el producto #278 🚀
PM daily routines, Big tech Q1 results, Coinbase NFTs, Monetizing Instagram's Reels, The future of Search, WhatsApp reactions, Engineer career paths, Cognitive bias & more
🎰 The week in figures
$7.14B: Elon Musk has secured about $7.14B in new funding from a group of 19 investors to back his Twitter acquisition; investors include Sequoia Capital, Binance, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, Andreessen Horowitz, Qatar Holding, and Fidelity Investments. Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who tweeted his rejection of Musk’s $54.20 a share buyout offer last month, has pledged to commit his ~35M Twitter shares worth about $1.7B to retain an investment in the company
$2.1B: Shopify announced plans to acquire ecommerce delivery fulfillment network Deliverr for $2.1B
$320M: Yuga Labs (Bored Ape Yacht Club creator’s) sold deeds to virtual land for its in-development metaverse project Otherside over the weekend, raising around $320M while also seeing users incur over $100M in gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain; the virtual lands was sold as 55K new NFTs at $7K each; all purchases were made in ApeCoin (APE); due to the size of this NFT mint, Ethereum gas fees rose more than 10X typical levels and cost buyers ~$176M
$196M: Mobile device management platform Mosyle raised $196M in Series B; the company provides a unified solution with device management, security, internet privacy, identity management, and application management features for Apple devices; Mosyle has witnessed a triple-digit revenue growth since 2020 and has garnered over 32k enterprise customers to date
$142M: Neo Financial raised $142.2M Series C at $784.8M valuation; the Canada-based company provides banking, credit cards, buy-now-pay-later, investing, and rewards services; since its founding in 2019, Neo has amassed over 1M customers and has partnered with Hudson’s Bay, Home Depot, Boston Pizza, and over 7,000 other national retailers
$111M: Chilean fintech company Xepelin has raised $111M Series B; Zeppelin offers a B2B SaaS payments infrastructure; it has expanded its client count to 15k and has grown its Mexico revenue by 60 times
$50M: Indian neobank Open raised a $50M Series D at a $1B valuation; Open serves SMBs by providing digital banking, payments, invoicing, and automated bookkeeping services; this is India’s 16th unicorn this year, following 44 in 2021
$50M: consumers spent ~$50M daily on NFTs in March, down from $100M per day in January; NFT sales in Q1 were $8B, up from $2B in the same quarter a year ago
10.07%: Microsoft Edge has passed Apple Safari as the second most used desktop web browser (10.07% vs. 9.61%); Google Chrome remains the desktop leader with 66.64% market share; in mobile, Chrome leads with 63.57% followed by Safari’s 24.82%
💰 Q1 financials
Airbnb: revenue was $1.51B (up 70% y/y); net loss of $19M (shrunk 98%); total nights and experiences were 102.1M (up 59% y/y); CEO Brian Chesky said the company will introduce its biggest change in a decade on May 11
Ebay: revenue fell by 5% YoY in Q1 to $2.5B; net loss of $1.3B, compared to the $641M net income it recorded in Q1 2021; GMV fell by 20% YoY to $19.4B; active buyer base fell by 13% YoY to 142M
Etsy: Q1 revenue was up 5.2% YoY to $579.3M; net income fell by 40% YoY TO $86.1M; active buyer base increased 4.9% YoY to 95.1M; active seller base rose by 62.8% YoY to 7.7M
Lyft: revenue of $875.6M (up 44% y/y); net loss of $196.9M (shrinking 53% y/y); Lyft’s active riders were 17.8M (missed expectations by 200K); sales and marketing was Lyft’s fastest-growing cost (up ~61% y/y), analysts were concerned by Lyft’s driver retention costs
Match Group: revenue of $799M (up 20% y/y); operating income of $208M (up 10% y/y); global payers increased 13% y/y
Shopify: revenue was $1.2B (up 22% y/y); GMV was $43.2B (up 16% y/y);
Uber: $6.85B of revenue (up 136% y/y); net loss of $5.9B, mainly driven by Uber’s Grab, Aurora, and Didi investments; Monthly Active Platform Consumers were 115M (up 17% y/y, down 3% q/q)
📰 What’s going on
Coinbase NFT launched publicly after a two-week beta period; the platform enables social media functionality, allowing users to follow each other, comment on NFTs, and discover trending collections; Coinbase's NFT marketplace less than 2k users (at the time of sending the newsletter) after fewer than 150 people joined the platform on the first day it was open to the public; there were $75k worth of transactions on its first day (Wednesday), which is significantly less than the $177.2M that was traded on OpenSea that same day; OpenSea has +1.65M users, the most of any NFT marketplace
Twitter is allowing a few users to test Twitter Circle, a feature designed to share Tweets with a smaller audience; users can share content with up to 150 people rather than publicly, similarly to the Close Friends story feature on Instagram
Twitter's open source social network unit Bluesky released “Authenticated Data Experiment” (ADX) to developers for testing; ADX enables a personal data server and a command-line client; this will use cryptographic hashes to allow users to self-authenticate
Meta is experimenting with new creator-focused tools to help users monetize content on Instagram Reels; the platform's "Reels Play bonus program" will award $20 per five Reels topping 100 views; the bonus program will reset every 30 day; the company is also rethinking Instagram's interface to include a full-screen home feed
Meta will sunset its podcast business and remove them altogether by June 3; impacted features include its short-form audio product Soundbites and its central audio hub; Meta told creators that it doesn’t plan on alerting users that podcasts will no longer be available
Meta will slow the pace of hiring this year as it faces lower-than-expected revenue growth, according to an internal memo; the company is impacted by Apple's data-privacy changes, an industry-wide downturn, and a loss of revenue in Russia following the Ukraine invasion; in the memo, CFO David Wehner said the company is readjusting its growth targets in the second half of 2022, which will impact its hiring goals for nearly every team in the company; Meta will slow down or freeze hiring for most senior and mid-level positions; it's also suspended the hiring of entry-level engineering roles
According to recently leaked documents from Meta's Reality Labs, the company's latest "high-end" virtual reality headset codenamed "Project Cambria" should be available for purchase as early as September 2022; the internal documents describe the headset as a "future of work device" and a "laptop for your face"
WhatsApp is rolling out the ability to react to specific messages with emojis, similar to reactions on Facebook and Slack; the first emojis are 👍❤️😂😮😢🙏, though WhatsApp owner Meta said it expects to add more in the future
Spotify launched “Spotify Island” on Roblox’s gaming platform; when visiting the digital island users embark on quests, buy digital merchandise and unlock exclusive content; Spotify said it has 2.2M gaming-related user generated playlists on its music streaming platform
Apple, Google, and Microsoft announced plans to support passwordless logins for websites and apps; the tech giants made a joint commitment to expand support for a “passwordless” sign-in standard developed by the FIDO Alliance and World Wide Web Consortium
Microsoft's and Volkswagen's partnership has resulted in a new HoloLens 2 feature that allows the headset to be worn on the road; the so-called "moving platform" uses data from the headset's cameras and an inertial measurement unit to acclimate the VR technology to a simultaneously static and moving space, like a car
Google could release its first foldable Pixel phone as early as Q4 2022; the long-rumored foldable phone, previously thought to be canceled, could be called the Pixel Notepad and have an outer display of 5.8 inches
Stripe announced Financial Connections, which will give Stripe’s customers a way to connect directly to their customer’s bank accounts, to access financial data to speed up or run certain kinds of transactions
Kraken, a cryptocurrency exchange, will launch an NFT marketplace with a promise to subsidize Ethereum transaction fees for its users; no details disclosed; an NFT marketplace that offers zero fees seems like a good strategy for growth and user acquisition, as the platform can potentially attract more users in a short time
Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that runs Wikipedia, announced that it will no longer accept crypto donations, citing environmental concerns; the community voted against accepting crypto donations after a three-month-long deliberation period, with 71% of its members opposing donations in crypto. Complement with this interesting rebuttal letter to the EPA refuting House Democrats’ call to investigate the environmental effects of crypto mining; co-authors included Jack Dorsey, FSInsight’s Tom Lee, and MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor
EU Antitrust investigators preliminarily found that Apple violated EU law after restricting other apps from using its NFC chip; only Apple Pay has access to NFC capability; the NFC-restrictions give Apple Pay an advantage over third-party mobile wallets
📚 Good reads
From good to great PMs: daily routines, by Gibson Biddle. “Begin your day with intent, minimize meetings, spend time with customers, manage your own career, balance time between doing/thinking, plus some other good habits (don’t watch TV!)“
Tools of the trade: The tools and processes used for discovery at Pendo, by Product Talk
10 cognitive biases that shape our world. Being aware of our cognitive biases helps to recognize their power in shaping our thoughts, opinions, attitudes and the decisions we make, which is extremely important for PMs. This is a great intro onto the topic, and a good refresher for the ones already familiar with cognitive biases and heuristics
The future of Search is boutique. A nice analysis of the current “curated search” trends. “The project of human knowledge, as it stands today, is a vast ocean of ephemeral and fragmented information and ideas, with the best sources near-impossible to find. We need more interfaces with a point of view on what information is missing, how it needs to be organized, and at what point of the value chain the curation has to happen“
Why this ad made me stop scrolling? The psychology behind great social media ads. Another great and fun visual study by the folks at Growth.Design
How to chart your engineering career path - IC, Manager or Technical Founder? Although this article is aimed for engineering professionals, it’s a great read for PMs. I shared it with my dev teams (share it with yours too, they will appreciate it!), together with a brief summary including the following quotes:
Engineering doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Who are you actually building for? Reduce the feedback loop as much as possible. Literally, go find your user, sit next to them and see what they’re doing. Become steeped in the problem
You have to be incredibly excited about the mission — not just the product you’re building. Are you committed to tackling the problem? In the early days, the product can change so much. You don’t want to get too caught up in excitement about a particular solution or technical challenge
Anticipate and address the FAQs. Whether you’re writing a doc, an email or an announcement, you’ve got to anticipate what questions might come up. You can even ask folks around you what their own questions are about your project. When you force people to go through that thought exercise, they start to put themselves in the shoes of whoever is reading the email or the customer update.
We want to be world-class Olympic athletes in what we do — and we need brutally honest feedback to get there
Patrick Collison built this relentless culture of questioning what we were doing and whether it was the highest impact thing,…we talk internally about debating without ego. It’s not about being prideful or defending something just because it’s your idea. But we want folks to speak their mind without being afraid of being seen as ‘not nice’. Sometimes you need to narrow down what you’re actually disagreeing on. Maybe one of us is missing context or information, or we’ve misunderstood what the goal was supposed to be. It’s about maintaining mutual respect and high trust for one another, even when you disagree
🔮 Emerging trends
Are NFTs the future of subscriptions? NFT memberships can let fans share in the upside and let creators target multiple fan willingness to pay
A new research paper entitled "Holographic Glasses for Virtual Reality" unveiled new possibilities for lightweight, thin, near-eye VR glasses. The article was written and researched by collaborating scientists at Stanford and NVIDIA. The collaboration resulted in an ultra-thin, 2.5mm-thick pair of holographic glasses. The glasses are over 3x as thin as Meta Reality Labs' thinnest pair (9mm). More:
The near-eye technology uses spatial light monitors to visualize holographic and flat images directly in front of the user's eyes
Stanford and NVIDIA's prototype is also far more lightweight, having solved the "vergence-accommodation" issue, which requires many VR headsets to set a comfortable distance between the wearer's eyes and the lens
However, the current prototype has a limited field of view with a shrunken 2.3mm eye box
The paper recognizes this limitation but argues the researchers have discovered how to widen the box to 8mm
Have a great weekend!
Angel
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