Equity Monday: Vaccine news scrambles the stock market, shakes up startups

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

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode that we wound up titling “Fortnite is actually a SaaS company.”

It makes sense in context, I promise.

Anyway, here’s what’s on today’s show:

• Joe Biden was elected president and the stock market is not mad about divided government.
• Positive vaccine news sent many stocks sharply higher this morning, but not all. Some pandemic-favored tech companies instantly dropped double-digit percentage points of value.
• Esign raised $151 million, showing strength in the Chinese startup market, and the e-signature space.
• And this neat Series B for Cellwize caught our attention this morning.
• Finally, a warning. The stuff that is changing lately may begin to change a bit less. We’ve lived in the pandemic economy long enough now that it’s hard to recall what life was like before. But, we’d best start remembering, as there’s a lot that is going to change in the next few quarters.

This has been a wild day to start the week, but with good news.

I suppose a vaccine was always going to eventually make it to this step, but, that said, the United States is seeing record COVID-19 cases today. So mask up and let’s get as many of us across the line as we can.

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