Steel production accounts for roughly 8% of the emissions that contribute to global climate change. It is one of the industries that sits at the foundation of the modern economy and is one of the most resistant to decarbonization.

As nations around the world race to reduce their environmental footprint and embrace more sustainable methods of production, finding a way to remove carbon from the metals business will be one of the most important contributions to that effort.

One startup that’s developing a new technology to address the issue is Boston Metal. Previously backed by the Bill Gates-financed Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund, the new company has just raised roughly $50 million of an approximately $60 million financing round to expand its operations, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The global steel industry may find approximately 14% of its potential value at risk if the business can’t reduce its environmental impact, according to studies cited by the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.

Boston Metal, which previously raised $20 million back in 2019, uses a process called molten oxide electrolysis (“MOE”) to make steel alloys — and eventually emissions-free steel. The first close of the funding actually came in December 2018 — two years before the most recent financing round, according to Tadeu Carneiro, the company’s chief executive.

Over the years since the company raised its last round, Boston Metal has grown from eight employees to a staff that now numbers close to 50. The Woburn, Massachusetts-based company has also been able to continuously operate its three pilot lines producing metal alloys for over a month at a time.

And while the steel program remains the ultimate goal, the company is quickly approaching commercialization with its alloy program, because it isn’t as reliant on traditional infrastructure and sunk costs according to Carneiro.

Boston Metal’s technology radically reimagines an industry whose technology hasn’t changed all that much since the dawn of the Iron Age in 1200 BCE, Carneiro said.

Ultimately the goal is to serve as a technology developer licensing its technology and selling components to steel manufacturers or engineering companies that will ultimately make the steel.

For Boston Metal, the next steps on the product road map are clear. The company will look to have a semi-industrial cell line operating in Woburn by the end of 2022, and by 2024 or 2025 hopes to have its first demonstration plant up and running. “At that point we will be able to commercialize the technology,” Carneiro said.

The company’s previous investors include Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Prelude Ventures and the MIT-backed “hard-tech” investment firm, The Engine. All of them came back to invest in the latest infusion of cash into the company along with Devonshire Investors, the private investment firm affiliated with FMR, the parent company of financial services giant, Fidelity, which co-led the deal alongside Piva Capital and another, undisclosed investor.

As a result of its investment, Shyam Kamadolli will take a seat on the company’s board, according to the filing with the SEC.

MOE takes metals in their raw oxide form and transforms them into molten metal products. Invented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and based on research from MIT Professor Donald Sadoway, Boston Metal makes molten oxides that are tailored for a specific feedstock and product. Electrons are used to melt the soup and selectively reduce the target oxide. The purified metal pools at the bottom of a cell and is tapped by drilling into the cell using a process adapted from a blast furnace. The tap hole is plugged and the process then continues.

One of the benefits of the technology, according to the company, is its scalability. As producers need to make more alloys, they can increase production capacity.

“Molten oxide electrolysis is a platform technology that can produce a wide array of metals and alloys, but our first industrial deployments will target the ferroalloys on the path to our ultimate goal of steel,” said Carneiro, the company’s chief executive, in a statement announcing the company’s $20 million financing back in 2019. “Steel is and will remain one of the staples of modern society, but the production of steel today produces over two gigatons of CO2. The same fundamental method for producing steel has been used for millennia, but Boston Metal is breaking that paradigm by replacing coal with electrons.”

No less a tech luminary than Bill Gates himself underlined the importance of the decarbonization of the metal business.

“Boston Metal is working on a way to make steel using electricity instead of coal, and to make it just as strong and cheap,” Gates wrote in his blog, GatesNotes. Although Gates did have a caveat. “Of course, electrification only helps reduce emissions if it uses clean power, which is another reason why it’s so important to get zero-carbon electricity,” he wrote.

The lure of subscription pricing is the guarantee of recurring revenue for your business. Once a customer flips the switch to turn on your subscription, it’s easy money:

While that’s true, converting a subscription customer isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. You can build a platform, launch with fanfare, offer all sorts of incentives and trials to attract potential customers — and watch as they disengage and lapse into limbo.

That’s the actual guarantee that comes with subscription pricing, which will happen unless you cultivate a funnel that catches potential subscribers as soon as they learn about your product and follows them until their very last sign-in.

I built my first subscription-model product in 1999. I’m currently in early-access on my latest, and I’ve launched a bunch more along the way.

While the customer dynamic has changed over the last 20 years, the conversion process has not. In fact, it’s actually gotten easier to convert and retain customers through the subscription funnel.

Here’s what I’ve learned.

Why subscription pricing works

Subscription pricing is a hot trend in just about every business in every industry. Pay-as-you-go is the new normal from software to retail to service.

In my mind, the major shift occurred when mobile phones started pricing unlimited usage per period instead of fixed or cost per minute. Once usage limits were removed, use cases exploded and the promise of a truly mobile computer was finally realized.

Makers of all stripes learned that lesson: From razors to video streaming to accounting software, pricing models have emerged that focus on time periods instead of units.

But contrary to popular belief, subscription pricing doesn’t work because of the lower price point that a monthly installment allows. It’s effective because a subscription reorients each customer’s mind from product function to value proposition.

I don’t care what kind of German engineering went into my razor blades, as long as I have working blades when I need them.

As an entrepreneur, you probably use at least one digital subscription service to build your own product and company, if not several. In fact, just to get to the MVP of my new project, I subscribed to AWS, MailChimp, Zapier and Bubble. I’m still on the free tier of a few more services for some lower-priority features. There’s a few more I quit or never tried.

Thus, you know that value prop plays a big part of whether the customer will pay and stay. So reinforcing your value proposition should play a big part in every level of your customer funnel.

You must catch and track customers to be effective

A subscription-pricing model without an ability to track the steps in the conversion funnel will result in all the headaches of subscription pricing without any of the benefits.

Welcome to 2021, a year that could extend 2020’s startup market disruptions and excesses — or change patterns that previously performed well for early-stage tech companies and their investors.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

As we turn the page, I have a number of questions worth raising as we muck into 2021.

Each relates to a 2020 change that is expected to persist, by either the general market or those bullish on startups. I want to know what would need to change to shake up what became the new normal last year. After all, it’s precisely when it feels like nothing could shake up a downturn (or a boom) that things often do.

Today, let’s discuss seed deals, venture investing cadence, the resulting valuation pressures from rapid-fire bets, current IPO expectations and what happens to software sales when remote work begins to fade.

1. How long can seed deal-making stay hot?

As 2020 came to a close, Natasha Mascarenhas and I reported on seed investing’s strong year and its especially strong second half. How long can that pace keep up?

Nearly all our questions today deal with the endurance of certain conditions, namely: how long the market can keep parts of startup land red-hot.

When it comes to seed deal-making, Q1 and Q2 2020 saw similar levels of investment in the United States. But Q3 proved explosive, with money invested into domestic seed deals rising from around $1.5 to $1.6 billion during the first two quarters to $2.2 billion in the July-September period.

Q4 numbers are yet to fully come in, but it’s clear that private investors were incredibly bullish on early-stage startups in the second half of 2020. How long can that keep up? I think the answer is for a while yet, as investors have shown scant enthusiasm for slowing down their dealmaking cadence.

While cadence remains hot generally, seed deals should stay heated as the number of investors who are willing to invest early has increased.

Which brings us to our second question:

2. How long can investors keep writing such quick checks?

A theme that cropped up in the second half of 2020 was the pace at which investors were conducting venture capital deals. This was for a few reasons. To start, venture capitalists have raised larger funds in recent years, meaning that they need larger returns to make the math work out. This led to many investors putting money to work in younger and younger companies, hoping to get in early on a big win. That setup led to more deal competition and faster deal-making.

How? Two things. Investors who were already on a startup’s cap table — already part-owners, in other words — led preemptive rounds, in part to get ahead of other investors who might want to poach the succeeding deal. Other investors, knowing this, seemed to do the same math and move even faster, and earlier, to get around the defense.

So how long can the trend keep up? Given that many big VC firms raised in 2020, many startups picked up some tailwinds from the COVID-19 economy and exits have been strong, forever? Until something stops things? Think of it as Newton’s First Law of startup investing.

What could be the sudden impact to shake up the current set of conditions boosting the pace at which seed and later deals occur? An asteroid strike is probably too extreme, but inertia is one hell of a drug and markets love to stay happy.

Moving along, all the competition to get money to work in hot startups now has had another effect than the mere speed of deal-making; it has also pushed prices higher.

Healthcare startup Color has raised a sizable $167 million in Series D funding round, at a valuation of $1.5 billion post-money, the company announced today. This brings the total raised by Color to $278 million, with its latest large round intended to help it build on a record year of growth in 2020 with even more expansion to help put in place key health infrastructure systems across the U.S. — including those related to the “last mile” delivery of COVID-19 vaccines.

This latest investment into Color was led by General Catalyst, and by funds invested by T. Rowe Price, along with participation from Viking Global investors as well as others. Alongside the funding, the company is also bringing on a number of key senior executives, including Claire Vo (formerly of Optimizely) as chief product officer, Emily Reuter (formerly of Uber, where she played a key role in its IPO process) as VP of Strategy and Operations, and Ashley Chandler (formerly of Stripe) as VP of Marketing.

“I think with the [COVID-19] crisis, it’s really shone the light on that lack of infrastructure. We saw it multiple times, with lab testing, with antigen testing and now with vaccines,” Color CEO and co-founder Othman Laraki told me in an interview. “The model that we’ve been developing, that’s been working really well and we feel like this is the opportunity to really scale it in a very major way. I think literally what’s happening is the building of the public health infrastructure for the country that’s starting off from a technology-first model, as opposed to, what ends up happening in a lot of industries, which is you start off taking your existing logistics and assets, and add technology to them.”

Color’s 2020 was a record year for the company, thanks in part to partnerships like the one it formed with San Francisco to establish testing for healthcare workers and residents. Laraki told me they did about five-fold their prior year’s business, and while the company is already set up to grow on its own sustainably based on the revenue it pulls in from customers, its ambitions and plans for 2021 and beyond made this the right time to help it accelerate further with the addition of more capital.

Laraki described Color’s approach as one that is both cost-efficient for the company, and also significant cost-saving for the healthcare providers it works with. He likens their approach to the shift that happened in retail with the move to online sales — and the contribution of one industry heavyweight in particular.

“At some point, you build Amazon — a technology-first stack that’s optimized around access and scale,” Laraki said. “I think that’s literally what we’re seeing now with healthcare. What’s kind of getting catalyzed right now is we’ve been realizing it applies to the COVID crisis, but also, we started actually working on that for prevention and I think actually it’s going to be applying to a huge surface area in healthcare; basically all the aspects of health that are not acute care where you don’t need to show up in hospital.”

Ultimately, Color’s approach is to rethink healthcare delivery in order to “make it accessible at the edge directly in people’s lives,” with “low transaction costs,” in a way that’s “scalable, [and] doesn’t use a lot of clinical resourcing,” Laraki says. He notes that this is actually very possible once you reasses the problem without relying on a lot of accepted knowledge about the way things are done today, which result in a “heavy stack” versus what you actually need to deliver the desired outcomes.

Laraki doesn’t think the problem is easy to solve — on the contrary, he acknowledges that 2021 is likely to be even more difficult and challenging than 2020 in many ways for the healthcare industry, and we’ve already begun to see evidence of that in the many challenges already faced by vaccine distribution and delivery in its initial rollout. But he’s optimistic about Color’s ability to help address those challenges, and to build out a “last mile” delivery system for crucial care that expands accessibility, while also making sure things are done right.

“When you take a step back, doing COVID testing or COVID vaccinations … those are not complex procedures at all — they’re extremely simple procedures,” he said. “What’s hard is doing them massive scale and with a very low transaction cost to the individual and to the system. And that’s a very different tooling.”

Slack did its best to ease the working world back into their jobs this morning by breaking, ensuring that everyone’s return to the grind would be as chaotic and unproductive as possible.

Precisely when the downtime began is not clear, though problems amongst the TechCrunch staff began a little after 10 o’clock in the morning. Slack itself posted at 10:14 a.m. Eastern Time that there was a problem:

Downtime issues are not new for the workplace chat application that went public in mid-2019, before announcing a deal to sell itself to Salesforce toward the end of 2020. TechCrunch covered the service’s uptime issues in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017 and so forth.

The downtime is embarrassing, as Slack is in the midst of selling itself for a hefty check. For a service designed to help folks work, falling apart precisely when the users — customers! — you serve are trying to gear back up for a working year is simply awful.

I suppose we can call one another until Slack is back up.

To close, here’s the view from Redmond, with its competing Teams product:

Update: Slack sent TechCrunch a statement, saying the following:

Our teams are aware and are investigating the issue. We know how important it is for people to stay connected and we are working hard to get everyone running as normal. For the latest updates please keep an eye on @slackstatus and status.slack.com.

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out the second of our two holiday eps, the most recent looking at what we think might happen this year.

What did we get into today? A great question. Here’s the rundown:

Mostly we’re still making sure that our brains still work and that the return of work really is here. Taking a break was nice. Now the news is coming back, so we are as well. Hugs, and chat Thursday.

ShareChat, an Indian social network that added Twitter as an investor in 2019, may soon receive the backing of two more American firms.

The Bangalore-based startup is in advanced stages of talks to raise money from Google and Snap, as well as several existing investors, including Twitter, three sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round — a Series E — is slated to be larger than $200 million, with Google alone financing more than $100 million of it, four sources said, requesting anonymity as the talks are private. The round values ShareChat at more than $1 billion, two of the sources said.

ShareChat, Google and Snap did not respond to a request for comment. ShareChat has raised about $264 million to date and was valued at nearly $700 million last year.

The terms of the deal could change and the talks may not materialize into an investment, the sources cautioned. Local TV channel ET Now reported last year that Google was in talks to acquire ShareChat.

ShareChat’s marquee and eponymous app caters to users in 15 Indian languages and has a large following in small Indian cities and towns. Twitter and Snap, on the other hand, are struggling to gain users beyond urban cities in the world’s second-largest internet market. Both Twitter and Snapchat have about 50 million monthly active users in India, according to a popular mobile insight firm.

In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Ankush Sachdeva, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat, said the app was growing “exponentially” and that users were spending, on average, more than 30 minutes on the app each day.

If the deal goes through, it would be the first investment from Snapchat’s parent company into an Indian startup. Google, on the other hand, has been on a spree of late. The Android-maker last month invested in DailyHunt and InMobi’s Glance, both of which operate short-video apps.

Like the two, ShareChat also operates a short-video app. Its app, called Moj, had amassed more than 80 million monthly active users as of September last year, the startup said at the time. Several of these short videos apps, as well as Times Internet’s MX TakaTak (operated by MX Player), have witnessed an accelerated growth in recent quarters thanks in part to New Delhi banning ByteDance’s TikTok and hundreds of other Chinese apps last year. (Also worth pointing out: Google’s proposed check size to ShareChat is much larger than those it wrote to DailyHunt and Glance.)

Last year, Google announced that it plans to invest $10 billion in India over the course of five to seven years. Days later, the company invested $4.5 billion in Indian telecom giant Jio Platforms. Google and Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion in Jio Platforms last year, reach more than 400 million users in the country.

Google, Facebook, ShareChat, DailyHunt and Glance generate most of their revenue through ads. About 85% of the ad market in India is currently commanded by Facebook and Google, analysts at Bank of America wrote in a report to clients last year. “We estimate this market to be $10 billion by 2024 and see room for Facebook to increase its market-share by 4 percentage points in 4 years led by partnership with Jio. We estimate Facebook may have $4.7 billion revenues by 2024,” they wrote in the equity research report, obtained by TechCrunch.

Bangalore-based CRED is kickstarting the new year on a high note.

The two-year-old startup, led by high-profile entrepreneur Kunal Shah, said on Monday it has raised $81 million in a new financing round and bought shares worth $1.2 million (about 90 million Indian rupees) from employees.

The Series C financing round, as first reported by TechCrunch in late November, was led by DST Global. Existing investors Sequoia Capital, Ribbit Capital, Tiger Global and General Catalyst also participated in the round, and so did a few new names, including Satyan Gajwani of Indian conglomerate Times Internet, Sofina and Coatue.

The round gave CRED — which operates an eponymous app to reward customers for paying their credit card bill on time and offers deals from interesting online brands — a post-money valuation of $806 million.

In an interview with TechCrunch, Shah said that about 10% of CRED’s cap table is currently allocated to employees, and those who held vested stocks were eligible to sell up to 50% of their shares back to the startup in its first ESOP liquidity program. “We believe that startups should think about creating wealth for every shareholder, including employees.”

CRED has nearly doubled its customer base to about 5.9 million in the past year, or about 20% of the credit card holder base in India. The startup said that the median credit score of its customer was about 830, and about 30% of its customer base today holds a premium credit card. (On a side note, more than 50% of CRED customers pay their bills using UPI.)

CRED is one of the most talked-about startups in India, in part because of the scale at which its valuation has soared and the amount of capital it has been able to raise in such a short period.

One of the biggest questions surrounding CRED is just how it makes money, given how most fintech startups in the country — and there are many of them — are struggling to find a business model.

Shah said CRED makes money by cross-selling financing products — for which it has a revenue-sharing arrangement with banks and other financial institutions — and levies a similar cut from merchants who are on the platform today. More than 1,300 brands — including big names Starbucks, TAGG, Eat.Fit, Nykaa and emerging premium direct-to-consumer brands such as The Man Company, Sleepy Cat and Crossbeats –have joined the platform in recent years.

Direct-to-consumer market in India is still in its nascent stage, though some estimates say it could be worth $100 billion by 2025.

“I don’t think we were very deliberate to make D2C happen. It just so happened that in the early days when we offered rewards for D2C brands, they started to see huge traction,” he said, adding that CRED drove more than 30% sales for some brands.

“We realized that we were able to solve the discovery problem for customers. We are approaching this with themes — work-from-home and coffee — and it’s working out well. We are now playing matchmaking role between customers and brands that otherwise had to spend a lot of money in marketing.”

One of the biggest propositions of CRED is that it has been able to court some of the most sought-after customers in India. Unlike many other startups and giants such as Google and Facebook, CRED is not going after the next billion users.

“About 20 million customers account for 90% of all online consumption in India. These are the customers we are focusing on,” said Shah, who previously ran financial services firm Freecharge and delivered one of the rare successful exits in the country. The core challenge in chasing customers in smaller cities and towns in India is that very few people have the financial capacity to buy things, Shah said.

For that model to work, the GDP of India — where the average annual income of an individual is about $2,000 — needs to grow. And for that, we need more participation from females, said Shah. Less than 10% of the female population in India are currently part of the workforce, compared to over 90% in China.

An interesting use case for CRED today is that it could potentially license to venture firms data about the traction D2C brands are seeing on its platform, which could use it as a signal to inform their investment decisions.

Shah cautioned that the startup is “extraordinarily sensitive about data” but said the team is thinking about ways to help venture firms discover these firms. “We are planning to create a newsletter to showcase many of these brands to the investor world,” he said.

And finally, will CRED launch a credit card or other banking products? “Can we partner with banks to cross-sell every product that they today offer? The answer is yes,” said Shah, though he cautioned that the startup is in no hurry to supercharge its offerings.

My big question for 2021, and the one that is on every startup’s mind, is how will a cataclysmic event such as a global pandemic show up in post-pandemic innovation? I think we’re in the early innings of seeing what “aha moments” have materialized into companies. And we won’t know the pandemic’s true impact on our psyches until the dust settles and we have an opportunity to reflect.

We do know it will be fascinating to watch. In 2020, innovators and investors were forced to stand still, and witness cracks, fractures and rubble in society in a way like never before. It was a humbling year that, for much of the tech community, was mostly spent inside, away and alone.

One reaction I’ve noticed so far — that isn’t necessarily new but comes with new weight — is a rush of innovation that focuses on reducing friction. Take trends like the rise of building in public or the unbundling of venture capital. Or remote work’s shift from enabling communication to now needing to enable passive and active collaboration. Apply the same idea to mental health, education and fitness. Heck, we’re even seeing people take the Y Combinator format and apply it to anything that makes sense, from helping operators turn into investors to helping employees try to turn their side gig into a full-time company.

While these movements didn’t begin because of the coronavirus, they all seem to have a huge, pandemic-sized asterisk next to it.

It would be easy to dismiss these movements as small and inconsequential. But, as my colleague and fellow Equity co-host Danny Crichton pointed out this week, “sometimes the most important changes in venture and startups more generally have come from lowering that last bit of friction to action.”

Lowering friction feels like the mantra with which we all need to enter 2021.

I already have hope that innovation will come from a more diverse set of people, whether it’s in a hacker house for undergraduate women or a student-founded service that matches undergraduate students to nonprofits. So, as we enter the new year — and bear with me here — I urge you to be optimistic.

The last year in tech hasn’t left people exhausted and hopeless, it’s left them energized and ready.

Will the second time be the charm for Qualtrics?

When SAP announced that Qualtrics was getting spun out in July, the full-circle moment made the Equity podcast crew jump to our mics with guesses around why. Now, months later, there’s a new S-1 filing, and more to color in. Alex Wilhelm broke down the Utah-based unicorn’s numbers, noting that it’s the second time Qualtrics has filed.

Will the second time be the charm that Qualtrics needs to actually go public this time around? I’ll let you make the call yourself once you sift through Alex’s analysis of the valuation and financials.

Miami, Substack and Clubhouse

If those three words in a single subhed elicit a certain reaction from you, Danny Crichton has a bone to pick with you. He wrote a piece this week about tech’s cynicism around anything new, underscoring how Miami’s future as a tech hub, Substack’s future as a replacement for traditional journalism and Clubhouse’s future as a social media disruptor have come under fire as expected:

The cynicism of immediate perfection is one of the strange dynamics of startups in 2020. There is this expectation that a startup, with one or a few founders and a couple of employees, is somehow going to build a perfect product on day one that mitigates any potential problem even before it becomes one. Maybe these startups are just getting popularized too early, and the people who understand early product are getting subsumed by the wider masses who don’t understand the evolution of products?

Danny’s argument is to give these companies a little more grace to execute on a vision they themselves are not even close to scratching the surface of. When it comes to holding specific decision-makers and businesses to a certain standard, I prefer a more fluid conversation. But I do agree that writing off a business because it hasn’t done everything correctly from the start can hurt progress. It’s easy to be grumpy, but why not choose to be an optimist? Tell me your optimistic bets by responding to this newsletter or tweeting me @nmasc_.

And some good news

Speaking of humbling moments and optimism, our own Sarah Perez wrote a piece this week about EarlyBird, an app that lets families and friends gift investments to children. While Acorns and Stash have similar offerings, EarlyBird is bringing a fresh UX play to financial literacy, freedom and education. There’s a ton of work left to be done, hurdles to deal with, and giant unicorns to compete with. EarlyBird, however, is only weeks old, so there’s much to watch out for.

VP Caleb Frankel, now EarlyBird COO, explained the early inspiration:

“This all started with a problem I experienced years ago when my beautiful baby niece was born. I found myself head over heels and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on just the most ridiculous stuff — pretty much just junk gifts,” he says. “I wanted to have a larger impact in her life and something that she could really use when she grew up.”

Around TechCrunch

Attending CES 2021? TechCrunch wants to meet your startup

Gift Guide: Last-minute subscriptions to keep the gifts going all year

Across the week

Seen on Extra Crunch

How artificial intelligence will be used in 2021

On the diversity front, 2020 may prove a tipping point

The 2020 boom in climate tech SPACs

2021 will be a calmer year for semiconductors and chips (except for Intel)

Understanding Europe’s big push to rewrite the digital rulebook

Seen on TechCrunch

China lays out ‘rectification’ plan for Jack Ma’s fintech empire Ant

NSO used real people’s location data to pitch its contact-tracing tech, researchers say

India’s slow 2020 told through dollars and cents

An earnest review of a robotic cat pillow

@EquityPod

The Equity pod put together a 2021 predictions episode (with Chris Gates, our producer, making a guest appearance on the mic as well!). We talk about IPO candidates, San Francisco and the future of drugs.

2020 brought several million downloads to the podcast, and we’re super thankful to all of y’ all for tuning in. This year will be even bigger, better and, hey, maybe we’ll even get to make fun of each other in person too.

Till next week,

Natasha Mascarenhas

TMYTEK recently raised a Series A+ round of about $10 million for products that make it easier to test 5G millimeter wave equipment. So far, the company’s clients include KDDI, NTT DoCoMo and research institutions. But the Taiwanese startup has aspirations to sell its own base stations, too, competing with well-established players like Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei. TMYTEK plans to use its expertise, gleaned from helping other researchers develop 5G infrastructure, to create what its chief executive officer describes as a “complete 5G industrial chain.”

Its latest funding round was led by TMYTEK’s manufacturing partner Inventec, one of the largest OEMs in Taiwan, and brings the startup’s total funding so far to $13.3 million. Other investors included Taisic Materials, ITEQ, Tamagawa Electronics, and Taiwan’s National Development Fund. TMYTEK also recently took part in SparkLabs Taipei’s accelerator program.

Co-founder and chief executive officer Su-Wei Chang told TechCrunch that it plans to raise a Series B next to develop and commercialize its base stations. To get ready for its base station business, TMYTEK recently joined the O-RAN Alliance, founded by some of the world’s biggest telecoms to create more interoperable mobile networks, in a bid to encourage the development of new technology and faster deployment.

Chang said TMYTEK’s base in Taiwan gives it a strategic advantage. 5G manufacturing is an important part of Taiwan’s economy, with exports reaching record highs during the second half of 2020, thanks in part to demand for 5G-related equipment and technology for smartphones, autonomous vehicles and smart devices.

Chang studied at University of Massachusetts Amherst and when TMYTEK was founded six years ago, he was often asked why he didn’t stay in the United States, where it would have been easier to secure startup funding. But being in Taiwan puts the company closer to many important markets, including Japan, where 30% of its current business comes from, and gives TMYTEK a good foundation to expand into the U.S. and European market, he said.

It has also given the company a supply chain advantage. TMYTEK has manufacturing partners across Asia, including Inventec in Taiwan, and factories in Vietnam and Thailand, in addition to China. Chang said this means TMYTEK was not limited by the COVID-19 pandemic or the U.S-China trade war.

Before launching TMYTEK in 2014, Chang and co-founder Ethan Lin both worked at Academia Sinica, one of the top research institutions in Taiwan, where they focused on millimeter waves even though at the time most researchers were more interested in the mid-band spectrum.

But as more devices and applications began to crowd the 4G spectrum, mmWave became less niche. With Qualcomm’s launch of next-generation 5G mmWave hardware and chips, and more carriers launching mmWave coverage, mmWave is poised to become mainstream.

Millimeter waves offer powerful signals with wide bandwidth and low latency, but drawbacks include difficulty traveling through obstacles like buildings. It also has a limited range, which is why millimeter waves need more base stations. Beamforming, which directs signals toward a specific device, and antenna array, or multiple antennas that work like a single antenna, are used to extend its coverage.

Making mmWave development faster

One of the main challenges for the millimeter wave market, however, is the lack of R&D tools to speed up their development and time to market, resulting in higher costs and slower deployment.

To keep up with market opportunities, TMYTEK transitioned from design and manufacturing projects for clients to offering 5G-focused solutions like the BBox, which stands for “beamforming box.” The BBox was created after a professor at National Taiwan University told Chang that his team was working on antenna design, but didn’t have the resources to work on beamforming technology, too. It lets researchers create 16 beams and control the signal’s amplitude and phase with software, so they can test how it works with antennas and other hardware more quickly. TMYTEK claims the BBox can save researchers and engineers up to 80% in time and cost.

Chang said TMYTEK realized that if researchers at NTU, one of Taiwan’s largest research universities, needed a solution, then other labs did, too. So far, it has delivered 30 sets to companies including KDDI, NTT DoCoMo, Fujitsu, several Fortune 500 companies and research institutions.

While the BBox was created for antenna designers, the company also began exploring solutions to help other designers, including algorithm developers who want to test beam tracking, communicate with base stations and collect data.

For that scenario, TMYTEK created the XBeam, which is describes as a “total solution,” and is meant for the mass production phase, testing modules, smartphones and base stations before they are shipped. Traditional solutions to test modules rely on mechanical rotators, but Chang said this is more suited to the research and development process. The XBeam, which is based on the BBox, electronically scans beams instead. The company claims the XBeam is up to 20 times faster than other testing solutions.

TMYTEK created the XBeam’s prototype in 2019 and launched the commercialized version in November 2020.

The BBox and XBeam will help TMYTEK build its own base station business in two ways, Chang said. First, having its own solutions will allow TMYTEK to test base stations and bring them to market faster. Second, the startup hopes building a reputation on effective research and development tools will help it market its base stations to private and public networks. This is especially important to TMYTEK’s ambitions since their base stations will be up against products from major players like Nokia, Ericsson, Samsung and Huawei.

“Our advantage at TMYTEK is that we’re doing the design and we have good partners for manufacturing. Inventec, our investor, is a top five manufacturer in Taiwan,” he said. “And TMYTEK also builds our own testing solution, so our value is that we can provide a total solution to our customers.”

Rendin, an Estonian proptech startup that wants to improve the home rental experience, including offering a no-deposit feature, has raised €1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the round is Tera Ventures, Iron Wolf Capital, Truesight Ventures, Atomico’s Angel Programme and Startup Wise Guys.

Launched in Estonia in March this year and currently expanding to Poland, Rendin operates a long-term rental platform that promises to smooth out the process between landlords and tenants. Its headline feature is an insurance-backed solution that means no deposit is required from tenants.

The broader premise is that by digitizing the rental process and adding an insurance layer, further trust can be generated between parties, therefore increasing occupancy rates.

For landlords, Rendin has created a “letting agreement service” with certain guarantees and has insured those risks via a partnership with ERGO Insurance SE (Munich Re Group). So, for example, if a tenant causes damage or ends up in debt, the property owner is covered. The letting agreement is handled via the startup’s app and platform that plugs into rental marketplaces and real estate CRMs on the backend to provide a fully digital experience.

“We launched publicly in Estonia on March 10, 2020, two days before the country went into pandemic lockdown,” Rendin co-founder Alain Aun tells me. “It really looked like the world was going to fall apart and a lot of the risks in home renting skyrocketed. We had to reinvent some parts of our product insurance very quickly to adjust to the changes around us.

“Suddenly we had desperate tenants losing their income, expats leaving the country in a hurry, and more. Our learning curve was tremendous. We figured, if we can survive this, we can survive anything. The last eleven months have been constant proof to us that the concept of Rendin can endure.”

Longer term, Rendin is building what Aun describes as “a new standard in home renting.” The first step is to manage the rental process risks to help establish trust between landlords and tenants. This has seen the proptech startup build an “end-to-end value chain,” from contracting, evidence-based handover, preventive insurance flows, loss control and claim handling.

Aun says Rendin’s insurance product offers landlords more safety than regular deposits, while some risks for tenants are also covered. “The insurance is a tool that helps Rendin to solve real-life, often complicated situations in renting, both for landlords and tenants,” he explains. “Tenants in the Rendin platform don’t have to pay the security deposit, but this is just a feature, not the core product. Trust is the name of the game.”

To generate revenue and cover the insurance costs, Rendin charges a fee of 2.5% of the monthly rent. It can be paid by the tenant or by the landlord. “More and more landlords choose to pay the Rendin fee themselves as it helps find new tenants faster,” adds Aun.

On the competition, Rendin isn’t competing with real estate listing sites or letting agencies, and instead can be thought of more as a plugin that can be easily integrated into listing sites and agents’ business processes.

“There are a few no-deposit startups around but their business models, although similar at first glance, are entirely different from ours,” claims the Rendin co-founder. “Most of them are set up to be essentially lending businesses that collect interest from tenants with real estate agencies serving up demand for them, but they don’t really do anything to help mitigate risks for the parties [involved].”

The Exchange is taking a break from vacation to dig into the new Qualtrics S-1 filing. Then the column and newsletter are back on hold until January 4.

This afternoon, Qualtrics, a software company that helps companies poll their employee base, customers and others, filed to go public. It’s the second time that the Utah-based unicorn has done so, failing the first time to complete its offering after SAP swooped in and bought it for around $8 billion in cash.

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

SAP announced in late July of this year that Qualtrics would be spun out via an IPO, bringing the smaller company’s saga full-circle.

The new S-1 filing — you can view the 2018 original here — is a different animal from the first. First, Qualtrics is larger than it was, and older. And its financials are more complex as it extricates itself from its soon-to-be-erstwhile corporate parent.

Qualtrics intends to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “XM.”

Looking back at my chat with Ryan Smith, then Qualtrics CEO and today its chairman, and Bill McDermott, then SAP’s CEO and today the CEO of ServiceNow, it’s hard to believe that the acquisition deal was only two years ago.

Much has changed since late 2018. Let’s see what happened to Qualtrics in the meantime. We’ll dig into the financials, the company’s implied valuation range (spoiler: It has gone up) and whatever else we can shake loose.

The new Qualtrics S-1

A few things up top. First, SAP will be the company’s controlling shareholder after the Qualtrics’ IPO. That’s early in the S-1 filing. And, Smith and Silver Lake are investing in the company as part of its new debut.

Global investors are running from Chinese tech stocks in the wake of the government’s crackdown on Ant Group and Alibaba, two high-flying businesses founded by Ma Yun (Jack Ma) that were once hailed as paragons of China’s new tech elite.

Shares of major technology companies in the country have fallen sharply in recent days, with Bloomberg calculating that Alibaba, Tencent, JD.com and Meituan have lost around $200 billion in value during a handful of trading sessions.

Already reeling from the last-minute halt of the public debut of Ant Group, a major Chinese fintech player with deep ties to Alibaba, the e-commerce giant came under new fire, as China’s markets watchdog opened a probe into its business practices concerning potentially anticompetitive behavior.

Ant Group was itself summoned by the government on December 26, leading to a plan that will force the company to “rectify” its business practices.

Shares of Alibaba are off around 30% from their recent record highs set in late October. Tech shares are also off in the country more broadly, with one Chinese-technology-focused ETC falling around 8% from recent highs, including a 1.5% drop today.

The American Depositary Receipts used by traders to invest in Alibaba fell from around $256 per share at the close of Wednesday trading on the New York Stock Exchange to around $222 last Thursday. The company is down another half point today. It was worth more than $319 per share earlier in the quarter.

It’s clear that the rising tensions between China’s tech giants and the country’s ruling Communist Party have investors spooked. But Jack Ma’s relationship with the Chinese government has always been a bit more fraught than that of his peers. Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), the founder of Tencent, and Xu Yong (Eric Yong) and Li Yanhong (Robin Li), the co-founders of Baidu, have kept lower profiles than the Alibaba founder.

Bloomberg has a good synopsis of the state of the market right now. The companies that are most directly in the crosshairs appear to be Ma Yun’s, but at different times, Tencent has been the focus of Chinese regulators bent on curbing the company’s influence through gaming.

Specifically for Alibaba things have gone from bad to worse, and a boosted share buyback program was not enough to halt the bleeding.

Whether this new round of regulations is a solitary blip on the radar or the signal of an increasing interest in Beijing tying tech companies closer to national interests remains to be seen. As the tit-for-tat tech conflict between the U.S. and China continues, many companies that had seen their growth as apolitical may become caught in the diplomatic crossfire.

Other tech companies are seeing their fortunes rise, boosted by newfound interest from the central government in Beijing.

This is already apparent in the chip industry, where China’s push for self-reliance has brought new riches and capital for new businesses. It’s true for Liu FengFeng, whose company, Tsinghon, was able to raise $5 million for its attempt at building a new semiconductor manufacturer in the country. Intellifusion, a manufacturer of chipsets focused on machine learning applications, was able to raise another $141 million back in April.

Private investors may be less enthused at the prospect of backing Chinese tech upstarts who could face government censure should the regulatory winds shift. Whether other startup markets in the region — India, Japan, among others — will benefit from the Chinese regulatory barrage will be interesting to track in 2021.

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out the first of our two holiday eps, the last one talking to VCs about what surprised them in 2020.

Anyhoo, from vacation, here’s what Chris and I got up to:

Tune in Thursday for one more fun episode, and then we’re back to regular programming the week after!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST and Thursday afternoon as fast as we can get it out, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts.

During my five years with Global Founders Capital, Rocket Internet’s $1 billion VC arm, I saw more than a hundred of Rocket’s incubated companies attempt to internationalize. For background, Rocket Internet has helped launch some very successful businesses internationally, including HelloFresh ($12.9 billion market cap), Lazada ($1 billion exit to Alibaba), Jumia ($3.2 billion market cap), Zalando ($21.2 billion market cap) and many others. Rocket often followed the Blitzscaling model popularized by Reid Hoffman — earning them an appearance in his book of the same name.

After an initial success helping Groupon scale internationally via a merger with Rocket’s incubation firm CityDeal, Rocket’s team have aggressively scaled businesses from Algeria to Zimbabwe — sometimes in a matter of weeks. No surprise, Rocket also has a graveyard of failed companies that were victims of bad internationalization efforts.

My personal observations on Rocket’s successes and failures start with this crucial point: These learnings might not apply to your unique combination business model, market and timing. No matter how well you prepare and plan your internationalization, in the end you need to be agile, alert and smart as you dip your toes into your first foreign market.

Fail fast and cheaply

Internationalization can be a big driver of growth and consequently enterprise value, which is why investors always push for it. But going abroad can also destroy value just as quickly. As a founder, it’s your job to manage financial and operational risks. Finding the right balance between keeping costs in check and not underinvesting can mean doing things more slowly than your board would like. For example, you might launch new markets sequentially instead of rolling 10 out at the same time.

Adopt a “hire slow, fire fast” mentality for your expansion strategy. Don’t be afraid to pull the plug if things don’t work out.

Our team at Heartcore Capital use the following framework and learnings to guide internationalization strategies for our portfolio companies. A successful internationalization strategy needs to answer and address the “Four Ws”: When, Where, Which and With whom to internationalize. (Regarding the fifth W from journalism, you should not need to ask the “Why” question if you want to build a large business!)

1. When is the right time to start?

Many companies make the costly mistake of launching abroad too soon. They look at internationalization as a detached function, isolated from the rest of the business and then launch their second market prematurely. Follow this simple rule: Wait to internationalize until you hit product/market fit.

How do you know exactly when you’ve reached product/market fit? According to Marc Andreessen, “Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” He adds that experienced entrepreneurs can usually feel if they’ve reached this point.

Let’s take the man for his word and move on to the actual argument: Until you have product/market fit, you will not be able to distinguish between what you’ve learned from your business model and what you’ve learned from your in-country experience. Mistakes will compound. Complexities and costs will multiply. I contend that insufficient understanding of their business and operating model is the main reason why companies fail with their expansion strategies.

Founders should also consider the underlying costs of internationalizing before they decide to expand (more about this in the “What” section below). Some companies are global by default — think mobile gaming companies — or simply require language localization. Others need to build new warehouses, hire local teams or build entirely new products. The costs and respective risks of expanding prematurely depend heavily on the business model.

There are edge cases where companies need to move quickly to internationalize for strategic reasons — despite uncertainty about their market fit. For instance, companies like Groupon or those engaged in food delivery face winner-takes-most markets, where opportunities for product differentiation are limited. “Blitzscaling” makes sense in cases like these.

However, you should tread carefully if your only reason to start scaling abroad is a large fundraise or to match a competitor’s internationalization efforts. Scaling prematurely for the wrong reasons might just cost you your entire company.

When Rocket Internet announced it would launch the Homejoy model into European markets with Helpling, the American “original” company launched quickly in Germany in an effort to squash their new competitor. In the early days of “on-demand everything,” a managed marketplace for cleaning services sounded like the next unicorn in the making.

In 2013, Homejoy had a fresh $24 million Series A from Google Ventures and First Round — considered a huge round at a time when Instacart had just raised an $8 million Series A and Snapchat had done a $13 million Series A round. It must have seemed like a good idea to squash the German competition early.

As it turned out, Homejoy’s product was not yet ready to scale internationally. Just 13 months after launching in Germany, Homejoy had to cease operations globally, while Rocket’s Helpling is still alive and kicking. Helpling focused carefully on product, automation and making their unit economics work. A rush to crush an international competitor caused the demise of a would-be unicorn.

2. Where should you internationalize?

When deciding which new international market to tackle, it is vital to do your homework. Analyze the competitive environment, partner availability, infrastructure, culture, regulation and synergies with your home market.

In the early days of e-commerce, it was rather easy to analyze if a market was an expansion target. In the absence of professional competition, Rocket chose new countries based solely on GDP and internet penetration.

The rivalry between China’s top online learning apps has become even more intense this year because of the COVID-19 pandemic. The latest company to score a significant funding round is Zuoyebang, which announced today (link in Chinese) that it has raised a $1.6 billion Series E+ from investors including Alibaba Group. Other participants included returning investors Tiger Global Management, SoftBank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China and FountainVest Partners.

Zuoyebang’s latest announcement comes just six months after it announced a $750 million Series E led by Tiger Global and FountainVest. The latest financing brings Zuoyebang’s total raised so far to $2.93 billion. The company did not disclose its latest worth, but Reuters reported in September that it was raising at a $10 billion valuation.

One of Zuoyebang’s main competitors is Yuanfudao, which announced in October that it had reached a $15.5 billion valuation after closing a $2.2 billion round led by Tencent. This pushed Yuanfudao ahead of Byju as the world’s most valuable edtech company. Another popular online learning app in China is Yiqizuoye, which is backed by Singapore’s Temasek.

Zuoyebang offers online courses, live lessons and homework help for kindergarten to 12th grade students, and claims about 170 million monthly active users, about 50 million of whom use the service each day. In comparison, there were about 200 million K-12 students in 2019 in China, according to the Ministry of Education (link in Chinese).

In fall 2020, the total number of students in Zuoyebang’s paid livestream classes reached more than 10 million, setting an industry record, the company claims. While a lot of the growth was driven by the pandemic, Zuoyebang founder Hou Jianbin said in the company’s funding announcement that it expects online education to continue growing in the longer term, and will invest in K-12 classes and expand its product categories.

The end of the year is looming and with it one of your most important tasks as a manager. Summarizing the performance of 10, 20 or 50 developers over the past 12 months, offering personalized advice and having the facts to back it up — is no small task.

We believe that the only unbiased, accurate and insightful way to understand how your developers are working, progressing and — last but definitely not least — how they’re feeling, is with data. Data can provide more objective insights into employee activity than could ever be gathered by a human.

Consider this: Over two-thirds of employees say they would put more effort into their work if they felt more appreciated, and 90% want a manager who’s fair to all employees.

Let’s be honest. It’s hard to judge all of your employees fairly if you’re (1) unable to work physically side-by-side with them, meaning you’ll inevitably have more contact with the some over others (e.g., those you’re more friendly with); and (2) you’re relying on manual trackers to keep on top of everyone’s work, which can get lost and take a lot of effort to process and analyze; (3) you expect engineers to self-report their progress, which is far from objective.

It’s also unlikely, especially with the quieter ones, that on top of all that you’ll have identified areas for them to expand their talents by upskilling or reskilling. But it’s that kind of personal attention that will make employees feel appreciated and able to progress professionally with you. Absent that, they’re likely to take the next best job opportunity that shows up.

So here’s a run down of why you need data to set up a fair annual review process; if not this year, then you can kick-start it for 2021.

1. Use data to set next year’s goals

The best way to track your developers’ progress automatically is by using Git Analytics tools, which track the performance of individuals by aggregating historical Git data and then feeding that information back to managers in minute detail.

This data will clearly show you if one of your engineers is over capacity or underworked and the types of projects they excel in. If you’re assessing an engineering manager and the team members they’re responsible for have been taking longer to push their code to the shared repository, causing a backlog of tasks, it may mean that they’re not delegating tasks properly. An appropriate goal here would be to track and divide their team’s responsibilities more efficiently, which can be tracked using the same metrics, or cross-training members of other teams to assist with their tasks.

Another example is that of an engineer who is dipping their toe into multiple projects. Indicators of where they’ve performed best include churn (we’ll get to that later), coworkers repeatedly asking that same employee to assist them in new tasks and of course positive feedback for senior staff, which can easily be integrated into Git analytics tools. These are clear signs that next year, your engineer could be maximizing their talents in these alternative areas, and you could diversify their tasks accordingly.

Once you know what targets to set, you can use analytics tools to create automatic targets for each engineer. That means that after you’ve set it up, it will be updated regularly on the engineer’s progress using indicators directly from the code repository. It won’t need time-consuming input from either you or your employee, allowing you both to focus on more important tasks. As a manager you’ll receive full reports once the deadline of the task is reached and get notified whenever metrics start dropping or the goal has been met.

This is important — you’ll be able to keep on top of those goals yourself, without having to delegate that responsibility or depend on self-reporting by the engineer. It will keep employee monitoring honest and transparent.

2. Three Git metrics can help you understand true performance quality

The easiest way for managers to “conclude” how an engineer has performed is by looking at superficial output: the number of completed pull requests submitted per week, the number of commits per day, etc. Especially for nontechnical managers, this is a grave but common error. When something is done, it doesn’t mean it’s been done well or that it is even productive or usable.

Instead, look at these data points to determine the actual quality of your engineer’s work:

As the United States entered its first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns, there were wide expectations in startup land that a reckoning had arrived. But the expected comeuppance of high-burn, high-growth startups fueled by cheap capital provided by venture capitalists raising ever-larger funds, failed to arrive.

Instead, the very opposite came to pass.

Layoffs happened swiftly and aggressively during the early months of the pandemic era. But by the middle of Q2, venture activity had warmed and third quarter dealmaking felt swift and competitive, with some investors describing it as the hottest summer in recent years.

But somewhat lost amongst the splashy megarounds and high-interest IPOs that can dominate the news cycle were seed-stage startups. The raw little companies that represent the grist that will shape itself into the next set of giants.

TechCrunch explored what happened in seed investing to uncover what was missed amidst the storm and fury of late-stage startup activity. According to a TechCrunch analysis of PitchBook data and a survey of venture capitalists, a few trends became clear.

First, the pattern of rising seed-check sizes seen in prior years continued despite the tumultuous business climate. Second, more expensive and larger seed deals were not only caused by excessive capital present in the private markets. Instead, COVID-19 shook up which startups were considered attractive by private investors. And the changeup did not necessarily raise their number.

Let’s dig into the data and see what it can teach us about this wild year. Then we’ll hear from Eniac Ventures’ Nihal Mehta, Freestyle’s Jenny Lefcourt, Pear VC’s Mar Hershenson and Contrary Capital’s Eric Tarczynski about what they saw in 2020 while writing a chunk of the checks that our data encompasses.

The American seed market in 2020

If you didn’t think much about seed in 2020, you’re not alone. Late, huge rounds consumed most of the media’s oxygen, leaving smaller startups to compete for scraps of attention. There was so much late-stage activity — around 90 $100 million or larger rounds in Q3, for example — it was difficult for smaller investments to command attention.

But despite living in the background, the dollars invested into seed-stage startups in the United States had an up-and-down year that was fascinating:

Seed dollar volume fell as Q1 progressed, reaching a 2020 nadir in April, the start of Q2. But as May arrived, the pace at which investors put money into seed-stage startups accelerated, recovering to January levels — which is to say, pre-pandemic — by June. The COVID dip, for seed, then, was a short-term affair.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Today is our holiday look-back at the year, bringing not only our own Danny and Natasha and Chris and Alex into the mix, but also five venture capitalists who we got to leave us their notes as well. The goal for this episode was to reflect on a year that no one could have ever predicted, but with a specific angle, as always, on venture capital and startups.

We asked about the biggest surprise, non-portfolio companies to watch, and trends they got wrong and right. There was also banter on Zoom investing (Alex came up with Zesting, but we’re taking suggestions if anyone comes up with a better moniker) and startup pricing.

Here’s who we asked to call into our super Fancy Equity Hotline:

Thanks to them all for participating, and of course you, our dear Equity listeners, for a blockbuster year for the podcast.

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