Since the birth of Equity in mid-March of 2017, Chris Gates has been part of the team. Indeed, he helped found the show, and over the next half-decade produced and edited hundreds of episodes. He was, in short, a pillar of the team, and a key driver of how show operated day to day. Which is to say that he brought kindness, and warmth, and care to our work. As one of our colleagues put it, TechCrunch's podcast history can't be written without his name as a huge part of it.

Sadly for the Equity team, but equally good news for his new employer, Chris's last day was last Friday. So we gathered to record a special episode of sorts.

Natasha, Alex, and Chris sat down and played back a number of clips from the show, including our first-every episode, the first time that Natasha was on the podcast. That sort of thing. And we said some nice things about Chris at the same time.

Technically Equity's birthday isn't for a week or two, but we decided to hybridize our look-back with Chris's exit. After all, we're an earnest team that needed a minute (or 30) to sit and be earnest.

If you are an Equity listener, don't worry too much. We still have Grace Mendenhall on the production team, so we are in good hands. And we've added Maggie Stamets in recent weeks as well, who has been doing an ace job thus far helping us write and record. Finally, Kell is helping edit our babble down into usable content.

So as with prior Equity exits -- Matthew Lynley, Katie Roof, Connie Loizos, Kate Clark, Danny Crichton -- we are hugging it out, and getting back to work.

More to come! We're not going anywhere! But we will miss Chris. A lot.

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.