Who captures the most value after the SaaS acre? Companies or start-ups?

Hello and welcome back to Equity, the podcast about the startup business, where we unravel the numbers and nuances behind the headlines. This is our Wednesday episode, where we limit ourselves to one person, think about their work and unpack the rest.

Of Alex as the leader of today’s interview, we once again dove into the world of startup financing. In the wake of businesskinda.com reporting on company results, valuations and unicorns more broadly thanks to Q1 data, we invited Janelle Teng from Bessemer Venture Partners to riff with us on the state of the cloud.

That’s also the title of Bessemer’s latest data dump on cloud stocks, startups, AI and more. Teng, a co-author of the report, ran through some key bits with us to better explain her company’s perspective, and to answer our critical comments about Figma and why startups should always kill Goliath, not with him come along for a round of grapes and lounging.

We digress. You can find the report that we talked about here, our first notes of that here. Finally, an overview of topics:

• Is the valuation carnage that startups have survived since late 2021 finally over?
• Why is investor preference swinging back to growth from profitability?
• What is the state of the runway in late-stage startups?
• Is the M&A break almost over?
• And of course AI and SaaS and where VCs see the pair go!