What’s Clubhouse and why Marc wants us to build – TechCrunch

Good morning and welcome back to TechCrunch’s Equity Monday, a brief jumpstart for your week. Regular Equity episodes still drop each and every Friday morning, so if you’ve listened to the show over the years, don’t worry — we’re only adding. In fact, last week’s show (with Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas) was a blast, and you should check it out.

This morning, however, we had a lot to get through, so let’s go over the show’s rundown:

• Changes are afoot in Israel regarding employee comp and startup valuations.
• The UK is coming to the aid of its startups at a notable cost.
• Alibaba is dropping serious coin on new cloud infra, reminding us that there’s more to the world than Washington state.
• Alan, a French insurtech startup, has raised $54.4 million.
• It’s earnings week, with a number of major tech companies joining other large American companies in reporting results. Q1 2020 is whatever. What everyone wants to know is how bad the rest of the year is going to be.

And, finally, Marc’s latest essay. I should probably write about it more broadly, but as we said this morning: “Aspirational construction of the future is a concept that many people associate with America,” and demanding that we harken back to our halcyon days is no sin. That said, we’ll need to do work as a country to set the groundwork needed to make an explosion in entrepreneurship and building possible — like providing healthcare to all citizens so that folks can quit their jobs without losing care, making room for new businesses to rise.

Still, it’s good for Marc to get hyped up and mad at our current state, and he has the money to do something about it. So, let’s see what he does about it.