el producto #317 🚀

Google's AI plans, ChatGPT Plus, Big tech results, Foldable iPads, Velocity vs speed, Product enablement principles, Microsoft Teams Premium & more

Feb 5

Hey team,

Welcome to a new edition of el producto

🎰 The week in figures

50B: Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced YouTube Shorts has surpassed 50B daily views, up from 30B daily views in April 2022; YouTube started sharing ad revenue with Shorts creators on February 1st

$400M: MNT-Halan has raised $400M at $1B valuation to offer microloans and buy-now-pay-later features for Egypt and the MENA region; MNT-Halan has 5M users, of which 2M have borrowed using the company's microloans platform

$300M: Anthropic, a generative AI startup founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, raised $300M by Google at a $5B valuation

$250M: Character, a startup that developed an AI chatbot, is looking to raise $250M; the chatbot can assume different roles, like a celebrity or a famous CEO, and allows users to engage in text-based role-playing games

$110M: Live entertainment discovery platform Fever secured $110M in fresh funding; the firm intends to use the incoming funds to scale the organization and invest in new content opportunities

100M: In January, ChatGPT hit the 100M MAU mark, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, beating TikTok by 7 months

$93M: Zopa has raised $93M at over $1B valuation; Zopa is a fintech company that offers peer-to-peer loans with low rates, flexible terms, and no early repayment fees

1.75M: Netflix told advertisers that subscribers to its ad-supported tier doubled in Jan over Dec and that it expects to have 1.75M ad-based subs by the end of Q1

1000: Over the past six months, OpenAI hired ~1000 contract workers to label data and teach its models to learn programming operations

10: after launching its drone delivery service in towns in both California and Texas, Amazon’s Prime Air had made deliveries to fewer than 10 houses as of mid-January

-7%: PayPal will cut 7% of its staff, impacting ~2000 employees, blaming the macroenvironment; shares were up ~2% on the news

💰 Q4 results

Alphabet: total revenue: $76B (+1% y/y), YouTube ads revenue: $7.96B (-8% y/y), Cloud revenue: $7.3B (+32% y/y), net income: $13.6B (-34% y/y); shares were down 3% after missing on both top line and bottom line estimates

Amazon: $149.2M (+8.5% y/y), AWS revenue: $21.4B (+20% y/y), ad revenue: $11.6B (+19% y/y), net income: $278M (-98% y/y); shares were down 5% due to weak guidance

Apple: total revenue: $117.2B (-5.5% y/y), products revenue: $96.4B (-8% y/y), services revenue: $20.8B (+6% y/y), net income: $30B (-13% y/y); shares were up ~3% despite missing on revenue and profits

Meta: revenue: $32.2B (-4% y/y), net income: $4.7B (-55% y/y), Family of Apps DAP: 2.96B (+5% y/y), the company announced $40B in share buybacks, shares were up over 20%. Meta has been the S&P 500’s best-performing stock since its low in early November; its shares have more than doubled since November 3rd

Snap: revenue: $1.3B (flat y/y), FCF: $78M (-51% y/y), net loss: -$288M; DAUs: 375M (+17% y/y), paid subscribers: 2M; shares were down >13%

Spotify: €3.2B ($3.5B) in revenue, up 18% y/y; revenue from Premium grew 18% y/y to €2.7B, and ad-supported revenue rose 14% to €449M, driven by podcasts; Spotify added 33M MAU during the quarter to 489M, up 20% y/y; Spotify shares closed up +12% after the news

📰 What’s going on

Netflix released new anti-password sharing rules, including forcing all devices using an account to connect to the WiFi of the account’s primary location every 31 days; Netflix estimates that up to 100M users access its platform via someone else’s credentials

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple could be releasing a foldable iPad in early 2024 and is working on a foldable 20-inch iPad/MacBook hybrid that could be available in 2026

OpenAI announced a premium version of ChatGPT called “ChatGPT Plus” for $20/month: features include premier access to new features, faster responses, and no throttling during high-traffic periods

OpenAI released a free tool that can identify if a piece of text was generated by AI or written by a human; it scores on a scale of “Unlikely generated by AI” to “Likely generated by AI”; the program operates best on work with >1000 words

Microsoft will offer a premium version of Teams for $10/user/month featuring AI-generated notes powered by OpenAI’s GPT-3.5

Microsoft plans to incorporate GPT-4, a faster and better version of ChatGPT built by OpenAI, into its Bing search engine in the coming weeks

China’s Baidu is working on its AI-powered chatbot, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and plans to incorporate the service into its main search engine in March; the company would be the first to bring the technology to China, as ChatGPT is blocked there

Meta execs are becoming open to the possibility of more favorable revenue-sharing terms for creators to boost the popularity of Reels after long being opposed to the idea

Twitter’s dev team announced that the company would no longer support free access to the Twitter API; a paid tier will launch on February 9th

Amazon Prime altered its free delivery policy on grocery orders, raising its minimum from $35 to $150 to avoid the $9.95 delivery charge

TikTok announced several new features, including an upgrade to its algorithmic For You feed and tweaks to its enforcement and community management tools

Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger are launching Artifact, an AI-driven personalized news app; the startup is entering a space that includes apps such as Matter, SmartNews, Flipboard, Pocket, and Newsbreak, in addition to Apple News and Google News

Samsung has partnered with Google and Qualcomm on a new mixed-reality platform alongside its new Galaxy S23 smartphone lineup

EV startup Rivian, delivery firm FedEx, and sports-betting company DraftKings announced layoffs on Wednesday; Rivian said it was laying off 6% of its workforce, or about 840 employees, to conserve cash as it prepares for a potential price war in the EV industry

📚 Good reads

WTF is Strategy? Adam Fishman shares an amazing long(ish) read on what it takes to build a great company and product strategy - with lessons from Hubspot, Reforge, Facebook, Nextdoor, Patreon and Imperfect Foods

Product enablement principles, by John Cutler. As John embarked on a new role, he took time to reflect on the principles that will help him driving product success

Pull, don’t push: how to drive Product adoption by becoming a catalyst. First Round Review shares a framework for lowering barriers to change when building and selling products. “Catalysts don’t ask themselves, ‘Well what could I do to get someone to change? Instead, they ask ‘Why haven’t they changed already?’ What’s stopping them? What are the obstacles getting in the way?”

Vectors of action: the power of Velocity over Speed. Anne-Laure LeCunff invite us to reflect on our progress and whether we’re going in the right direction. Seeing your actions as a vector and not a scalar is a simple mental model to reflect and make adjustments to the way you work, so you can maximize personal growth without sacrificing your mental health. Complement and contrast with this article by ex-Booking experimentation leader Lukas Vermeer: No velocity without speed - Speed is not velocity, but speed is still critically important for velocity. The key phrase missing from both “failing fast” and “rapid iteration” is “… so that we can learn faster”

🚀 Emerging trends

Google preparing a competitor to ChatGPT

Called "Apprentice Bard," the chatbot is based on Google's free-flowing conversational AI called LaMDA, or "Language Model for Dialogue Applications." It's unclear if or when Google could roll out the AI service.

Like ChatGPT, users of Google's service would type in a prompt, and the AI would generate a text response
Unlike ChatGPT, Apprentice Bard appears to be able to answer questions about current events
CNBC reportedly viewed an internal example wherein the Google service answered a question about Alphabet's recent layoffs. By comparison, ChatGPT is limited to data up through 2021
It's possible that Google could unveil the AI-assisted search engine and/or a chatbot next week
Google announced a streaming event on Wednesday, Feb. 8. A description says Google is using artificial intelligence to "reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need"

Chatbot in search:

Additionally, Google is internally testing an experimental search page that uses the AI chat technology
The desktop page relies on a Q&A format. It replaces the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button under the search bar with five possible question prompts
Once a user types in a query, the program delivers human-like responses in gray-colored bubbles
It also suggests follow-up questions and posts the usual search result link below that

Code red:

Meanwhile, Google is said to be working on a cloud project named "Atlas" that's related to the search giant's new prioritization of AI
In December, Google executives issued a "code red" to teams to refocus their efforts toward AI as it faces a potential threat over ChatGPT
During an all-hands meeting that month, executives said the company is taking a conservative approach to deploying AI tech in its web search
Google has a "reputational risk" at stake given the more than 1B people who rely on its search engine, they noted

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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