Memes, money and madness: 2021 in tech

Hello and welcome back to Equity, a podcast about the business of startups where we unpack the numbers and nuance behind the headlines.

It’s just about Christmas, which means you may be stuck with family at the moment. Regardless of what, if any, holidays you may celebrate, there’s good chance that there are more people around you than normal. We’re here to distract you from that.

To ensure that you get respite from Actual Human Interaction, the Equity team has prepared a look-back at the year. Big numbers? Check. Big themes? You know it. Big moments of ‘wait, that happened this year?!’ Well, we’d have it no other way.

Here’s what we have in store for you:

• High-level venture capital stats from the year, from around the world including India, Latin America, and the United States.
• The rise of memes and money: Remember the Gamestop/stonk saga? That was this year, amazingly. So too was the Robinhood IPO, the Coinbase direct listing, and a host of other related stories. Sure, by the end of the year we had moved on to other pieces of key news, but don’t forget how wild the start of 2021 was from a trading perspective.
• The crypto boom: Love it or hate it, crypto was one of the key startup themes this year. Capital raced into NFT marketplaces, crypto infra projects, new blockchains, and more. It was a gold rush, but all the gold was digital.
• A changing creator economy: We had little choice but to talk talking, to chat chatting, to yammer about yammering. Yes, we riffed on the rise and fall of Clubhouse, and the larger live-audio market. Podcasts, videos, and the creator economy as a whole were pretty big narratives this year, so we talked through what went down.
• We also touched on remote work, fintech, insurtech mistakes, media startups, and a grip of topics that you, the Equity family, sent in via Twitter.

Did we get to everything? Heck no. We didn’t even get close. But that’s because 2021 was a busy damn year. It started busy and never slowed down. What do we expect in 2022? Well, just wait for next week’s episode!