el producto #325 🚀
Zoom's AI-powered meeting summaries, Apple launches BNPL & holds XR headsets production, Assumption-mapping techniques, How Booking revamped its app & more
Hey team,
Welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$168M: Kream, a luxury resale platform, raised $168M in a Series C funding round at a $742M valuation; the firm's user base has jumped from 2.2M to 5.3M since October last year
$110M: Spain-based Cabify has raised a $110M funding round to boost its ridesharing service; the company claims it has over 42M users
$108M: Ledger, a French hard wallet for storing digital currencies, added €100M ($108M) to its Series C.
4.25M: ByteDance-owned Instagram competitor Lemon8 has entered the US App Store's Top 10; Apptopia estimates the social platform has 4.25M MAUs; ByteDance seems to be leveraging TikTok to promote Lemon8 downloads
$11M: Twitter Blue has generated $11M in revenue and gained 385K global subscribers on mobile since relaunching three months ago
1M: Clearview AI, a facial recognition software platform used by law enforcement and government agencies, has executed close to 1M searches for US police departments and scraped 30B images from platforms like Facebook
📰 What’s going on
Apple launched its BNPL service to select users in the US; accepted users can apply for loans of $50 to $1000 and repay those loans over six weeks with 4-interest free payments
Apple pushed back mass production of its mixed reality headset to the middle/end of Q3 due to lacking optimism that the reveal will create another "iPhone moment"
Apple's annual developer's conference, WWDC, will occur from June 5-9; Apple may unveil its VR/AR headset despite production delays
Twitter will soon only feature posts from paid verified accounts in its "For You" algorithmic feed; starting on April 15, Twitter will no longer recommend tweets from unverified accounts in the feed in order to "address advanced AI bot swarms taking over," according to Elon Musk
Netflix is reportedly working on a feature for users to play video games on their TVs using a phone; app developer Steve Moser uncovered code in Netflix's iOS app that references playing TV games using an iPhone as a controller
A high-ranking Google AI engineer left the company to join OpenAI earlier this year due to Google using ChatGPT interactions to train its Bard chatbot; Google has denied these claims
Google is upgrading its Bard AI with its "more capable" Pathways Language Models (PaLM), bringing greater capabilities such as improved coding and reasoning, according to CEO Sundar Pichai
Google shared the set of four core principles it believes are essential for responsible AI: education and training; tools, technique, and infrastructure; structures and processes; and partnerships; according to the blog post, the primary principle for Google is AI should be socially beneficial, meaning benefits should exceed the foreseeable risks and downsides
Zoom has partnered with OpenAI to bring more AI features to its video conferencing app; the company is adding AI-powered meeting summaries and more to its Zoom IQ conversation assistant
Text-to-image startup Midjourney ended its free trial program, citing "extraordinary demand and trial abuse"; this comes after multiple Midjourney-generated images went viral, including ones depicting Trump’s arrest
A petition to pause all development on AI models that are more powerful than GPT-4 for the next six months has been signed by over 1000 people, including Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak
Italy's privacy regulator has temporarily blocked ChatGPT and opened an investigation into OpenAI over processing user data and potential non-compliance with the EU's GDPR
Disney has shut down the division developing its metaverse strategies, and Microsoft recently shut down a social VR platform it acquired in 2017
Amazon has opened its Internet of Things network for developer testing; the service, known as Amazon Sidewalk, provides a low-bandwidth network that reportedly connects over 1B devices in the U.S.
Amazon is expanding its presence in the restaurant industry through ordering partnerships;he move renews Amazon's efforts to enter the industry after its "Amazon Restaurants" program failed and was forced to shut down in 2019
Startups are using metrics, such as payback period for acquisition, net burn per net new recurring revenue, and revenue per employee, to instill confidence in VC backers amidst the volatile macroeconomic conditions; the metrics are different from the ones that startups use during phases of growth, such as EBITDA, net revenue retention rate, and cash burn
📚 Good reads
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) released its annual Marketplace 100. In it, the firm ranks the top 100 private consumer marketplaces globally. It provides a great look into the categories and companies building the next big marketplace businesses
Bing’s AI chat UX case study. The guys at Growth.Design look at:
Bing's 2 biggest onboarding mistakes
Why "closing the gap" between intent and solution is the holy grail
How one redesign could increase engagement
Assumption-mapping techniques for Product Discovery, by Gosia Podzorska. “With an assumption map you’ll have more confidence in achieving your goals, as it’s the prerequisite for an actionable plan and a good product roadmap”
How Booking.com revamped its app. Natalie Halimi shares highlights and learnings from their journey of modernizing the codebase and design of the Booking.com app. The article focuses on the mechanics of getting such a program off the ground, keeping it running, and proving impact
A Vine post-mortem. Why Vine died: closing the loop on the company that changed the internet. “As their loop closed, they opened a new one for the far more powerful, phenomenal, addictive, and culturally significant generation of UGC. In death, they were the template for TikTok.“
The Async Startup playbook. First Round Review talks to Sidharth Kakkar, co-founder of Subscript, who shares how he successfully built a fully remote workplace from day one (ditching meetings along the way)
Webflow’s path for Product/Market-Fit. Another good deep dive by First Round Review
Decision anxiety: how to make decisions when feeling anxious, by Dr. Hannah Rose for Ness Labs. Decision anxiety can make it hard to recognise the right choice. It can commonly lead to making low-risk, but inappropriate, choices, or failure to reach any conclusion. This brief read shares some techniques to get around this challenge
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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