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

I'm joined today by Senior Tech Ranch reporter on the FinTech Beat. It's Marianne

as a veto. Mary Ann before we tell folks what we're doing today, how are you?

I'm doing good Alex. I'm excited to be doing this with you. This is going to be so

much fun. You're very, very kind.

Today we are taking a first of two looks back at 2023.

It has been a big year, very busy, lots of major news events for us to crunch upon, and so we are going to go back and touch

on some key themes from this year. I hope you're on vacation and you're sitting back and you're

relaxing and you can take a little journey down memory lane with us Marianne so what's on the agenda?

Well we're going to talk about venture funding or a lack thereof.

Fair enough. Yeah and then we're going to dig a little bit into FinTech and what happened there, it's ups and downs, and then we'll assess the creator economy.

Yes, and we'll even at the end touch a little bit on AI and what I'm calling the

return of Key Person Syndrome and just in case you were saying to yourself but what about

AI why isn't this whole show just about AI well we do have a second look back coming in and that will involve both

crypto with our own Jackie Melanick and also AI with Devon Coldway also from Tech Runches.

So we have more coming. This is more the Alex and Mary Ann talked through the biggest things that they recall from this year because we wanted to chew it over with you before we say goodbye to 2023, which, Marianne, I gotta say, much more busy than I expected it to be given where we were, you know, this time last year.

Yeah, I agree. It was more busy and it was just, I felt like it was a very turbulent year.

So many ups and downs and so many we had a couple of big

stories that gave us whiplash besides open AI right we had the CVB collapse so I felt like

we were just constantly up and down up and down and trying to keep up with everything.

Yeah, absolutely and so I want to start with the venture capital of data because it's so kind of core to what we talk about on the show, but there's two ways to think about this. One is what happened this year on a quarter by quarter basis, and then the other way is how does that compare to the year before?

So, Marianne, I'm going to start saying numbers, and when you think I've said too many just

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