el producto #321 🚀

Mapping out a career in Product, Bing's AI vs Google, Growth inflections, Snap's AI bot, Youtube's generative AI tools, Revolut's profitable year, Musk to create ChatGPT competitor, & more

Hey team,

Welcome to a new edition of el producto

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🎰 The week in figures

-$1B: Klarna reported nearly $1B (10.4B kroner) in full-year operating losses in 2022; the figure represents Klarna's highest annual losses yet, 46.5% more than 2021's losses of ~$680M; despite the widened losses, Klarna — Europe's most valuable VC-backed company — expects to return to profitability by Q3 this year; Klarna was profitable until 2019, when it started pursuing aggressive expansion in the U.S. 

$675M: AI software startup Inflection AI to raise as much as $675M in fundraising from undisclosed investors; the Silicon Valley-based startup was co-founded in 2022 by LinkedIn creator Reid Hoffman, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, and former DeepMind researcher Karén Simonyan; it aims to develop new technologies that could enable people to speak to computers in plain language

$300M: Wiz, an Israel-based cloud security startup, raised a $300M Series D at a $10B valuation; Wiz expects to hit $200M in ARR in 2023 and has raised ~$900M since being founded three years ago 

$250M: AI chatbot developer Character.ai has secured a $200M to $250M investment that values the startup at roughly $1B

$230M: Skydio, a San Mateo-based autonomous drone maker, raised $230M at a $2.2B valuation; the company's drones are used by the Ukrainian military

$76M: New York-based behavioral marketing startup Wunderkind secured $76M in Series C funding; the firm intends to use the proceeds to accelerate product development, increase team strength, and boost market expansion

$75M: Temporal, a developer productivity startup led by former Uber engineers, raised $75M, bringing its total funding to over $200M

$65M: AI-powered dashboard startup Typeface emerged from stealth with $65M funding; by combining generative AI with a brand's tone, audiences, and workflows, Typeface seeks to revolutionize content workflows and corporate content development

$50M: Neobank startup Varo is reportedly in talks to raise a $50M down round; the size of the new round is a tenth of its last oversubscribed Series E, which closed at $510M in September 2021; Varo was then valued at $2.5B; at the upcoming fundraiser, its pre-money valuation is expected to be around $1.8B

16M: Wise hits 16M customers and reveals rebrand to bolster global expansion; Wise’s new look was created to reflect its global reach, drawing inspiration from the currencies, languages and places it serves around the world

2k: Bluesky, a social media app by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, entered private Beta testing; as of Feb. 28, the app had 2,000 installs on iOS

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💰 Q4 results

Salesforce: shares jumped as high as 16% following its earnings report showing it beat expectations and providing strong guidance for its next fiscal year; Q4 revenue: $8.4B (up 14% y/y); Q4 operating cash flow: $7.1B (up 19% y/y)

Zoom: revenue: $1.1B (+4% y/y), enterprise revenue: $636.1M (+18% y/y), net loss: -$104M, revenue beat estimates and shares initially jumped >7%

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📰 What’s going on

Revolut reports first full year of profit; the fintech app has released its annual report for 2021, which indicates the company nearly tripled its revenue between 2020 and 2021

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is creating a product team with the focus of integrating generative AI into its offerings

YouTube is working on generative AI tools that will assist in content creation, according to new CEO Neal Mohan; in his first letter to the YouTube community, Mohan said AI could assist creators by expanding their storytelling and increasing their production values

In recent weeks, Elon Musk has approached AI researchers about creating a ChatGPT competitor; according to one researcher, the project is in the early stages, with no concrete plans; Musk co-founded OpenAI

Snap will release its own AI chatbot, called "My AI"; the feature will initially only be available for paid subscribers and is powered by OpenAI's most recent ChatGPT software

Tencent has created a team to work on a ChatGPT-like chatbot called "HunyuanAide," following other large Chinese tech cos, Alibaba and Baidu 

TikTok introduced a control feature prompting users under 18 to enter a passcode after 60-minutes of daily screen time; if the user is under 13, a guardian will have to enter the passcode to enable 30 more minutes of watch time

Microsoft Windows 11 latest update includes its new AI-powered Bing, available for Phone Link, iOS, and taskbars

Microsoft introduced a "personality" feature for Bing AI that lets users toggle between three different conversational styles for the chatbot; Bing preview testers can now choose between creative, precise, and balanced tones for the chatbot's responses

Visa and Mastercard are pausing partnerships and delaying product launches with crypto companies until the market and regulatory environment improves

Chinese company Realme launched a smartphone called GT3 that can be fully charged in 9 minutes and 30 seconds, starting at $649

The FDA rejected Neuralink’s application to begin human testing on its brain-computer interface devices

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📚 Good reads

What causes growth inflections? As always, Lenny Rachitsky's research is above and beyond top-notch — always bringing us the insider insight into different companies. This post explores inflection points for two dozen of today’s most successful products

“Sweat the details” and other commandments for mapping out a career in Product. In this interview by First Round Review, Jiaona Zhang serves as our guide to crafting and growing a career in product. Currently the VP of Product at Webflow, Zhang has also held product leadership roles at Dropbox, WeWork and Airbnb. She pulls on threads from each step of her career journey for folks to learn from, whether you’re considering a pivot into the product org, navigating the transition from an individual contributor to management or are a founder looking to bring on your first product leader. Here’s an overview of what you can expect:

• Lessons for early-career PMs. Advice for breaking into the function and common mistakes first-time PMs make that are easily avoidable. “Success in your job is actually building a great product, not just making your team happy or executing on whatever small task crops up.”

• Advice for managing PMs. Fresh takes on becoming an “emotional dampener” and thinking strategically as you get more senior. “The biggest change in this phase is that your impact is measured through your team and not what you do yourself,” Zhang says. “What got you to where you are is most likely not gonna get you to the next point. You are coaching and supporting your team — your influence is now through your reports.”

• Guidance for product execs. Tactical pointers for working closely with a CEO and executive board and Zhang’s advice on why you should treat your org like a product. “Build a team in the same way you would build a product. Just as you would think about your users and their pain points, you should think about your team and the problems you’re facing so that you have clarity on what you’re solving for.”

The most popular video streaming services by country, by Visual Capitalist

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🔮 Emerging trends

Can Bing's new AI search challenge Google?

AI is all the fuss now, and Microsoft is at the forefront with the “new” Bing. Can they challenge Google’s search dominance?

Check out this UX visual case study to find some of the techniques that Microsoft is using (for good or bad) to market their new AI search.

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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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