Hello, and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

This week we recorded at Early Stage, TechCrunch’s event for founders who are building startups from the ground up.

Sadly, our dear friend Natasha Mascarenhas took ill, and we had to lean on Alex for the episode. Happily, though, Darrell from the TechCrunch team was sitting next to us on the show floor so we tagged him in for some rocket knowledge.

Anyhoo, here’s the run of show!

• All things Early Stage: Notes from the show floor, what we can infer about attendance and a vibe check.
• Elon’s new, larger rocket went up (very good) and then went “boom” (not as good). Happily for the space race, the overall result of the launch was good. Rockets have a tendency to go boom when they are new, and it’s a bit of the, well, testing process to have them do so. Sure, a non-boom result would have been better, but SpaceX wasn’t planning on trying to reuse the parts anyway.
• Tesla’s earnings came out and investors are not that pleased. While there was some good stuff in the numerical set, price cuts at the company and moderating cash flow indicate that profitability gains could be harder to reach in the future.
• And layoffs. Meta is cutting staff. Insider is cutting staff. BuzzFeed is cutting staff. It’s a mess out there.

We are back at full strength next week — and no longer on the road — so expect regular service to resume. Hugs!

For episode transcripts and more, head to Equity’s Simplecast website.