el producto #339 🚀
Threads and the Fediverse, Moats in the AI era, Apple Vision Pro rollout plans, Marketplaces and transaction costs, Tracking Revenue per employee, & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$39.8B: US VCs invested ~$39.8B (-50% y/y) in ~3000 deals (-33% y/y) in Q2
$2.34B: Global crypto funding was $2.34B in Q2 2023, representing a fifth straight quarterly decline, with valuations down ~70% y/y in H1 2023
30M: Threads surpassed 30M signups within 24 hours of launching, and 1M downloads within 1 hour, becoming the most rapidly downloaded app ever, surpassing ChatGPT; it now has more than 50M signups
1M: Twitter alternative Bluesky surpassed 1M downloads across iOS and Android devices
400K: Apple has reportedly asked its supplier, Luxshare, to reduce the production of Vision Pro devices by more than 50%; the company is expected to produce around 400,000 Vision Pro devices, down from its plan of producing 1M devices
📰 What’s going on
Apple is planning a slow, appointment-only retail rollout of Vision Pro; the mixed-reality headset will be available for customers to try on and demo at dedicated sections within Apple Stores
Apple has updated its Shazam app on iOS to recognize songs while they are playing in other apps like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube; users can also enable the Auto Shazam feature, which listens and identifies songs as the user scrolls through other apps
Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over its new Threads product, accusing the company of poaching former employees and misappropriating trade secrets to create a copycat app
OpenAI has made GPT-4, its latest text-generating model, available through its API; developers can now integrate the chatbot technology into their applications and services using the cloud-based API; GPT-4 surpasses predecessor GPT-3.5 with enhanced text generation, reasoning, code interpretation, and image support
Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba has released its own AI image generator for beta testing; the tool, called Tongyi Wanxiang, lets users input prompts in both Mandarin and English, and it generates images in different styles like 2D illustrations, sketches, or 3D cartoons
Klarna partnered with Stellar Global to develop a virtual shopping solution; the solution allows brands to engage customers as they browse web pages
📚 Good reads
The concept that explains everything about marketplaces. Dan Hockenmaier on how by understanding transaction costs, we can better understand the dynamics and potential of marketplaces. “Marketplaces are simply businesses that don’t sell goods or services, but instead sell the reduction of transaction costs. As a result, studying transaction costs will help you understand where marketplaces will succeed, what kind of marketplace to build, and how to price them.“
The New New Moats - why Systems of Intelligence are still the next defensible business model. Jerry Chen shares deep considerations on the impacts of AI in the digital landscape: "AI doesn’t change how startups market, sell, or partner. AI reminds us that [...] the fundamentals of business building remain the same. The new moats are the old moats." Enlightening read for anyone trying to figure out the impacts of AI with a solid framework of reasoning
Winnable and Unwinnable Games. In the 3rd part of this series of posts, John Cutler explores the decision-making process and information asymmetries in a hierarchical organization. Each decision maker simplifies and condenses the information to present to their boss, losing context and detail. Among a bunch of other things, we need to maintain a balance of difficulty, ensure clear goals, and provide timely feedback and rewards
Revenue per employee: the GOAT of SaaS metrics, by CJ Gustafson. Revenue per employee allows you to drill down to the core economics of any company - it cuts through all the noise and there's nowhere to hide. It probably offers the best insight into a company's scalability: as your company grows it should demonstrate operational leverage - that means the ability to do more with less
🔮 Emerging trends
Threads and the decentralized "fediverse”
The move towards decentralization in social media is a response to concerns about the concentration of user data and influence over public discourse by tech giants
The "fediverse," a combination of "federation" and "universe," is a network of decentralized servers that can share data, and Threads is part of this network
Threads operates as a collection of distinct servers set up by users, similar to Twitter competitor Mastodon. Servers can become "federated" and communicate with each other if their creators wish to share content
Meta's entrance into the fediverse with Threads is a significant move toward open social networking
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, suggests that being part of the fediverse will allow users to take their audience to another server if they ever leave Threads.
Mosseri said Threads would not encourage politics or "hard news" due to associated scrutiny and negativity risks
Developers can build their features and set their own content moderation policies for their respective servers on Threads
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel