el producto #330 🚀
Big tech Q1 results, Amazon's TikTok competitor, Google's foldable phone, Slack's AI features, Facilitating continuous collaboration, How Duolingo grows, The quantum revolution & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$990M: Apple's recently-launched high-yield savings account, which offers a 4.15% APY, brought in ~$990M in deposits over its first four days of operations
$330M: San Francisco-based drone delivery startup Zipline raised $330M in Series F funding at a $4.2B valuation
$300M: OpenAI completed a $300M share sale at a valuation between $27B-$29B; OpenAI's losses hit ~$540M in 2022 while building ChatGPT; CEO Sam Altman also privately hinted at raising up to $100B to develop artificial general intelligence; the company expects to surpass its $200M revenue projection for 2023
$250M: Cohere, a generative AI startup building tools focused on enterprise users, is close to raising $250M at a ~$2B valuation; Cohere is already working with Spotify to improve search and podcast recommendations
$100M: generative AI startup Runway raised a $100M funding round at a $1.5B valuation; Runway is one of the startups behind the popular text-to-image generator Stable Diffusion; the startup has also released software that uses AI to edit or create short videos
-20%: Shopify announced a 20% reduction in its workforce, its second major layoff in less than a year; the Canadian e-commerce company has also agreed to sell the majority of its logistics business to supply chain technology company Flexport
💸 Q1 results
Apple: $94.8B (-3% y/y); product revenue: $73.9B (-4% y/y), services revenue: $20.9B (+5% y/y); net income: $24.1B (-3% y/y); total current and non-current cash and securities: ~$166.4B; shares were up over 4% after beating on the top-line and bottom-line
DoorDash: revenue: $2B (+40% y/y), total orders: 512M (+27% y/y), gross order volume: $15.9B (+29% y/y), net loss: -$162M; shares were flat after earnings
Shopify: GMV: $49.6B (+15% y/y), revenue: $1.5B (+25% y/y), subscription revenue: $382M (+11% y/y), FCF: $86M, net income: $68M
Uber: revenue $8.8B (+29% y/y), net loss: -$157M, FCF: $549M, mobility revenue grew ~72% y/y to $4.3B; shares were up as much as 8% on Tuesday due to beating on revenue
📰 What’s going on
Amazon's TikTok competitor "Inspire" is now available across the U.S.; the feature allows users to access short product review videos uploaded by eligible content creators
Amazon is developing a more powerful large language model (LLM) to power Alexa; CEO Andy Jassy said the project forms part of the e-commerce giant's larger goal of creating "the world's best personal assistant"
Microsoft unveiled a major Bing AI chatbot update, including image and video answers, and enhanced Microsoft Edge integration
Microsoft's cloud unit plans to start selling access to ChatGPT on a private server for ~10x the current price (~$200/month); the software is currently being tested by a handful of users, mostly in the financial services industry
Alphabet engineer claims OpenAI and Google will lose AI moat; in a leaked document, a senior software engineer at Alphabet claimed that both Google and OpenAI would lose their moats in AI to open-source solutions
Google is introducing passkeys as an alternative to traditional passwords across all Google accounts, including Gmail and Drive; Passkeys can be accessed via fingerprints, face scans, or PIN unlock codes, providing a more secure login option
Google confirmed that it will unveil its first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold, during its I/O event on May 10; the phone is expected to have a 5.8-inch external screen that folds out into a tablet-sized 7.6-inch display; it could ship in June for around $1,700, making it Google's most expensive smartphone
Slack announced new AI features, enabling better workflows with integrations like SlackGPT, which will provide AI-generated conversation summaries and writing assistance, and Salesforce's EinsteinGPT
Inflection AI, a startup co-founded by Reid Hoffman and DeepMind Co-Founder Mustafa Suleyman, launched a chatbot called Pi, which is designed to serve as a personal AI assistant; the company has already raised $225M and has ~30 FTEs
Airbnb launched 4 new features to lure summer travelers away from hotels:
“Airbnb Rooms”: allows guests to book individual rooms, in select homes, at lower rates
“Host Passport”: provides guests with more information about their host, such as their interests, background, and the language(s) they speak
Transparent pricing: discloses all fees in the initial price of the booking
Responsibility list: clearly defines checkout expectations for guests — so they can factor that into their booking decision
Robinhood takes on Apple with a 4.65% savings account; the move, which comes a day after the latest Fed interest rate hike, will be for Robinhood’s Gold Members, who pay $5 per month for membership
Venmo has announced that it would enable crypto transfers as of May; the new feature will allow users to buy crypto on Venmo through fiat currencies and send it to another Venmo user, PayPal user, external wallet, or hardware wallet
BeReal rolled out RealPeople, a new curated timeline of "the world's most interesting people," including athletes, artists, and other notable users; the company has refuted claims that its user engagement has dropped significantly in recent months
Twitter restored free API access for emergency, weather, and transportation alerts, ensuring that critical info will continue to be shared without additional costs
📚 Good reads
A simple approach to facilitating collaboration in a continuous way, by Jonny Schneider. Change won’t usually happen in a few big steps but in hundreds of smaller ones. “If you turn up and say you’re doing it wrong, we have to do it this way, your way doesn’t work, chances are people won’t listen. They won’t listen to your advice and they won’t take your leadership. It’s better to meet where they are and walk to the next destination together, one step at a time”
How can you test a customer’s willingness to pay? Three strategies by Teressa Torres. “Don’t ask what people are willing to pay. We are all terrible at predicting our future behavior. Instead, create scenarios where you observe real behavior.“
How Duolingo grows: If Angry Birds taught you French. Another brilliant analysis by Jaryd Hermann. Insights on crowdsourcing, product principles, gamification, personalization, storytelling, ruthless A/B testing, duel flywheels, community, finding new ways to reaccelerate growth, and more
How to create Figma plugins with just ChatGPT (no code). A quick and easy guide including the prompt to help you create Figma plugins
How to do linear regression and correlation analysis. Olga Berezovsky, author of the Data Analysis Journal newsletter, explains correlation and regression analysis, when to use one versus the other, how to run an analysis yourself, and a couple of common pitfalls to avoid
Level, Depth, Time, and Frame, the four dimensions of product planning and operating, by John Cutler. “As a product manager, you often find yourself overwhelmed. Whenever you go high level, someone asks you to get specific. And whenever someone asks you to get specific, you are asked to "be strategic." It can be very disconcerting. What is happening is that you are navigating level, depth, time, and frame.”
🔮 Emerging trends
The quantum revolution
Quantum computing could break the internet. When it works, it will offer a new world of technological possibilities — but will also threaten data encryption as we know it, with huge implications for online security. Governments, corporations and venture capitals have been investing heavily to get ahead of this seismic shift, and to make quantum computing work.
But what is quantum computing? This brilliant visual explainer demonstrates how it works, and what it could achieve.
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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