Equity Monday: Circuit breakers, seed rounds and startup valuations

Good morning friends, and welcome back to

TechCrunch’s Equity Monday

, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode

with Danny Crichton

, in which we took a look at the new Kleiner fund.)

This morning was more of the same. More

COVID-19 bad news

and stock market worry. But this weekend saw other, new issues, like a collapse in oil prices

and record low yields in Treasuries.

What happens when all U.S. government notes yield less than 1%? We’re about to find out.

For us this morning what matters is that COVID-19 is still spreading, the global stock markets are still falling and domestic equities are about to get hit hard, if pre-market trading is any indication. Currently stocks are flashing about 5% losses as we write to you.

Skipping the show’s order, here’s what’s on our minds this morning:

• What happens to private market valuations now as the public market continues to reprice? When does sentiment shift?

• What happens when startups pull back spend and hunt for slower, but more efficient growth?

• Finally, what happens to all the companies looking to go public? Like Asana (more here

  ), Procore (notes here

  ), Accolade (our coverage

  ), not to mention Postmates, DoorDash (read this

  ) and Airbnb (more here

  ). Currently, it looks like we could jet into Q2 2020 with two venture-backed, non-biotech IPOs under our belts.

Finally on the show, we did get to mention seed rounds for

Airmeet

, Sama

and Vivoo

. Those, at least, brought a little bit of optimism to the day.

More soon, and stay informed this week. It’s a good time to stay abreast of the news.

Equity drops every Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on

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