How to blow through capital at an incredible rate

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

It was yet another jam-packed week full of big news, IPO happenings, and venture activity. As always we’ve done our best to deliver the gist on what’s been going on. We had

Alex Wilhelm

and Danny Crichton

on hand to handle it all, which went medium-good. In other Equity news, we’re back with guests over the next few weeks, so if you miss us having a venture capitalist along for the ride, fear not, their return is just around the corner.

Up top this week was Jon Shieber’s

report

that Kleiner Perkins has rapidly deployed its most recent fund, a $600 million vehicle. While the news felt surprising, digging back through our archives

we were reminded that the firm had indicated it might put its capital to work quickly. Still, as Danny pointed out, it’s rare that venture capitalists have to go our raising from LPs on an annual basis.

Kleiner Perkins has already blown through much of the $600 million it raised last year

After that, we turned to some funding rounds that held our attention, including

the Free Agency round

that is working to bring talent management to the technology industry similar to the sports and entertainment worlds.

Free Agency wants to give every tech worker a career and salary boost

The concept makes some sense as compensation packages for top talent in the industry can extend into the seven-figures (Free Agency takes a 5-10% cut of an employee’s income using the increasingly popular

income-share agreements

). Also this round felt a bit like a reminder that the labor market is tight at the moment.

How income share agreements will spark the rise of career accelerators

We then moved on to

Josh Constine’s story

about “Ring for enterprise” startup Verkada, which raised a massive $80 million round at a $1.6 billion valuation. That’s eye popping, since the extremely small dilution implied with those numbers (5%) is very rare in the venture world.

Verkada raises $80M at $1.6B to be every building’s security OS

After that we turned to a few rounds that Alex has had his eye on, namely the

somewhat-recent Insurify round

, the pretty-recent Gabi round

, and the most-recent Policygenius. All told they sum to $150 million, which made us ask the question, why are venture capitalists so into insurance marketplace startups?

Finally, we touched on the latest from the

intra-SoftBank delivery war

between DoorDash and Uber Eats, including who is impacted, and what it means for future consolidation in the on-demand world. Or more precisely, why hasn’t there been more?

Finally, don’t forget

that IPO season is upon us

. Are you caught up

?

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