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Welcome to a new edition of el producto

🎰 The week in figures

$35B: Amazon's AWS unit will spend $35B to build new data centers in Virginia by 2040, creating an estimated 1K jobs; Amazon will get a 15-year extension on tax exemptions and can receive up to $140M in performance grants

$10B: Microsoft confirmed that it's making another multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT and DALl-E creator OpenAI; while the software giant didn't disclose the exact amount, sources said $10B

$2B: Stripe has been trying to raise at least $2B at a $55B-$60B valuation to cover a large tax bill related to employee stock units

$300M: San Francisco-based Anthropic is said to be raising $300M in funding that would value the AI startup at around $5B; Anthropic, founded by two former OpenAI researchers, recently introduced an AI conversational chatbot, Claude, that's similar to ChatGPT

$125M: Xpansiv, a California-based infrastructure provider for environmental markets, raised a $125M Series D; Xpansiv’s platform offers a carbon and environmental commodities marketplace, including carbon, RECs, digital fuels, and water rights

$123M: UK-based Onto has raised $123M to expand its EV rental subscription platform; Onto enables users to subscribe to a platform that gives them access to over 7,000 rental cars, all of which are electric

$100M: Tranch has raised a $100M seed to provide buy now, pay later features for businesses. Tranch, a Y-Combinator alumni, provides funding for transactions as high as $500k

1M: Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered code suggestion tool, has surpassed more than 1M users

~219K new podcasts were created in 2022, down ~80% from a high of ~1M new podcasts in 2020 and down ~31% from ~319K in 2019

-6%: Spotify will cut ~6% of its ~9.8K employees; CEO Daniel Ek said the company tried to cut costs over the last few months without cutting jobs, but layoffs became necessary

💰 Q4 results

Microsoft: revenue: $52.7B (+2% y/y), net income: $16.4B (-12% y/y), Azure revenue +31% y/y, LinkedIn revenue +10% y/y; shares were down ~2% on the news

Tesla: revenue: $24.3B (+37% y/y), net income: $3.7B (+58% y/y), 405.3K cars delivered (+31% y/y), 439.7K cars produced (+44% y/y)

📰 What’s going on

Google cut most of the jobs working on its incubator, Area 120; the program, which typically aids and assists ~20 projects at a time, will graduate only three products in March

Google researchers introduced a new AI system that generates music from text descriptions; the new model, called MusicLM, outperformed other AI music generators in both audio quality and its ability to adhere to its prompts; due to copyright issues, Google will not release MusicLM publicly yet

Stripe co-founders Patrick and John Collison told employees that management set a 12-month goal of either going public or allowing employees to sell shares in a private market transaction

Apple is developing a Siri-enabled no-code-esque way to build apps on its forthcoming AR platform; in practice, users could tell Siri to build out features of an app while using its AR headset

How big tech grew during the pandemic, and why Apple is avoiding layoffs: Apple's workforce grew ~20% from Sept 2019 to Sept 2022 to ~164K, incl 65K retail employees; during that same period, Microsoft: +53%, Alphabet: +57%, Meta: +94%, Amazon: 100%+

NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced that ridesharing companies like Uber and Lyft will be required to be 100% electric by 2030; the proposed legislation will impact ~100K drivers

Meta is embracing internal AI tools that have increased ad-targeting accuracy with less user data and boosted its short-form video product, Reels

TikTok selected specific videos to "supercharge their distribution" through a process called "heating" to attract brands and influencers by inflating their view counts

TikTok informed some employees that they could face job termination if their home address is not within the vicinity of their office, to crackdown on remote work

Amazon launched RxPass, a $5/month Prime service that allows subscribers to get as many generic versions of medications as needed; the service will initially cover drugs for 80 common conditions

Strava has acquired Fatmap, a startup that creates high-res 3D maps for the outdoors, for an undisclosed amount; Fatmap has 1.6M registered users and offers a premium version for $30/year; >100M people use Strava

BuzzFeed will use ChatGPT to create and enhance its content, including personalized quizzes; the company will maintain human-generated journalism at its BuzzFeed News outlet

As part of a partnership with OpenAI, Shutterstock has launched a generative AI toolkit for users of its Creative Flow design platform; Shutterstock says the images are "ready for licensing" as soon as they are generated

Several major U.S. banks are partnering up to launch a new digital wallet that would rival Apple Pay; Wells Fargo, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, PNC, U.S. Bancorp, and Truist Financial are developing a new product that would let consumers shop online using their debit and credit cards

📚 Good reads

Becoming a Product Coach. Marty Cagan has been vocal about the industry’s need for more skilled product coaches. In this article, Marty describes what are the prerequisites to become a good Product Coach, the different types of Product Coaching, and how to price and market Product Coaching services

How a paywall A/B test increased trial conversion rates by 23% at Blinkist. Check out the psychology behind the results in this visual case study by Growth.Design

How will ChatGPT change Product Management. The folks at Mind the Product share few more examples of how ChatGPT can add value to PMs

Duolingo’s gamification strategy, and a framework to build game-like products, by Greg Isenberg

Retool’s path to PMF. Retool founder and CEO David Hsu takes us along on his entrepreneurial journey — mapping out the highs and lows, bumps and bruises, that eventually led to Retool becoming the go-to platform for developers building internal tools

Product Hunt’s 2022 winners. To put it lightly, 2022 was the year of AI. No-code wasn't too far behind, either!

The 3 phases of Product Managers. A fun view of the common growth steps of Product Management, by David Pereira

🚀 Emerging trends

Apple’s mixed-reality OS

Apple's upcoming mixed-reality headset will feature an interface that resembles the operating system for iPhones; the device is due to launch sometime this year.

The OS:

the XR headset will not come with physical controllers; rather, it will feature eye- and hand-tracking, meaning users will be able to control it by staring at an item on the screen and using hand gestures to activate it
its iOS-like interface will feature a Home screen with customizable widgets and app icons
FaceTime-based video chatting and meeting capabilities will be a big area of focus; Apple plans to render a user's face and body during virtual meetings

The device:

analysts that follow Apple's developments regarding new devices claim that Apple is going to name its upcoming headset Apple Reality Pro
the new hardware device will cost around $3,000 and will have features such as:
- motion gesture controls (making it unique among other headset options in the market)
- the ability to serve as a Mac external display
- the device will be able to switch between virtual and augmented reality; in the latter, users can activate a pass-through mode, which turns on the headset's exterior cameras to view their surroundings
- coolers to avoid over-heating
- batteries the size of two iPhone 14 Pro Maxes combined
- while $3,000 would be double the price of Meta's Quest Pro devices, if these features were to be included, it would make Apple Reality Pro the standout VR/AR headset in the market

The partners:

Apple is said to be working with Disney and Dolby to develop VR content for the device; its Apple TV+ content will be compatible with the headset

That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack

Angel

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