Equity Shot: 1% is the new “growth”

Happy Saturday and welcome back to an Equity Shot, a short-form episode of Equity where we drill into one particular topic. There was so much news this week in our main areas of focus — startup funding rounds, new venture funds, that sort of thing — that we had to exclude earnings from the main show! (But really, check it out, as it was a good time.)

Sad, I know. Everyone surely noticed the loss, but we gathered once again on Friday afternoon to dig into the results all the same. A big thanks to Danny, Natasha and Chris for gathering ’round one more time to get through:

•  SaaS and enterprise earnings: We dug into Microsoft’s results (TechCrunch coverage here), along with notes on quarterly results from Atlassian, Zendesk and ServiceNow. The gist is that big corp SaaS did fine in Q1, but there are varying levels of concern regarding the future.
• Subscription content: Spotify is doing fine and Netflix smashed it, according to Danny (TechCrunch coverage here, and here, respectively). Spotify also managed to eke out the world’s funniest net income result, while Netflix shot forward like a hare from a trap. In short, we may be listening to fewer podcasts, but we sure as hell aren’t getting off the couch.
• Advertising shops: While the advertising world melts down in spectacular fashion, tech shops that are ad powered did kinda OK. Facebook did what it always does, wowing with results and this time telling investors that April was looking better than March. Snap grew like hell, surprising investors, even if its overall cost structure is broken when compared to its revenue. Twitter was the miss of the bunch, struggling the most after telling investors it was still seeing COVID-19 issues in April. And, finally, Alphabet did Google things, so its stock went up, COVID-19 be damned.

We avoided Tesla  because who can be bothered, and managed the shortest note on Apple  ever recorded on a business podcast. All that and we had some fun. Hugs from Equity; we’ll be right back Monday morning!