This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

This week our very own Mary Ann was off -- we send her our best, as she is a living saint -- so Natasha and Alex and Grace and Chris got together to compile our news roundup. And oh boy was there a lot to corral.

Today? The issue of venture capital expectations in certain sectors where startups may not be the best fit. And what happens when they raise a mountain of capital. Natasha and Alex had former founder and present-day indie journalist Vincent Woo to come on the show with us. Why? Because he's written extensively about Lambda School, one of our subjects of the day.

Today we had a goodly bag of things to dig into, including: The FT finds that major social platforms are taking a bath thanks to Apple’s new privacy rules. But is that such a bad thing? The Chinese labor standard of ‘996’ is losing its dominance in its domestic market. The Dell-VMware spinoff has finally happened. At last. Digital Currency Group raises $700 million, Mosaic Building Group raises $44 million, and When I Work locked down $200 million of its own. Looking ahead, we have AllBirds and NerdWallet IPOs this week! Sorry that the show was late! Chat soon!

This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a host of topics from the public and private markets alike.

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Chris got together for this particular Wednesday edition of Equity, the part of the week when we niche down to a single topic and discuss it at length. This time ’round we tackled the very small of whether today’s pace of venture capital investment is sustainable, and whether the current structure of venture capital funds will survive. It was the right time to do so, given that:

Hark, all ye who pay attention to the stock market, for Elon Musk's wheels-focused company broached the $1 trillion market cap threshold today.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

This week Mary Ann and Natasha and Alex (along with our amazing production team Grace, Chris, and Kell) took on a bevy of topics from around the world of startups and technology more broadly.

Look, we don't get it either. Taking some time as a group to sit around and chat through the possibly impending PayPal-Pinterest deal, Natasha and Alex didn't wind up cracking the story. Which makes some sense, as investors sent PayPal stock down 5% on the news, implying that they didn't really get it either.

Natasha and Danny and Alex got together to dig into the recent NerdWallet IPO filing, and what it can tell us about how the written word -- in its digital form -- can still be worth quite a lot. Here's an outline of the chat:

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

In today’s episode, talk our way through some big breaking news from the technology world so that we can better understand just what is going on. Danny and Alex got together late Friday on a Twitter Space to discuss Microsoft’s decision to pull LinkedIn from the Chinese market, a move that lit up headlines around the world. That LinkedIn was still in China in 2021 may feel more surprising than the news that it will exit that particular market, but the moment matters all the same as it marks the end of an experiment — could a mega-tech company have a US HQ and a first-party service live in China?

This week was one of our strongest shows yet, with a wide diversity of news items that were genuinely fun (and complicated) to chew through. And even though we started off kind of grumpy, we laughed through tech difficulties, crypto puns, and fintech CAC. It's called coping. Here's what we got into:

This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Fashion.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week with Grace on the dials, which meant that we had a flat lovely time recording Equity for you. Of course, Equity is TechCrunch's venture capital focused podcast where we dig into the most critical funding rounds, and natter about the key news items impacting startups.

Hello and welcome back to Equity. This is our Wednesday show, the time of the week when we niche down to a single topic. Today? Gaming.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

Hello friends and welcome to bonus Equity, the sort of podcast episode where you get even more chat for the same low price of zilch. We are here to ensure a high ROI for your podcasting dollar! To cap the week off, Danny and Alex and Chris got together live on Twitter to chat through the demise of the Zoom-Five9 deal. Those of you who remember how recently the deal was announced are likely a little surprised -- how did it fall apart so quickly? Well, a few reasons: There could be inherent risk in all-stock transactions provided a rapidly-changing market. It may be the case that Zoom simply did not bid enough for Five9. And there's a mix of anti-trust and national regulatory issues to the deal that never got fully hammered out.

Natasha and Mary Ann and Alex were all aboard this week under the guidance of Chris and Grace, meaning that we were running full-strength for our roundup of this super busy week. Before we hop into the topics, you can follow the show on Twitter — all the cool kids do! — and keep in mind that on Mondays Equity provides a short kickoff to the week, we chat a single topic on Wednesdays, and Fridays are when we go through the full week. Make sense? Hell yeah:

We got the crew together — Natasha and Danny and Alex — this time 'round to talk fraud, one of our favorite topics. There's been a raft of fraud lately which caught our eye. The heart of today's episode is a question about fraud, and what more of it might mean: Does more fraud indicate that we're in a growing bubble, or that we're in the later-stages of a bubble about to burst?

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets.

And the winner of TC's Startup Battlefield is.... gonna have to listen to find out

Today we got the gang together -- Natasha and Danny and Alex -- to chat about the most recent IPOs in tech-land, namely debuts from Freshworks and Toast. TechCrunch has covered their pair of firms somewhat closely during their IPO run, as they each have some notable characteristics: