Startup Struggles: A Tale of Layoffs and Leadership

This was our live show week! Yes, Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex got together with Grace for our Friday recording on Thursday, meaning that we gathered on Hopin and Twitter Spaces to yammer through the week's news. It was a very busy week, with breaking news up to the minute before we recorded -- including this piece from the Better.com saga.

• Square’s Better.com name Block is Butter-y smooth 
• Failure is a choose-your-own adventure for startups
• Will rising interest rates decimate startup valuations?
• Is today's market sad or sane?

So! What did we get into? A lot:

• How Conceive is helping people manage the matter of infertility, Cottage raising $15 million to make ADUs more common, and how Tandem is taking on the hybrid work future.
• Next up was Austin, Mary Ann's home turf. We held an event there this week that we touched on, but the main thrust of our chat circled around this piece.
• From there it was time for the bad news -- including layoffs at Workrise, Better.com, and the implosion of Fast. The startup market is changing, and not every company is going to make it out the other end of 2022 it appears.
• And we closed out with our take on all things Elon and Twitter, including this three views piece and why it's hard to build a single-person social network.

And with that, we are back Monday morning. Chat soon!

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

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