el producto #327 š
el producto #327 š
Twitter generative AI plans, Quora chatbots, Using ChatGPT in PM work, Trial configurations to kick-start PLG, Building Airbnb categories with ML, WhatsApp multi-device mode & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition ofĀ el producto!
š° The week in figures
$270M: Clear Street, an independent prime broker providing investment banking services,Ā raisedĀ a $270M Series B at a $2B valuation
$132M: ID.me, a Virginia-based identity verification startup, raised a $132M Series D; the company has 100M registered digital wallets on its platform
$112M: Altruist, a custodian and software builder for investment advisors,Ā raisedĀ a $112M Series D
$100M: PhonePe, the Indian payments giant,Ā raisedĀ another $100M, tacking it onto the $350M it just announced in a round that has grown to $750M
$100M: Alphasense, an AI-based market intelligence and search platform,Ā raisedĀ a $100M Series D
650k: Lemon8, an Instagram-like app created by TikTok-maker ByteDance, has amassed 650K installs in the US over the past week and a half, and 17M downloads worldwide
-80%: Global VC crypto funding dropped ~80% y/y in Q1, from an ATH of ~$12.3B in Q1 2022 to ~$2.4B last quarter
š° Whatās going on
WhatsApp is now easier to use on multiple devices thanks to a new companion mode that lets you access your account across more than one smartphone
Meta open-sourced its Animated Drawings AI project, which uses AI to generate animations from user-submitted sketches and doodles
Amazon Web Services unveiledĀ Bedrock, a suite of generative AI tools aimed at businesses and developers; using Bedrock, AWS customers can build chatbots, write and summarize text, and create and classify images using prompts
Speaking at MIT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman claimed his startup is not currently training GPT-5 and "won't for some time"
Twitter has purchased ~10K GPUs and is working on its own generative AI project; Twitter also reportedly hired at least two former DeepMind engineers
Twitter Blue subscribers can now compose tweets with up to 10K characters and utilize bold or italic fonts
Twitter hasĀ rebranded its featureĀ that allows creators to charge for exclusive tweets and other content; Elon MuskĀ announced āSubscriptions," which is similar to Twitter's previous "Super Followsā feature for creator monetization; Subscriptions lets Twitter creators charge $2.99, $4.99, or $9.99 a month for exclusive content, such as subscriber-only chats in Twitter Spaces and special subscriber badges
ByteDance is attempting to attract Meta VR developers to move their apps away from Meta's platform over to its Pico headset by offering devs $15K-$20K per title
Substack rolled out its Twitter-like Notes product to all users after traffic to Substack was throttled by Twitter last week
Q&A site Quora is now allowing users toĀ create their own chatbots; Quora users can now create the bots, based on their own prompts, to generate text in a particular style, format, and other factors; the bots will be based on Anthropic'sĀ Claude InstantĀ chatbot and OpenAI's ChatGPT; examples of bots already created includeĀ poe.com/PirateBot, which talks like a pirate, andĀ poe.com/emojis, which translates messages into emojis
Notion expanded itsĀ startup program, offering unlimited AI usage for free and a Startup in a Box with templates for different stages of company growth;Ā Notion for StartupsĀ also allows networking with the startup community, early access to new features, office hours, and AMAs with the Notion Team
SenseTime, a China-based company konwn for its facial recognition tech, debuted a suite of new AI products, including an AI chatbot, an image-processing tool, a video-generation tool, and a service that renders 3D buildings
China-based ride-sharing service Didi announced plans to launch a 24/7 autonomous robotaxi service by 2025
š Good reads
How to use ChatGPT in your PM work, by Lenny Rachitsky. Real-life examples (and actual prompts) of how PMs are already using ChatGPT day-to-day
A Total Addressable Market (TAM) Masterclass. Finance is often a black box for many PMs, and Tech CFOĀ CJ Gustafson covers a topic many PMs and founders get lost in. The size of the TAM ultimately determinesĀ how much revenue a company can capture over time. A company canāt āoutgrowā its TAM, but rather will end up capturing some fraction (market share) of the TAM
Itās all about trials. From reverse trials to paid pilot trials, benefits and drawbacks of each configuration. This post on activation flows for trials is pure gold, youāll have to return to it if youāre prototyping a product that counts on a product-led growth loop
The cost of craft - why itās hard to do great work at scale? ThisĀ post from George Kedenburg IIIĀ - former Product designer at Meta and Instagram - itās an essential peek into the tension between growth (and the abundance and complexification of features that inherently comes with it) and keeping the quality bar high for product design.Ā The author touches upon the many facets of the problem, covering the somewhat conflicting incentives we sometimes create in product-driven organizations, the sometimes problematic role of metrics (and their impacts on bonuses), and much more
Building Airbnb categories with ML & human in the loop. An insightful article by Airbnb explaining how their ML Categorization works in detail
š® Emerging trends
The raise of generative AI
About a third of the AI companies featured in this year'sĀ Forbes AI 50Ā are using generative AI in some form, highlighting how much the technology has become embedded in the AI landscape
Details:Ā Forbes released its fifth annual list of the "most promising privately-held companies" in AI this week, with aĀ particular emphasis on generative AI. Both GA infrastructure and applications were cited as major trends, with companies like Midjourney, Anthropic, Inflection, Runway, and OpenAI chosen for this year's list
What the numbers say:Ā Collectively, the 50 companies have secured $27.2B in total funding, led by Microsoft'sĀ $10B investmentĀ in ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Meanwhile, transformers, theĀ type of neural network behind ChatGPT and other advanced text generators, captured the biggest revenue share in the market last year at 42%
What's next:Ā Precedence Research estimates the global generative AI market size will grow from $10.8 billion in 2022Ā to $118.06B by 2032
Thatās all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel
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