LinkedIn is the reason Apple made the M1 chip

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

This week was good fun not only because we had the whole team together to record, but also because we are still basking in the endless glory of our winning a Webby earlier this week. Frankly we are still shocked. But happy-shocked, like when you get a new toy and it is covered in static electricity.

Anyhoo, we had a packed show with much, much left on the floor as we tried to shoehorn the week into our time slot. Here’s what we got into:

• The world of connections: Fave raised $2.2 million to connect fandoms, Somewhere Good raised $3.75 million to build feedless micro-communities, and both Spokn ($4 million) and Spot ($5 million) are hoping to use the spoken word to connect companies and their staffs. Honestly we think that the overall connection-community world is super exciting.
• Piano, one of those startups we actually have the luck of using, raised $88 million for analytics, subscription and personalization tools. We get into why the round makes sense, and why one investor stood out more than the others.
• Corporate media: Coinbase is building out a media-ish org (Alex wrote about it here on his personal blog; Scrawler.co has more on the matter), and with TheSkimm hoping to find a corporate home and The Hustle doing the same, we had to dig into the matter. Our take is that content marketing is a response to expensive social advertising. And that it’s fine. And that it is not news.
• Shoutout Forbes and its new union effort. Well done.
• Uptrust raised $2 million, which let us talk about the venture-sized opportunity in fighting the billions of dollars wasted on useless mass incarceration.
• And then we chatted about the public markets. Monday.com’s IPO is filed, Marqeta’s IPO is filed, Squarespace’s direct listing is done, and more. It’s hectic out there for late-stage startups.

The show flew by, much like our days recently, simply because it was so fun and jam-packed with news. And we got to make jokes about our listeners and Monday.com PR timing, so what else could we ask for? Talk soon!