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

We have a special episode this week. Instead of our regular lineup, we got Alex on the phone with an IPO expert to dig into the year's IPO cycle both at home and abroad. Helping with the effort was James Clark, the Head of Tech and Lifesciences, Primary Markets at the London Stock Exchange.

That means we had IPO fans from both the US and across the pond to kick into what has happened thus far in 2019, and what's coming around both in Q4 and in 2020.

We touched on a few topics, including the declining popularity of startups that don't make money, the strength of software companies' debuts (Datadog, CrowdStrike, for example), and a little bit on direct listings (they have a different name in the UK, it turns out).

We're now into the fourth quarter of 2020, and some companies have done better than expected (Beyond Meat), while others have done worse (Uber and Lyft). It's been fun, and, fingers crossed, we won't run short of more fodder in the coming months!