Stripe goes Fast for $20M, D2C tips and tricks and what’s happening to tech internships?

Hello and welcome back to

Equity

, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

The three of us were back today —

Natasha

, Danny

and Alex

— to dig our way through a host of startup-focused topics . Sure, the world is stuffed full of COVID-19 news

— and, to be clear, the topic did come up some — but Equity decided to circle back to its roots and talks startups and accelerators and how many pieces of luggage does an urban-living person really need?

The answer, as far as we can work it out, is either one piece or seven. Regardless, here’s what we got through this week:

• Big news from 500 Startups

  , and our favorite companies from the accelerator’s latest demo day

  . Y Combinator is not the only game in town, so TechCrunch spent part of the day peekin’ at 500 and its latest batch of companies

  . We got into some of the startups that stuck out, tackling problems within the influencer market, trash pickup and esports.

• Plastiq raised $75 million

  to help people and businesses use their credit card anywhere they want. And no, it wasn’t closed after the pandemic hit.

• We also talked through Fast’s latest $20 million round led by Stripe

  . Stripe, as everyone recalls, was most recently a topic on the show thanks to a venture whoopsie in the form of a check from Sequoia to Finix.1

  But all that’s behind us. Fast is building a new login and checkout service for the internet that is supposed to be both speedy and independent.

• All the Stripe talk reminded us of one of the startups that launched so it could beat it out: Brex. The startup, which has amassed over $300 million in known venture capital to date, recently acquired three companies

  .

• We chatted through the highlights of our D2C venture survey

  , focused on rising CAC costs in select channels, the importance of solid gross margins and why Casper wasn’t really a bellwether for its industry.

After that we had two quick hits, namely Natasha’s

look at how tech internships cancellations are impacting our future workforce,

and the latest from Slack

.

And that wraps up what felt like a refreshing show. We hope you think so too, and thank you for listening. Stay healthy, all.

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 AM PT and Friday at 6:00 am PT, so subscribe to us on

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and all the casts.

1. What do you call a check from Sequoia? A cheque!