The 3% gap in no-code

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

Up top the crew this week was the regular contingent: Danny Crichton, Natasha Mascarenhas and myself. As a tiny programming note, we’re going back to posting some videos on YouTube in a few weeks, so make sure to peep the TechCrunch channel if that’s your jam.

And we did a special episode on the SPAC boom, if you are into financial arcana. For more on SPACs –> here.

The Equity crew tried something new this week, namely centering our main conversation around a theme that we’re keeping tabs on: The resilience of tech during the current pandemic-led recession.

Starting with the recent economic news, it’s surprising that tech’s layoffs have slowed to a crawl. And, as we’ve recently seen, there’s still plenty of money flowing into startups, even if there are some dips present on a year-over-year basis. Why are things still pretty good for startups, and pretty good for major tech companies? We have a few ideas, like the acceleration of the digital transformation (more here, and here), and software eating the world. The latter concept, of course, is related to the former.

After that it was time to go through some neat funding rounds from the week, including:

• Dumpling raising $6.5 million to help individual shoppers build their own Instacart.
• Kibbo’s shot at making the #vanlife happen for more folks, something that we think is a good fit for the pandemic and the mobile professional.
• Sora’s $5.3 million raise for no-code HR connective tissue, something that I was rather bullish on but drew some chat about no-code itself, and if the trend is more hype than substance.

All that and I have a newsletter launching this weekend that if you read, you will automatically be 100% cooler. It’s called the TechCrunch Exchange, and you can snag it for free here.