el producto #275 🚀
WhatsApp Communitites, Oculus marketplace sales and Horizon 47.5% commission (!!), Ethereum 2.0, Elon Musk vs Twitter, Web3 and the future of internet & more
🎰 The week in figures
$43B: Elon Musk has offered to buy all of Twitter’s outstanding stock and take it private in a deal worth ~$43B; Musk would pay $54.20/share, a ~14% premium over Twitter’s price as of 10:30AM ET Thursday morning; Twitter’s Board of Directors voted unanimously to adopt a limited duration shareholder rights plan, often referred to as a “poison pill;” under the plan, if any individual or group acquires 15% or more ownership of Twitter’s outstanding common stock without the board’s approval, other shareholders will be allowed to purchase additional shares at a discount
$2B: Fortnite-maker Epic raises $2B at a nearly $32B valuation to build its kid-friendly metaverse; Epic revealed that it’s partnering with Lego to build a metaverse aimed at kids
$1B: Meta released its VR sales figures: the Quest marketplace has crossed over $1B in all-time sales in February; 124 apps earned more than $1M in yearly revenue, 8 earned more than $20M; Meta has over 350 games on the store
$925M: Stripe, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify, and McKinsey have pledged a combined $925M to purchase carbon-capture technologies from now through 2030; the companies backed Stripe’s Frontier, an initiative that's meant to build momentum and spur new technologies for the carbon capture market. Individuals can also contribute towards the Frontier fund through the Yayzy app, which offers it as one of their new offset options - Disclaimer: I am currently CPO at Yayzy
$350M: Ava Labs, a crypto startup and the lead developer of the Avalanche blockchain, is raising $350M at a $5.2B valuation; Avalanche competes with Ethereum and Solana by offering high speeds and low gas fees, and has 250 active apps
$200M: Salsify, a Boston-based startup selling e-commerce optimization software, raised a $200M Series F at a $2B valuation; Salsify generated $110M of ARR in 2021 and has 1200 customers including Coca-Cola and KraftHeinz
$180M: Swiggy has led a $180M financing round into bike taxi startup Rapido as the Indian food delivery giant looks to broaden its fleet network across the country; Rapido’s Series D round values the company at $800M
$175M: Wagestream, a UK-based startup that offers financial services geared towards hourly-workers, has raised a $175M Series C; Wagestream charges businesses to provide its services to employees
$108M: Legal case management platform Filevine raised a $108M Series D; Filevine claims 50K end-users across firms like Margolis Edelstein, Baker Hosteler and Kirton McConkie; the startup allows legal firms to create automated workflows, collaborate on documents and manage deadlines and data
$86.7M: Crypto buying platform MoonPay raised a $86.7M at a $3.4B valuation from celebrity investors, bringing total funding to over $630M; Moonpay says it has processed nearly $3B in transactions from 10M customers; Moonpay has employed a celebrity tweet marketing strategy where influencers thank Moonpay after buying their first NFT; new investors include Justin Bieber, Gwyneth Paltrow, Snoop Dogg, Parish Hilton, Steve Aoki, and Ashton Kutcher
47.5%: Meta will take a 47.5% commission on each transaction made on its virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds; Meta said it will impose a 30% “hardware platform fee” and a 17.5% fee for using Horizon Worlds
📰 What’s going on
Meta is planning to bring its Horizon Worlds social metaverse platform to the web; being available on the web would mark a major expansion for the platform, which is currently only available on its Quest VR headsets
Meta wants to release its first full augmented reality glasses in 2024, according to a product roadmap detailed by The Verge; the glasses are considered part of Mark Zuckerberg's pivot toward the metaverse and related hardware as the company moves away from its beginnings as a social media platform
WhatsApp will start testing Communities, a way for people to bundle common group chats into a larger umbrella to better organize conversations; for example, group chats linked to a school could create an overarching Community for parents and maintain smaller discussion groups based on things like classes and sports; testing will begin in the coming weeks, with a global rollout to follow; also, WhatsApp users will be able to share files up to 2GB and the group voice call limit will increase from 8 to 32 users
Sony and Apple may have delayed launching their respective virtual-reality headsets to early 2023, according to supply-chain analysts; shipments of VR displays are expected to rise over 50% in 2022
Apple updated its iMovie app with new features, Storyboards and Magic Movie; Storyboards offer users pre-made templates for popular types of videos shared on social, with colleagues or with classmates, while Magic Movie instantly creates a video from the clips and photos a user selects, automatically adding transitions, effects and music to the edit
Apple’s iOS 16 beta included references in the code that seem to point to the long-rumored Mixed Reality (AR/VR) headset Apple has under development; the beta also points to possible notifications changes, health-tracking features and possibly a new multitasking interface for iPad
Snapchat is rolling out a new product that aims to make it easier for news publishers to upload their content in real time as stories break; more than 40 news publishers from around the world will begin using a new feature called Dynamic Stories that lets them publish stories to Snapchat using RSS feeds
Twitter acquires Dublin-based mobile engagement platform OpenBack to enhance push notifications; OpenBack is a platform that aims to make apps more engaging through device-side control of push notifications; OpenBack makes it easier for mobile apps to process data on-device without needing to go through a third-party server, unlike conventional push notification SDKs
Spotify rebranded its companion app Spotify Greenroom as Spotify Live and integrated its live audio capabilities directly into its main streaming app, minus the interactive features; only select creators from Spotify’s originals will be able to go live in the main app; independent creators will still be able to stream in Spotify Live, however
Google quietly launched its awaited “Switch to Android” mobile app for iOS that helps users transfer their contacts, calendar, photos and videos from their iPhone to a new Android device; the app is not yet discoverable in the App Store
Zoom unveiled a product that uses AI to analyze video call transcripts and deliver insights to sales teams: the product, Zoom IQ for Sales, automatically provides metrics and feedback from video sales meetings that could help close deals
TikTok is testing a private "dislike" button that would allow users to flag comments they consider "irrelevant or inappropriate;” the dislike would only be visible to the person who registered it, and won't be shared with the person who posted the comment
TikTok's Augmented Reality development tools are now available to all users; TikTok creators can visit the company's Effect House to find the tools and instructions required to generate AR camera effects
Privacy-centric search engine DuckDuckGo has launched its first desktop browser for Mac in beta; the company intends to follow up with a Windows version due out before the end of the year
📚 Good reads
The Marketplace 100. future (a16z) shared the Marketplace 100, an annual list of the top private consumer marketplaces measured on a marketplace activity score for each company that includes GMV, data for app performance and website traffic
13 U.S.-based tech companies hiring international talent. In order for a U.S.-based company to hire foreign workers, it needs to sponsor their petition for an H1-B visa, a specialty visa for jobs requiring a bachelor’s degree or equivalent which lets them work in the country for up to 6 years. Each year, 85k candidates are awarded visas according to a lottery system. While the visa isn’t guaranteed, many top companies are leveraging the program to employ international talent. The companies include: Tripactions, Niantic, Reddit, Brex, Instacart, Databricks and Stripe
OnlyFans growth story, by Top of the Lyne. What SaaS can learn from a company that boasts 150M users, 1.5M creators, and an estimated $2B+ in net revenue
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released his first annual shareholder lettersince succeeding Jeff Bezos in July 2021. Jassy highlighted Amazon’s tremendous growth in the last 2 years, fueled mainly by the pandemic and the resulting change in both consumer and business behaviors. He noted that Amazon spent the first 25 years building a vast fulfillment network and then doubled it to meet customer demand in the last 24 months
Figuring out an input metric for Partnership Ecosystem Health. Very interesting experiment at Glovo to set up an input metric for Partner health (reduction of churn) involving the use of the Gini coefficient and a quite advanced mastery of statistics
Chris Dixon thinks web3 is the future of the internet - is it? Q&A with Chris Dixon on a16z's structure, the energy impact of blockchains, centralization in Web3, NFTs, investing in Yuga Labs at a $4B valuation, and more
Bootstrapping user-owned Networks with Web3. In this essay, Simone Cicero covers:
What are the possibilities that web3, tokenomics, and the adoption of blockchain technology are enabling for founders
What are the steps to funding, and then transitioning the network ownership to the users
Why and how should founders look into these possibilities
[Podcast + transcript] The value of ambiguity in Product by Airbnb Product Lead.Victoria Ku balances a full-time job, side projects, and motherhood. Here's how she lives her Product philosophy and avoids burnout
Product School presents The Future of Product Management Report, based on +5k PM surveys
🔮 Emerging trends
Ethereum, the blockchain running the world’s second most valuable cryptocurrency, is finally taking its next big step toward Ethereum 2.0, a major upgrade to a different technology that will have big implications for miners, software developers, and climate advocates
Developers this week started testing the new mechanism for verifying blockchain transactions, known as proof of stake, through a “shadow fork” or test version of the network. The Merge, as the switchover is being called, will change how the network is run and who makes money off of it, and will dramatically reduce its energy use. Full switch could come in fall (previously expected in June)
It will be a big period of transition for the Ethereum community. One interesting question is what happens to Ethereum miners. The Merge is no secret to them. Some are squirreling away ether with plans to stake it and become validators; others are mining as long as they can, hoping that rivals might drop away and make their work more valuable in the run-up to the Merge
The Czech metaverse company Somnium Space will introduce a "Live Forever" mode so that users can interact with loved ones after they've passed away. Artur Sychov, CEO and Founder, says the feature should launch next year. More:
The Live Forever mode will allow people to be "reborn" after death as avatars in the metaverse
The project will rely on various data metrics that many people may not feel comfortable sharing with tech companies, including one's voice, likeness, and mannerisms
In response to privacy concerns regarding the amount of data required to recreate a person's likeness, Sychov told Vice, "We don't want to know your name. We don't care about who you are"
Sychov explains he needs this data so that people interacting with the Live Forever avatar feel that the virtual re-creation is authentic rather than AI
Sychov's goal is for the interaction to feel real for at least 10 minutes — "you would not know that it's actually AI. That's the goal"
Sychov came up with the idea after losing his father to cancer
Built on the Ethereum blockchain, Somnium Space is available on various VR headsets
Have a great week ahead!
Angel
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