el producto #329 ๐
Big Tech Q1 results, Apple's health coaching, Microsoft's AI graphic design tool, Slack's revenue engine, Different types of roadmaps, Clubhouse to layoff 50% & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition ofย el producto!
๐ฐ The week in figures
$330M: Zipline, a drone delivery startup, is raising a $330M Series F at a $4.2B valuation; part of the companyโs success is due to launching in less-regulated areas of the world while awaiting US approval
$100M: Pinecone Systems, a NY-based startup that builds vector databases that act as long-term memory for LLMs, raised $100M at a $750M valuation; customers include Shopify, HubSpot, and Zapier
$97.4M: Replit, a startup offering collaborative coding tools with AI integrations, raised $97.4M at a $1.2B valuation; the company has ~22.5M users and 85 employees
$85M: Super.comย (fka Snapcommerce), a consumer finance app that helps ~5M users save money and build credit, raised $85M
245K: Bluesky, a Jack Dorsey-backed social network currently in invite-only mode, has ~245K downloads on iOS, with 50%+ downloads coming this month after its waitlist opened
-16%: Dropbox CEO Drew Houston announced the company would be cutting ~500 employees (16% of staff) due to slowing growth and a larger reliance on developing AI-powered offerings
-50%: Clubhouse will cut more than 50% of its ~100 employees as the once-popular social audio app struggles with declining user engagement post-COVID
๐ธ Q1 results
Alphabet: total revenue: $69.8B (+3% y/y), search revenue: $40.4B (+2% y/y), YouTube ads revenue: $6.7B (-2.5% y/y), Cloud revenue: $7.5B (+28% y/y), net income: $15B (-9% y/y)
Amazon: total revenue: $127.4B (+9% y/y), subscription revenue: $9.7B (+15% y/y), ad revenue: $9.5B (+21% y/y), AWS revenue: $21.3B (+ 16% y/y), net profit: $3.2B; shares were down ~4% on Friday due to slowing AWS growth
Meta: revenue: $28.6B (+3% y/y), net income: $5.7B (-24% y/y); Family daily active people (DAP): 3B (+5% y/y), Facebook DAUs: 2B (+4% y/y), headcount: 77.1K (-11% y/y), shares were up ~14% on Thursday morning; Meta's metaverse unit, Reality Labs, incurred aย $4Bย lossย in Q1, following a $14Bย loss in 2022
Microsoft: total revenue: $52.9B (+7% y/y), Intelligent Cloud revenue: $22.1B (+16% y/y), Productivity and Business Processes revenue: $17.5B (+11% y/y), net income: $18.3B (+9% y/y)
Snap: revenue: $989M (-7% y/y), DAUs: 383M (+15% y/y), FCF: $103M, net loss: -$328.7M; shares were down ~17% on Friday due to missing revenue estimates
Spotify: revenue: โฌ3B (+14% y/y, -4% q/q), operating loss: -โฌ156M, FCF: โฌ57M, MAUs: 515M (+22% y/y), paid subscribers: 210M (+15% y/y)
๐ฐ Whatโs going on
Apple is developing a new AI-powered emotions tracker and health coaching service, codenamed Quartz; the goal is to tailor programs to individual users using health data from wearables like the Apple Watch
Slack launched Canvas, a shared docs tool that lives inside the companyโs workplace chat app, intended to streamline collaboration
Microsoft's AI-powered graphic design tool, Designer, has beenย launched to the publicย in free preview mode;ย similar to Canva, Microsoft's web app generates designs for presentations, work projects, and more using OpenAI's DALL-E 2 and user-created content
OpenAI is instituting a new data safeguard, enabling users to exclude their ChatGPT conversations from training OpenAIโs LLMs; the company also plans to roll out a business plan subscription in the coming months
TikTok isย now testingย a feature that will allow users to create AI-generated profile pictures;ย the tool is similar toย Prisma Labs' viralย Lensa AI appย for creating colorful digital portraits, but is built directly within TikTok
Google addedย support for podcastsย to the YouTube Music app; YouTube podcasts landed on the web last year
Shopifyย launchedย its own bill pay feature to take on the expense management solutions of small business banking platforms likeย Brex, Mercury,ย andย Ramp
Klarna will roll out an AI-powered shopping feedย for its app;ย the feed comes as part of a wide range of new products and services announced by theย Swedish e-commerce payments firmย on Tuesday
Reddit is testing Discord-like chat channels in 25 selected subreddits, providing more ways for users to engage with each other
Artifact, the news-sharing app created by former Instagram founders, added an AI tool to summarize articles in different styles, including โexplain like Iโm fiveโ and โhigh-level pointsโ
๐ Good reads
Slackโs Net Revenue Retention and the science behind it. Slack's go-to-market motion is powered by a segmentation engine built in-house. Six personas are mapped to each account depending on where they are in their user journey. Slack's recipe to drive upsells and conversions is rooted in five fundamental components:
Drive a multi-modal GTM
Set up a GTM infrastructure
Make disparate pieces talk to each other
Add intelligence
Make intelligence actionable
The AI landscape. If you're interested in understanding the ins and outs of the AI industry,ย this post by Elad Gilย is a must-read. He covers everything from the various AI platforms and markets to the importance of open source and relevant IP.ย It's a comprehensive overview of the industry's key dynamics and implications and is extremely helpful for anyone looking to get a better grasp on this field of fundamental importance fast-growing
Good goals / bad goals, by John Cutler. A short piece to reflect on the quality of our goals. What types of behaviors do your goals encourage? Realize that goal setting takes practice and iteration. In many cases we donโt need explicit goals to encourage the right behaviors, so donโt feel pressure to set a goal for everything
Different types of roadmaps. The product roadmap is one of the few work products only PMs own. Everything else that is an actual work product, can be done by someone else: engineering, designing, talking to customers. The three main buckets of roadmaps that are widely in use at the top tech companies these days are: the classic spreadsheet; the now, next, later roadmap; or, a visual roadmapping tool
โThe neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination, by Anne-Laure Le Cunffโ. In this article, you'll learn about a handy framework to remember the three neurochemicals that affect your ability to get in the flow โ dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine โ based on the general areas of cognition they affect: fun, fear, and focus
Thatโs all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel
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