Equity Monday: Circuit breakers, Seed rounds, and startup valuations

Good morning friends, and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a short-form audio hit to kickstart your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re not changing the main show. (Here’s last week’s episode with Danny Crichton in which we took a look at the new Kleiner fund.)

This morning was more of the same. More COVID-19 bad news and stock market worry. But this weekend saw other, new issues, like a collapse in oil prices and record low yields in Treasuries. What happens when all U.S. government notes yield less than 1%? We’re about to find out.

For us this morning what matters is that COVID-19 is still spreading, the global stock markets are still falling, and domestic equities are about to get hit hard, if pre-market trading is any indication. Currently stocks are flashing about 5% losses as we write to you.

Skipping the show’s order, here’s what on our minds this morning:

• What happens to private market valuations now as the public market continues to reprice? When does sentiment shift?
• What happens when startups pull back spend and hunt for slower, but more efficient growth?
• Finally, what happens to all the companies looking to go public? Like Asana (more here), Procore (notes here), Accolade (our coverage), not to mention Postmates, DoorDash (read this), and Airbnb (more here). Currently, it looks like we could jet into Q2 2020 with two venture-backed, non-biotech IPOs under our belts.

Finally on the show, we did get to mention Seed rounds for Airmeet, Sama, and Vivoo. Those, at least, brought a little bit of optimism to the day.

More soon, and stay informed this week. It’s a good time to stay abreast of the news.