Wiz walks, Spotify impresses, and should VCs rotate back to SaaS?

Welcome to Cautious Optimism, a newsletter on tech, business, and power. Modestly upbeat.

The Rundown

• 📈 Trending Up: Cookies … spot Ether ETFs … Cruise … Apple-India … Aramco investing in chips? (BG) … Kamala-mentum … VCs for democracy … capital gains tax in India …

• 📉 Trending Down: Inflation … scraping journalism … CrowdStrike stock, down 30% in the last month … China’s participation in international supercomputing … climate change honesty …

• 🤔 What Else?

  • Aviato: I worked at Crunchbase for years and own stock in the company from my time there. But that doesn’t mean I am too partisan. I also love PitchBook, YCharts, and private-market data sources. Now, there’s a new entrant — Aviato. More focused on data analysis than ingestion, the company wants to build a VC database that TechCrunch describes as an “analytical platform for private market data.”

    • Hell yeah. I can’t wait to give this a spin. The company just raised $2.3 million to boot.

    • Elsewhere: Crunchbase CPO Megh Gautam dropped notes this week on where Crunchbase is going with AI and its own dataset. Surprise! Aviato won’t be alone in chasing the goal of building intelligence atop private-market data.

  • Spotify: Price hikes aren’t slowing Spotify down. The music streaming giant posted 14% monthly active user growth (under guidance), 12% growth in paid subscribers (ahead of expectations), revenue growth of 20% (ahead of expectations), and improved gross margins (29.2%, ahead of expectations) to boot.

    • Shares of Spotify are up 14% in pre-market trading.

  • What matters in Spotify’s earnings is that price increases and cost cuts have greatly bolstered profitability. To wit:

Check that free cash flow number at the bottom! Layoffs are often mocked as short-term sweeteners that help companies post better-than-expected results now at the expense of growth later. Maybe. But damn, they really can boost results in the near future, especially when coupled with rising prices.

Wiz walks

Wiz, the cybersecurity startup that has grown rapidly, has walked from offers to sell. Recall that Google was widely reported to be deep in conversations with Wiz to snap up the young company for as much as $23 billion. Wiz last raised at a $12 billion valuation.