el producto #281 🚀
a16z and the biggest crypto fund ever, Web3 and Climate-tech at Davos, How to nail subscriptions, Tech hiring freezes and layoffs, Meta testing AR glasses & more
🎰 The week in figures
$10B: Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin, has lost about $10B of its supply in the last couple of weeks
$4.5B: a16z has raised a $4.5B fund dedicated to crypto, blockchain, and web3 startups, the largest crypto fund to date; despite the current slump in the cryptocurrency market, the firm is convinced of the sector's potential
$400M: Global HR software provider Velocity Global raised a $400M Series B; Velocity helps companies onboard and pay remote employees; the Denver-based company claims $125M of revenue last year
$200M: Subscription payments processing startup Paddle acquired ProfitWell for ~$200M of cash and equity; ProfitWell operates a similar business and is used by Canva, Masterclass and Classpass
$150M: SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2 led a $150M Series B round into livestream shopping event platform Firework; the funding valued the firm at $750M; Firework intends to use the proceeds from the funding to back strategic acquisitions, pursue research and development, and accelerate global growth with a particular focus on India; Kraft Heinz, Albertsons, Unilever, American Express, and Fresh Market are among its 900 clients; Meta Platforms, Amazon, and YouTube are large companies that have developed their proprietary live-stream shopping tools
$135M: ML data reliability assessment provider Monte Carlo raised a $135M Series D at a $1.6B valuation; customers including Airbnb, Affirm and Vimeo use to Monte Carlo to detect, resolve and prevent data issues; the San Fransisco-startup’s total funding is $236M
$108M: London-based fintech startup Modulr raised $108M Series C; the embedded payments platform for digital businesses has now raised over $180M to date but declined to disclose its valuation; founded in 2016, Modulr enables businesses to avoid having to build their own complicated payments infrastructure; with over 200 customers, including Revolut, Wagestream, Sage, and BrightPay, the firm claims to process over $126B (£100B) in transactions per year
$100M: Ethereum scaling provider StarkWare raised a $100M Series D at an $8B valuation, up 4x from $2B in November; the platform is focused on maintaining low marginal gas cost per transaction; 56.2M NFTs have been minted using the StarkWare’s StarkEx
$70M: Adan Neumann announced his new climate tech startup; Flowcarbon raised $70M led by a16z to develop its blockchain-based carbon trading tools; the company is launching a token called the Goddess Nature Token (GNT) on the Celo blockchain
14%: Turkish quick commerce startup Getir will lay off 14% (~4,480 employees) of its workforce; the company will reduce the number of discounts it offers consumers in a bid to preserve cash
10%: Klarna will lay off 10% (700 employees) of its workforce; CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski blamed the layoff on multiple factors, including inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, shifts in consumer sentiment and the stock market, and a "likely recession."
300: German instant grocery startup Gorillas to exit four markets and lay off 300 employees in a bid to focus on profitability; the decision represents a drastic change away from the company's "hyper-growth" strategy; the announcement comes on the heels of a rumored unsuccessful fresh fundraising by the company owing to the global slump in venture capital activity
250: One-click checkout software company Bolt Financial is laying off approximately 250 employees, or one third of its workforce, as part of a broader restructuring
Related to the previous, Instacart, Microsoft, Lyft and Snap announced hiring slowdowns or freezes in certain areas, but not layoffs. If you are fortunate to be in a company which is hiring, keep an eye for professionals in need departing from some of the companies listed above
Q1 results:
Baidu Q1 results: revenue was ~$4.2B (up 1% y/y); net loss was ~$131.5M, due to a ~$445.4M one-time loss on long-term investments; Baidu’s online marketing revenue decreased 4% and its cloud businesses grew 45% in the quarter
Nvidia Q1 results: total revenue was $8.29B (up 46% y/y), data center revenue was $3.75B (up 83% y/y) and gaming revenue was $3.62B (up 31%); operating income was $1.9B (down 4% y/y), net income was $1.6B (down 15%)
Zoom Q1 results: revenue was $1.07B (up 12% y/y); GAAP operating profit was $187.1M (down 17.3% y/y); GAAP net income was $113.6M (down 50% y/y); ~199K Enterprise customers (up 24% y/y)
📰 What’s going on
Meta announced the release of MyoSuite, an AI platform that can generate musculoskeletal models for use in areas like prosthetics, surgery, and avatar creation; the models can be trained to mimic movement such as rotating a key or twirling a pen
Meta employees are being deployed across London to test the company's AR smartglasses, aka "Project Aria;” testers wearing identifiable vests will wear the glasses to collect data via built-in sensors that measure the wearer's location, hand or eye movements, and other audiovisuals; Meta plans to use the collected data to create an "interoperable and secure Metaverse"
Snapchat users can now add eBay listings to their snaps and share them with their friends and family; Snap users will have to select a listing from the eBay app and click the "share" button and the "Snapchat" option; they can then create a snap and add the eBay sticker; once the recipient clicks the eBay sticker, they are taken to the listing in the eBay app
PayPal is looking to add blockchain and cryptocurrency integrations to its services; the company is also considering a launch of its own token, the PayPal Coin
Uber will test on-demand and scheduled grocery delivery as part of a partnership with Grocery Outlet; the service is available at 72 Grocery Outlet stores in California, Oregon, and Washington
OpenSea redesigns parts of its NFT store as sales continue to slump; the updates aim to make the site easier to navigate and to make the actual NFTs themselves the center of attention; in an announcement post on Thursday, the company says these redesigns are “just the start” of the company’s work to refine how its site works
The company behind "Ingress" and "Pokémon Go" have launched a location-based AR platform for developers; using Niantic's so-called "Visual Positioning System" or "VPS" program, developers can create location-aware, AR-capable apps
Google Maps' historical Street View imagery comes to mobile; Google Maps’ Street View feature is getting a couple of upgrades to celebrate the service’s 15th anniversary; the first is a new feature coming to its iOS and Android apps that’ll display historical Street View imagery on your phone; the second is a new, more portable camera that Google hopes will make it easier for it to capture Street View imagery in the future
Google introduced Imagen, an AI system that turns word descriptions into photorealistic images; the text-to-image generator is said to create images that appear more realistic and lifelike than OpenAI's DALL-E 2; like that AI model, Google hasn't made it available to the public
Google has reportedly delayed the launch of its first foldable phone from late 2022 to spring 2023; the device in its current state is "not as complete as Google wishes"
Apple is seeking to expand production outside of China and has short-listed Vietnam or India as possible alternatives; Apple has informed some of its China-based contract manufacturers about the plans, citing supply-chain bottlenecks caused by China's COVID lockdowns and other reasons
Amazon opened its first physical clothing store called Amazon Style on Wednesday; the store is located in Glendale, California, about 10 miles outside of Los Angeles, and it carries men’s and women’s clothing, shoes, and accessories; Amazon Style will sell brands like Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger, Levi’s, Champion, and Steve Madden
Y Combinator has sent out a letter urging founders to prepare for the worst and extend runways within a month; for those companies that cannot reach a self-sustaining business model, the accelerator recommends raising money sooner rather than later; Sequoia sent a 52-slide presentation with a similar grim tone to 250 of its portfolio founders
Citing a breach of local data protection laws, the U.K.'s privacy watchdog has ordered Clearview AI to delete all the facial image data it has of U.K. residents; New York-based Clearview scrapes social media and the web to collect public photos for its database of 20 billion+ images
Drotion, a platform to build fully responsive landing pages with Notion, was launched recently; the platform does not require any design experience and enables users to create landing pages in less than 10 minutes
📚 Good reads
Why consumer subscription app fail, and what makes successful the few ones that make it through, by Lenny Rachitsky
How LinkedIn increased notification opt-in rates by 500%. The folks at Growth.Design with another visual case showing what’s the problem with most notification triggers, and how context/temporality is key
Baking the Flywheel into your development process, by Shira Berkovich. Following Amazon’s flywheel example, Shira proposes creating and applying a flywheel to the development process, and honestly, what’s not to love about a good flywheel
Understanding the Metaverse experience: explained in 7 layers. A breakdown of what a metaverse is, and the seven conceptual segments that make up a metaverse design
Web3 competitive advantage - winning in open and decentralized ecosystems. How to compete when users have zero switching costs and all code is forkable: engage developers
Hopper CEO on super-app ambitions and becoming an everything startup. Travel-tech founder Fred Lalonde discusses many topics, from building super-apps to why everyone worries when traveling
The forgotten benefits of “low tech” user interfaces. Seemingly outmoded technologies sometimes hold the key to better user experiences
The fastest-growing apps in 2022
🔮 Emerging trends
The old and the new Davos:
This week I attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, and shared a brief note on my general feeling in this LinkedIn post
While incumbents paraded their view of the world (no big changes, no surprises), I was amazed by the amount of startups and new projects appearing in the intersection of Web3 / Blockchain and Climate, and the attention they received by the VCs present and the general public
It is encouraging to see so much focus and attention on climate change, the biggest problem we have ever faced, and how much talent and innovation is being dedicated to tackle it
Some of the projects that caught my attention:
NFTrees: plan trees by purchasing NFTs and obtain virtual carbon credits
Open Forest Protocol: forestation projects monitored, verified and funded with blockchain technology
Reneum Insitute: tokenizing green energy
SunExchange: crowdfunding for solar energy with monthly returns in cash or BTC
Vatalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, co-authored a paper called "Decentralized Society" (DeSoc) to highlight his vision. The authors introduced the idea of "soulbound tokens" that can store a user's educational credentials, employment history, and more:
Soulbound tokens or SBDTs can store permanent records of merits and attributes in private blockchains as crypto assets
One paragraph reads: "Imagine a world where most participants have Souls [digital wallets] that store SBTs corresponding to a series of affiliations, memberships, and credentials"
Think of SBTs as a Web3-based resume, and unlike NFTs that can be traded and sold, SBTs are designed to be untradeable
An example of SBTs includes universities issuing tokens to their alumni to verify educational records
SBTs will not replace NFTs since they're used for different applications; for instance, SBTs are proof of character, and NFTs are proof of wealth
The writers acknowledged that there are challenges to implementing the SBTs since the concept sounds similar to China's "social credit system." SBTs are issued to people without their consent, making them an ideal tool for authoritarian states
The other issue associated with the use of SBTs is discrimination. For example, certain groups can be red-lined and targeted for cyber or physical attacks, enforcing restrictive migration policies, and making predatory loans
To overcome this challenge, the option to "burn" or hide SBTs from the general public could be made available
Have a great weekend!
Angel
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