Spotify's Shift Towards Advertising Revenue and User Experience Concerns

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. You can follow the show on Twitter here. I also tweet.

A few things this morning:

• Instagram is pausing work on the kids-focused version of its social service. It claims that the product is the right thing to build, but that it wants to talk to folks about why, first. TechCrunch has more here.
• Shares of Box are up this morning, after the company endured a period of time in the wilderness.
• Google is cutting its cloud app marketplace take rate as marketplaces more broadly lose their ability to accrete economic value as middlepeople.
• Spotify is spending to advertise its advertising solution so that others can spend more money on Spotify.
• Swiss startup Frontify raises $50 million, more than double its previous round's size.
• And from Sweden, EV company Polestar may go public via a SPAC, as EV company Cake raises $60 million. Nice to see Sweden do so well in a key business category.
• Tesla is doing FSD stuff, which confuses us.
• And looking ahead, Amplitude will set a reference price this evening and direct list tomorrow. Warby Parker will set an IPO price tomorrow evening, and trade on Wednesday.

And that's that! Chat Wednesday!

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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