When the economic tide goes out, we’ll see which VCs are naked

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

This week we were back to full strength, with Danny Natasha and Alex joined by Chris to chat through the latest venture capital brouhaha. Namely whether or not venture capital is about to get shaken to its core, or if we’re really parsing some long-term economic trends that will eventually revert.

Here’s a rundown:

• Sam Lessin kicked off the Twitter conversation by positing that venture capital as we know it is kaput, with software and later-stage investing possibly seeing the most disruption.
• Both Alex and Crunchbase News posted responses to the concept, which could best be summarized as yeah, but.
• However, the point that there is a lot of non-venture money flooding into startups is both real and material, and worth chewing on. So, masticate we did, parsing which areas of startup investing might be the most winsome for the VCs we spend so very much time talking to,

The direction and future of the venture capital world has largely been lost amidst a sea of large numbers. New megarounds. New unicorns. That sort of thing. But inside the rising tide of capital available to private companies has been a mix-shift of sorts. The question is where that goes long-term. We tried to posit a few things that could happen next.

Equity is back on Friday!