el producto #300 🚀
Web3 ecosystem, Musk's "everything app" ambitions, Twitter Edit, Google smartwatch, Deliveroo store, Video-search trends, Keeping track of research insights & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend & welcome to a new edition of el producto.
🎰 The week in figures
$1.2B: Naver, the South Korean search giant, announced it plans to acquire secondhand apparel marketplace Poshmark for $1.2B; Poshmark will become a standalone subsidiary of Naver; by acquiring Poshmark, Naver plans to combine the service’s growing social shopping platform, where users buy and sell used apparel, with its “technological prowess” and existing communities, like the online forum Naver Café
$570M: A blockchain linked to Binance has been hit by a $570M hack; Binance’s CEO tweeted that the tokens were stolen from a "bridge" used in the BNB Chain; blockchain bridges are tools used to transfer cryptocurrencies between different applications and have been heavily targeted in 2022
$410M: Cybersecurity company NetSPI has raised a $410M growth round; the company aims to use the funds to invest in innovation, talent acquisition, and global expansion; NetSPI provides attack surface management, pen testing as a service, and breach and attack simulation services to numerous clients, including Fortune 500 companies
$200M: CA-based Automation Anywhere has raised a $200M growth round; Automation Anywhere is a platform that enables businesses to automate their daily tasks through the use of machine learning and AI
$111M: Improbable is closing $111M in new funding for the metaverse despite reporting losses; the latest fundraising will value the company at $3.36B, an increase from its last valuation in 2018 at $2.8B
$84.9B: ByteDance reported to staff that revenue +80% to $61.7B in 2021 but operating losses 3x to $7.15B as heavily spent on growth; net loss widened by more than 87% to $84.9B in 2021
$80M: ShopBack, an online shopping rewards app backed by Singapore’s Temasek Holdings, raised $80M from the state investment giant’s late stage fund; ShopBack is a cashback reward program available across the Asia-Pacific; it allows online shoppers to receive a small percentage of their purchases on the platform, paid for through affiliate programs by the merchant
📰 What’s going on
Twitter rolled out its edit button to Blue subscribers in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; the feature allows users to edit posts five times in 30 minutes and is “coming soon” to the US, via Twitter Blue’s official account
Elon Musk says his purchase of Twitter will accelerate his plans for creating X, "the everything app;” on Tuesday, Musk reversed course and proposed closing the original $44B deal to buy Twitter, which the company has since agreed to
Spotify acquired Dublin-based Kizen, a tech firm that helps identify misinformation; previously, the two companies partnered in 2020 to focus on election content
Spotify is pulling 11 original podcasts, from its studios Parcast and Gimlet, resulting in less than 5% layoffs from the company’s podcasting staff
Uber partners with Marqeta, Mastercard, and Branch to power the Uber Pro Card, an enhanced loyalty and payments experience that will help drivers and couriers save on gas, fees, etc; the Uber Pro Card offers customized perks, including up to 10% cashback on gas and 12% on EV charging
Google Cloud launched a new vision-based AI platform, called Medical Imaging Suite, for health professionals; the software uses AI to scan medical images with faster and more accurate diagnoses
Google unveiled its Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro phones and first smartwatch; which will launch on Oct. 13
Google discontinued one of its last remaining offerings in Mainland China, Google Translate; the tech company claimed the move was prompted by low usage; China banned Google’s search engine in 2010
Google is creating an online-only startup accelerator focusing on the circular economy; circular economy companies focus on deliberately reusing, repairing, and recycling instead of producing goods that wind up as waste
Google redesigned its Google Home app to fix the camera view, add favorites, and enable sensors for automation; updated uses for older Nest cams will be limited
Some YouTube users are being asked to pay for Premium to access 4K video, even though the platform had previously never charged for that feature; a Premium subscription gives benefits like ad-free viewing, background listening, and the ability to download content; YouTube Premium costs $12/month in the US
Amazon announced it’s freezing all corporate hiring for its retail business for the remainder of 2022; earlier this week, there were >10K open roles posted for that division; AWS will not undergo the same hiring freeze
Amazon is shutting down field tests of its Scout delivery robots and scaling back the program; the six-wheeled electric robots have been making deliveries under the supervision of human “ambassadors" in California, Washington, Georgia, and Tennessee; Amazon said is it "reorienting the program" after receiving feedback about aspects that "weren’t meeting customers’ needs"
Shopify has announced the launch of its new mobile point-of-sale system; the new service comes after the company introduced a card reader in 2017 and expanded its POS hardware offering in 2019; Shopify's POS Go payment system will give merchants the ability to shift between in-person transactions and e-commerce; the company's push into the POS space puts it in direct competition with companies such as Adyen, Lightspeed, Clover, and Block-owned Square
Meta will be shutting down its newsletter subscription service Bulletin by early 2023; the feature was aimed at competing with Substack and attempted to attract writers by not initially taking a cut of their revenue
Meta’s VP of Metaverse said Horizon Wolds is suffering from quality issues and previously chided employees for their lack of in-app engagement; in a memo, the company directed managers to have Meta teams use Horizon Worlds at least once a week
Meta launched a set of free software tools for AI apps that make it easier to switch between different underlying chips from makers like Nvidia and AMD; the software is based on open-source ML framework PyTorch and can help run code up to 12x faster on Nvidia’s A100 chip or up to 4x faster on AMD’s MI250 chip
Facebook is adding new ways for users to customize their feeds; Facebook users will see “Show more” or “Show less” buttons on certain individual posts, which should result in users seeing more content that they're actually interested in
Reddit has "acqui-hired" the team from Swedish AI content moderation platform Oterlu; the four-person team will help Reddit develop ML-powered moderation models that can detect harmful content in different languages on its site
TikTok plans to begin a partnership with Los Angeles-based TalkShopLive; the move comes after TikTok struggled to gain traction with its e-commerce experiments in the U.K. TikTok shop, which launched in the U.K last year, allows consumers to purchase items through links that appear on the screen of live streams on its app; the deal will see TalkShopLive contribute the core technology that TikTok will use to launch TikTok Shop in North America
Deliveroo opened a brick and mortar grocery store in London; the restaurant delivery giant partnered with supermarket Morrisons to create “Deliveroo Hop”, giving customers the chance to shop in-store, through a digital kiosk via Deliveroo’s app for in-store pickup, and for local delivery via riders
The European Parliament voted in favor of enforcing USB-C as the common charging port across most devices by the end of 2024 and laptops by 2026; some small devices that are too small for the charger are exempt, like watches and health trackers
📚 Good reads
What China can teach us about the future of TikTok and video search, by Connie Chan, a16z. Snap, Instagram, and other social media companies have been experimenting with video search for years. Recently, we’ve seen a new wave of urgency by companies pursuing TikTok’s playbook. Whoever masters video search will unlock in-app commerce, payments, and other lucrative features
Discovery is messy: how do we keep track of all that we are learning? It’s not uncommon to see teams spend weeks on research, identifying meaningful insights, just so they get lost in some dark corner of a research report. Teresa Torres shares some best practices to ensure we handle learning with the attention it deserves
Foundations (and tradeoffs) for successful fintech infrastructure companies, by Marc Andrusko and Angela Strange, a16z. As every company becomes a fintech company, the field of fintech infrastructure has exploded over the last few years. This article lays out four key components that all infrastructure entrepreneurs—whether they’re still in the idea maze or already in market—need to consider as they build their companies, as well as three forks in the road where founding teams will need to decide which way to take their business
17 Slack Groups for PMs. Fleur Sykes from ProdPad put together a useful list of PM Slack communities. I frequently use some of these, in particular to gather feedback on new ideas or challenges, and to stay in touch with some folks I have coached
Make “evidence-based” decisions, not “data-based” decisions, by Saeed Khan. Thinking about “evidence” vs. “data” when making decisions, expands the thinking, actions and discussion. It allows for a broader set of information to be considered. It also leads to a more structured approach to evaluating the information you have to make your decisions which can lead to better decisions overall
It’s all about the money (movement): simplifying cross-border payments, by Joe Schmidt and Anish Acharya. While Elon Musk is working on taking humans to Mars, the way people and businesses move money internationally has not changed in decades. This has created multiple opportunities for innovation on infrastructure for both traditional banks and fintechs, with the authors outlining three big wedges they see emerging
🔮 Emerging trends
Looking to get up to speed on Web3? Here are a some alternatives to popular products that can help you escalate and sustain within Web3 space
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email
Angel
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