A16z doesn't invest, it manifests

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. In very good Show News™, Chris is back! He's working on the next iteration of the show, something that you will be able to see starting Very Soon. Get hype!

Today though, we had a delectable dish of dynamic doings, namely news items of the following persuasion:

• Bitcoin broke the $50,000 barrier, something that we wanted to talk about. Especially in light of Coinbase's $77 billion valuation. Natasha walked us through some growth metrics, and Alex was sad that he isn't already retired. Danny remains a full-on crypto bull.
• And on the blockchain thing, Blockchain.com raised $120 million, proving that there is huge amounts of capital available for the guts-and-bolts tooling of the bitcoin world.
• Li Jin, who coined the term 'passion economy', has closed her debut $13 million fund for startups within the same category. She joined other investors in our latest survey on the creator economy's changing tides. 
• Off of $1 million in ARR, Circle has brought on $4 million in funding at a valuation north of $40 million.
• A16z invested in Stir, which helps creators manage and view their various income streams. The funding total was not disclosed, but is reportedly valuing the company, still in beta, at $100 million.
• TalkShopLive brought on new cash for live video shopping. 
• Pipe17 closed an $8 million round that caught our eye. By building a service to help smaller ecommerce operations connect their tooling to one another, the company is betting on smaller ecommerce needing pipes to link up their various software services. This reminded us of Alloy, another neat company in ecommerce automation that also recently raised money.
• From there we riffed on the software market itself, its size, and the potential for investors to loosen their rules of intra-portfolio competition.
• Public raised $220 million, OutSystems raised $150 million, and Ally.io raised $50 million.
• Finally, a wave of edtech startups is over Zoom University and hopes to create much, much better. alternative.

Credits: Equity is produced by Theresa Loconsolo with editing by Kell. Bryce Durbin is our Illustrator. We'd also like to thank the audience development team and Henry Pickavet, who manages TechCrunch audio products.

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