el producto #329 🚀
el producto #329 🚀
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 of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$330M: Zipline, a drone delivery startup, is raising a $330M Series F at a $4.2B valuation; part of the company’s 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.com (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
💸 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 a $4B loss in Q1, following a $14B 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: €3B (+14% y/y, -4% q/q), operating loss: -€156M, FCF: €57M, MAUs: 515M (+22% y/y), paid subscribers: 210M (+15% y/y)
📰 What’s 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 company’s workplace chat app, intended to streamline collaboration
Microsoft's AI-powered graphic design tool, Designer, has been launched to the public in free preview mode; 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 OpenAI’s LLMs; the company also plans to roll out a business plan subscription in the coming months
TikTok is now testing a feature that will allow users to create AI-generated profile pictures; the tool is similar to Prisma Labs' viral Lensa AI app for creating colorful digital portraits, but is built directly within TikTok
Google added support for podcasts to the YouTube Music app; YouTube podcasts landed on the web last year
Shopify launched its own bill pay feature to take on the expense management solutions of small business banking platforms like Brex, Mercury, and Ramp
Klarna will roll out an AI-powered shopping feed for its app; the feed comes as part of a wide range of new products and services announced by the Swedish e-commerce payments firm 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 “explain like I’m five” and “high-level points”
📚 Good reads
Slack’s 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, this post by Elad Gil is a must-read. He covers everything from the various AI platforms and markets to the importance of open source and relevant IP. 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 don’t need explicit goals to encourage the right behaviors, so don’t 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
The neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. In this article, you'll learn about a handy framework to remember the three neurochemicals that affect your ability to get in the flow — dopamine, noradrenaline, and acetylcholine — based on the general areas of cognition they affect: fun, fear, and focus
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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