Equity podcast: Spotify’s impending debut, Uber’s done deal, and Nasdaq 7,000

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

This episode, the first of 2018, saw our own Katie Roof and your humble servant (Alex) joined by Atish Davda, CEO and founder of EquityZen. Matthew Lynley is off this week.

(Davda’s firm put together a landing page for Equity, which we thought was neat.)

This week saw the culmination of a huge number of stories that we have discussed in 2017. Namely that Spotify has finally filed for its direct listing, and the Uber-SoftBank deal is done.

Regarding Spotify, we got into why it would pursue a direct listing instead of a traditional IPO. And, of course, we are curious as to when the popular music streaming company actually does get out the door. With a private filing in December, the answer is essentially whenever, from our outside perspective.

And now, in the wake of the SoftBank-Uber deal finally getting itself done, what is Uber worth? There are a few numbers you can use. There’s one around $50 billion and one around $70 billion. We pick over both to figure out which one we think is fair.

All that and we riff about the rapid rise of the public markets in the last few years.

Hit play, and we’ll be right back 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.