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🎰 The week in figures

$6.5B: Stripe raised a $6.5B Series I at a $50B valuation, with all proceeds going toward covering tax obligations related to expiring RSUs and a new tender offer for employees

$500M: Chinese self-driving startup WeRide has confidentially filed for a US IPO, aiming to raise $500M; WeRide was most recently valued at $4.4B

$350M: Adept, an AI startup building software that turns plain text into computer actions, raised a $350M Series B at a valuation north of $1B

$200M: PhonePe, the Indian mobile payments giant, raised $200M from Walmart

$157M: Parker, a startup that offers corporate credit cards for middle-market e-commerce businesses, emerged from stealth on Thursday, announcing $157M in equity and debt funding

$150M: Saudi Arabia-based buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) startup Tamara secured a $150M debt facility from Goldman Sachs.; the firm intends to use the proceeds to expand its product portfolio; Tamara was founded three years ago and already has 6M customers; IKEA and H&M are two of the notable brands that leverage Tamara's platform for payments

$100M: Abu Dhabi-based G42 purchased a $100M stake in ByteDance, valuing the company at $220B; the company’s valuation has dropped from $300B due to TikTok’s uncertain future in the US

-10K: Meta Platforms announced it plans to cut 10,000 more jobs in the coming months and not fill 5,000 open roles; the new round of layoffs comes months after the company laid off 11,000 workers in November, roughly 13% of Meta’s global staff at the time

+15%: downloads of the top 10 crypto apps jumped by around 15% following the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank

-16%: venture funding fell with each passing quarter in 2022, and it is projected to fall yet again in Q1’23; current estimates indicate that venture funding for the quarter will come in at $56.3B — a 16% decrease from Q4’22; deals are expected to take a nosedive as well, dropping from 7,830 to 5,792 over the same period

📰 What’s going on

Meta debuted Meta Verified, a $12-$15/month paid verification program; initial features include a verification badge on Facebook and Instagram, impersonation protection, and direct access to customer support

Meta is ending support for NFTs on Facebook and Instagram; the latter platform began allowing select users to test NFT “digital collectible” posts in May 2022

Apple introduced a new live shopping experience on its U.S. e-commerce site; the feature allows U.S. customers to connect with a retail associate in the form of a one-way virtual shopping session

In a cost-cutting effort, Apple has slowed down hiring, cut some contract workers, reduced travel budgets, and delayed the frequency of employee bonuses

OpenAI debuted GPT-4, which is more accurate and well-reasoned than its predecessor; the model is now available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers; users can also sign up for the GPT-4 API waitlist

Microsoft announced that Bing search is now running a customized version of OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model

Google will be adding generative AI capabilities to Gmail, Google Docs, and other Workspace apps; the AI features will begin rolling out to a limited number of U.S. testers this month

Chinese search engine giant Baidu unveiled its latest Ernie chatbot to the public; the AI bot, which offers capabilities nearly on par with GPT-4, is considered the first major Chinese contender to ChatGPT

As part of its recent round of layoffs impacting 10K employees, Microsoft cut its entire AI ethics team, which was tasked with assessing risks associated with OpenAI integrations

LinkedIn will integrate OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-3.5 models onto its platform to provide users with ai-powered writing prompts for job descriptions and profile pages

OpenAI competitor Anthropic has debuted Claude, its ChatGPT rival, for business customers that want to use its product

Coinbase is considering creating a new overseas crypto trading platform for global clients as the US cracks down on crypto

Via, a NY-based transportation app, has acquired Citymapper, a London-based urban mapping startup with 50M users; reportedly, investors are mostly not making their money back

Y Combinator decided to curb its late-stage investments to focus on early-stage opportunities and its accelerator program; due to the scaling back of its growth-stage practice, the company laid off 17 employees or nearly 20% of its workforce; CEO Garry Tan said that the firm was considering the strategic shift for a long time and has not been influenced by the implosion of SVB, which has impacted 30% of its portfolio startups

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit satellite launch company will pause all operations and furlough nearly its entire staff due to financial woes

SVB Financial, the former parent company of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Friday; the parent company said it believes it has about $2.2B in liquidity, $3.3B in unsecured debt, and $3.7B of preferred equity outstanding

📚 Good reads

Growth ideas. Lenny Rachitsky shares a long (and growing) list of ideas for how to:
➔ Drive more top-of-funnel (short-term)
➔ Drive more top-of-funnel (long-term)
➔ Improve monetization
➔ Improve conversion and activation
➔ Improve retention
➔ Improve team velocity

Should you build a Super app? Super apps are on the rise as a topic and as a design pattern. Why? In this nice 2-piece set, Fran Van De Ven puts together some well-rounded heuristics answering questions such as when a should consider going for a Super App strategy and how to tactically bring it to the market. The topic is extremely interesting: the trends in the market push in a direction of more powerful teams and a general tendency towards product-centricity in organizations, a stronger verticalization of markets, and if you sum this up, is rather legitimate to assume that more companies will be able to build complementary services and use existing apps and products that they have to their advantages in bringing multiple services to the market

UX Research Templates Notion hub (free Notion account needed), a fantastic set of free templates on card sorting, competitor analysis, diary study, gap analysis, stakeholder walkthrough and everything in-between. Complement with this Product Discovery cheat sheet to know when to use which template

Impromptu: Amplifying our Humanity through AI - the new book from LinkedIn’s co-founder Reid Hoffman. Hoffman made the book available as a free pdf. “I wrote Impromptu both to encourage people to not only get to know GPT-4, but to embrace our choice of how we’ll use it, and explore the different ways this choice might play out“

Unlocking the power of optionality, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. We tend to assume optionality is built by keeping as many doors open for as long as possible. But the conventional path of accumulating optionality gives you reassuring but fragile options. In contrast, the best options – which involve lots of experimenting and tinkering – may feel riskier in the short term but will help you thrive through uncertainty

Why was there a run on Silicon Valley Bank? And how will this affect startups and the financial system? By Noah Smith. So…what happened to SVB, and why should you care? A long and mutually beneficial relationship between the tech startup sector and the government is in danger of breaking down

For Gen Z, TikTok is the new search engine. 40% of Gen Z’s first turn to TikTok or Instagram before performing a traditional Google Search. While SEO is still important, TikTok Optimization will be becoming more of a thing. Brands need to get more embedded within the TikTok-verse; from specific content for the TikTok algorithm on their own accounts, to partnering with creators

10 levels of data mastery for Product Managers. Data competency is one of the most important hard skills anyone building and growing a product can have. This is a great framework to think about leveling up how you use data, with concrete takeaways

🔮 Emerging trends

Office on steroids

Microsoft is infusing Outlook, PowerPoint, Word, and its other business apps with an AI assistant powered by ChatGPT; the company unveiled Microsoft 365 Copilot, a tool that can help automate work in the apps to improve productivity

Microsoft 365 will soon feature a Copilot text box in its apps, where users can prompt the AI to perform tasks such as writing an email
To deliver responses, the system accesses user data, like past emails and documents, across Microsoft 365 accounts
To increase the relevancy of its outputs, Copilot's large language model can be trained on data from individual businesses

What it does:

In a presentation, Copilot was able to write an email in Microsoft Outlook to invite friends to a graduation party
In PowerPoint, it auto-generated a presentation about a graduating student using photos from their OneDrive account
Another demo showed Copilot creating a business proposal in Microsoft Word and adding a summary and FAQ element to the document. It then used that proposal in Word to create a PowerPoint presentation
In Microsoft Teams, Copilot can create a transcript and summarize meetings that a user can't attend. Users can also converse with the bot to ask follow-up questions about the meeting
Copilot in Excel can automatically create charts and analyze sales data

What's next:

Microsoft said 20 of its enterprise customers are now testing Copilot, though it plans to make it available to more users "in the coming months"
It hasn't specified if the AI capabilities will cost extra in Microsoft 365, which includes the programs formerly branded as Microsoft Office, along with OneDrive, Teams, and more
Microsoft still cautioned that Copilot is best to use for "first drafts" and "starting points"
"Sometimes, Copilot will get it right," said Microsoft VP of Modern Work and Business Applications Jared Spataro said. "Other times, it will be usefully wrong, giving you an idea that's not perfect but still gives you a head start"

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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