el producto #326 🚀
The origins of ByteDance and how it grew, Tinder's $500/month subscriptions, Tips for Product leadership coaching, Substack launches Twitter-like product -> Twitter restricts Substack, & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$817B: Stripe processed ~$817B in transactions in 2022; y/y growth slowed to 26% last year, down from 60% in 2021
$80B: TikTok parent company ByteDance generated >$80B in revenue last year (+30% y/y); TikTok generated ~$10B in revenue, roughly 12% of ByteDance’s total, growing 2.5x y/y
$5B: via its leaked Series C pitch deck, Anthropic is aiming to raise $5B over the next two years to take on OpenAI, and plans on utilizing an AI self-teaching technique it developed called "constitutional AI"
$350M: DataBank has raised a $350M debt funding round to make enterprise cloud infrastructure management more efficient; DataBank has raised $1B in 2023 alone
$129M: Quantexa, a London-based startup that uses AI to help banks and other institutions detect fraud, raised a $129M Series E at a $1.8B valuation
$120M: LayerZero Labs, a blockchain infrastructure provider that helps build bridges between different protocols, raised a $120M Series B at a $3B valuation with participation from a16z, Sequoia, and others
$1M: Meta reportedly offers salaries of up to $1M to programmers to develop VR-powered games, apps, and technology for the metaverse
$500/month: Tinder is developing a $500-a-month subscription service that would give users priority in feeds along with access to a dating coach and "influential members;" the ultra-expensive offering, now in beta testing, could change before being rolled out to users, according to reports
74%: Uber accounts for 74% of the US ride-share market, up from 62% in early 2020, as its ride-share revenue more than doubled last year
+36%: Tesla revealed it delivered nearly 423,000 vehicles in Q1, up 36% YoY and up 4% from the previous quarter; Tesla also announced new price reductions for its U.S. vehicles and will cut the prices of its Model 3 by $1,000 and its Model Y by $2,000
+11%: US-based ad spend on TikTok grew 11% in March, with top spenders being Pepsi, DoorDash, Amazon, and Apple
-53%: global VC funding in Q1 dropped ~53% y/y from $162B in 2022 to $76B in 2023
-76%: Decentraland, the decentralized metaverse game once valued at $1B, had a 76% y/y drop in virtual attendance to its four-day “Fashion Week” event, despite brands like Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and Adidas all sponsoring shows
📰 What’s going on
Twitter started restricting access to Substack links and marking them "unsafe" in response to the newsletter startup announcing a Twitter-like product called "Substack Notes" earlier this week
Spotify has shut down Spotify Live (fka Locker Room and Green Room), a Clubhouse-like app it bought as part of its €57M Betty Labs acquisition in March 2021
Microsoft is bringing its Bing AI image generator to the sidebar of its Edge web browser; Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft's ad and web services head, says users would be able to "generate the image and insert it right into whatever [they] happen to be editing"
Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed the company would add chat-like AI features to its search product; search accounts for over 50% of Google’s total revenue, and Pichai is optimistic that the opportunity is larger than the threat
Google updated Bard by incorporating PaLM into its stack, enabling it to answer math and logic problems better; Google also stated that Bard would soon have coding abilities
Google is following after Apple and requiring apps in its Play Store to let users delete their accounts and data more easily; while the change won't take effect for months, developers will eventually need to provide a “readily discoverable option” for users to scrub their data and accounts in apps and the web
A new conversational Shortcut integrates ChatGPT into iPhones and other Apple devices; S-GPT is accessible on iPhones via a home screen icon, widget, the Shortcuts app, or as a Shortcut inside Apple's Siri; anyone can use it to ask questions and converse with ChatGPT from a prompt box on iPhones, iPads, and Macs
Meta plans to commercialize its generative AI technology this year, focusing on enhancing ad effectiveness and simplifying metaverse content creation
Bloomberg has developed a generative AI model called BloombergGPT geared towards financial tasks; the LLM was trained on a dataset of 700B+ tokens (~200B more than GPT-3), with about half coming from Bloomberg’s financial data
Amazon Web Services (AWS) announced a new accelerator program; the 10-week program targets Generative AI startups from countries around the world as Amazon continues to develop its own Generative AI models
Amazon said it plans to cut employee stock awards as part of a revised compensation plan; the move comes as the e-commerce giant tries to reduce expenses amid slowing online sales growth and an uncertain macroeconomic environment
Big tech companies have had to stall layoffs in the EU due to strict labor protections; Amazon and Google have responded by offering generous severance packages to staff in exchange for leaving voluntarily
A demand spike for AI servers has caused a shortage in chips powerful enough to run machine learning software at major cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle
Alibaba is now allowing corporate customers to test out its ChatGPT-style AI chatbot; the "Tongyi Qianwen" model recently underwent internal testing at Damo Academy, Alibaba's research institute for advanced technologies
An Alibaba research unit has developed an AI model that creates short videos based on written prompts; called ModelScope, the text-to-video system is available to try out online
Paris voted to ban shared e-scooters, forcing companies like Lime, Dott, and Tier to vacate the city; 89% of residents voted against keeping e-scooters in the city
📚 Good reads
ByteDance and TikTok origins: understanding the growth forces behind the most valuable startup on the planet, and breaking down concrete lessons from TikTok's road to $1B MAUs, by How They Grow
Getting engineers involved in brainstorming. Ellen Juhlin, Senior Director of Product Management at Orion Labs, found that engineers in particular were quick to jump to feasibility concerns when running brainstorming sessions. In other words, rather than focusing on idea generation, they wanted to skip ahead to idea evaluation. Ellen shared her challenge with the Continuous Discovery Habits Slack community and was able to use this feedback to make some changes to the way she approached brainstorming
Functional fixedness: when we stick to what we know, by Ness Labs. As we get older, our preconceived ideas of how things should be done become more rigid and harder to challenge. Although functional fixedness offers useful heuristics that help us save time on simple tasks, it can be detrimental to our creative thinking. Like many creative processes, the more you practice finding new ways of problem solving, the easier it will become
Using the Decision Stack in Product leadership coaching. Making effective decisions and defining your strategy as a product leader is HARD. That’s why Petra Wille often finds herself sharing Martin Eriksson’s Decision Stack tool with her product lead coachees. This framework is applicable in several different situations and can help you gain clarity and alignment. In this article, Petra shares a few of the most common use cases where the Decision Stack comes in handy
Midjourney, the most interesting app in AI. Aakash Gupta shares this story of David vs Goliath, in which Midjourney is outshining OpenAI with a much smaller team
Lessons from scaling to 32'000'000 MAU in 2 years at Smallpdf.com, by Leah Tharin
🔮 Emerging trends
More on digital twins
Few weeks ago we shared how researchers are developing accurate digital simulations of human bodies in the form of digital twins, which could potentially save and extend lives. Now we share more details on how digital twins could help personalize healthcare, predict diseases, diet, and lifestyle changes, and make healthcare more predictive and forward-looking.
The Barcelona Supercomputing Center has created virtual models of living cells and organs, such as Alya Red, a digital twin of a heart
The models have been used for "in silico" trials, where drugs or diseases are tested virtually. In silico trials can help detect early signs of drug failure, save time and cost, and eliminate the ethical issues associated with animal testing
Digital twins can also help fight public health emergencies like the COVID-19 pandemic
Computational models of patients can open new frontiers for testing vaccines and personalized treatment of symptoms
Creating a virtual twin requires personal data analysis, including genomic, biochemical, and wearable device data
Digital twins are commonplace in manufacturing, industry, and aerospace, but digital simulations of people are rare
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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