Equity podcast: Apple’s $400M deals, Target buys a startup and uh-oh net neutrality

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

This week Katie Roof, Matthew Lynley and myself — Alex Wilhelm — were joined by Eric Liaw from IVP to dig through the pre-Christmas news.

Normally, happenings are slow this time of the year. But, living up to its reputation as a year-apart, 2017 is not delivering the normal news slowdown. So, putting aside the latest from Uber, we started with a look at Apple’s massive $400 million Shazam deal, and its other, nearly-$400 million deal in a component company.

Apple, not really known as an overly acquisitive firm, is richer than Croesus. That fact makes its business dealings with smaller firms all the more interesting. Why did Apple decide to open wallet twice for nearly $800 million? We try to find out.

Next, we turned to the Shipt-Target deal, which was a bit of surprise, really. But, it shouldn’t have been. Target needs to have an ecommerce strategy that can compete with Amazon and Walmart over the long-term. And, that means it needs to have a strong shipping play. Shipt, for a small $550 million fee, will fill that niche for the retail giant.

All that and we brought up net neutrality at the very end.

We had a blast, and hope your week is going as well. Stay cool, and we’ll be right back.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on iTunes, Overcast, Pocketcast, Downcast and all the casts.