Why Box is one of the most underappreciated companies
Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's venture capital-focused podcast, where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.
This week, we recorded on location at TechCrunch Sessions: Enterprise in San Francisco, a show that saw talks from Box's Aaron Levie, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar and venture capitalists Maha Ibrahim, Rebecca Lynn and Jason Green. The latter, the founder of Emergence Capital, joined us before his panel for a special episode of Equity focused almost entirely on enterprise tech. Danny Crichton, the esteemed leader of TechCrunch's Extra Crunch, was on hand to co-lead the episode with Kate.
Before we jumped too deep into the enterprise pool, we had to review some news from one of the most-talked about companies. The co-working giant, legally known as The We Company, is said to have halved its IPO exceptions to a minuscule $20 billion! OK, that's not really that small, but compared to its most recent valuation of $47 billion, we're a bit shocked.
Next, we ran through the IPO pipeline. Cloudflare is expected to go public next Friday. Datadog will come after that. WeWork is reportedly kicking off its roadshow next week, but given this week's reports, that could be delayed.
After that, Green gave us his take on Box, the file sharing business in which he was an early investor. If you haven't heard, activist investor Starboard Value took a 7.5% stake in the business this week. Green explains what that means and what he think is next for the company. Levie, of course, spoke onstage at the enterprise event. In short, the executive said his goal is to continue building a sustainable business.
Finally, we dove into the latest trends in startups. Enterprise still isn't sexy, but it's much sexier than it has been in the past. Why? Because all the enterprise startups want to build consumer-friendly tools. Tune in to hear what Green thinks of the consumerization of the enterprise and all the startup madness.
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