had three this week: MonkeyLearn raising $2.2 million for no-code AI, Quaestor raising $5.8 million for startup financial tooling, and $4.5 million for Mmhmm which is both timely and neat.

Whew! Past all that we had some fun, and, hopefully, were of some use. Hugs and chat Monday!