What’s the opposite of a lean startup?

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Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This is our Friday show, and we’re talking about the week’s biggest startup and tech news. This week, Mary Ann and Alex ran as a duo, covering a wide swath of startup and technology news. Don’t forget that the Equity crew are opening this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, so snag a bagel and come hang in a few weeks!

Here’s the show rundown:

• Teamshares: Here’s an interesting one. Teamshares has raised a lot of money and is buying a lot of SMBs. But that’s just the start. It also plans to allow employees of those companies to buy most of their stock over time, while serving up centralized fintech services to all its sub-companies. Who doesn’t love to chat about a new model?
• MoonPay’s new venture arm: Crypto payment infra company MoonPay is getting into the venture game, with a focus on crypto, gaming, and fintech. The union of those three is crypto games, of course, but we have two eyes fixed on what MoonPay decides to invest in. New crypto-thematic, or crypto-adjacent funds are rarer these days, making the MoonPay news exciting.
• Rent Butter and Kiki: Now that the zero interest rate period is over, and the experiment in building new iBuying and mortgage service startups has partially concluded, renting is hot again. And thus, so too are rental-focused startups.
• The IPO drought has lasted longer than you anticipated: Working off a Crunchbase dataset, Alex has notes on just how long we have been waiting for real tech IPOs. The good news? They are (partially) back!
• What happens when you bring lean startup ideology into the AI world? A lot of experiments, it turns out.

And that is us until next week. Due to an American holiday, Equity will kick off on Tuesday next week instead of Monday!