el producto #344 🚀
iPhone 15 on September, X video chat, GPT custom instructions and web crawling bot, Booking.com's fintech efforts, How Headspace grows, Mindful context switching, & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$1.4B: Symphony Technology Group, a PE firm, will acquire editing software company Avid for ~$1.4B
$280M: Neuralink, a BCI (brain-computer interface) startup co-founded by Elon Musk, raised a $280M Series D; in June, shares of Neuralink were trading at a company’s ~$5B valuation in secondary markets
💸 Q2 results
Lyft: revenue: ~$1B (+3% y/y), net loss: $114.3M, active riders: 21.5K (+8.2% y/y), revenue per active rider: $47.51 (-4.8%); shares dropped ~9% on Wednesday
Roblox: revenue: $680.8M (+15% y/y), net loss: $282.8M, DAUs: 65.5M (+25% y/y); shares were down 20% after missing on top- and bottom-line
Twilio: revenue: ~$1B (+10% y/y), FCF: $71.9M, operating loss: -$142M, shares were up 6%+ on raised operating profit outlook for FY2023
📰 What’s going on
Apple is gearing up to release the iPhone 15 on or around September 22, following a launch event expected on September 12 or 13; the upcoming phone is rumored to boast various enhancements, including thinner bezels, a faster processor, an updated camera, and USB-C charging
OpenAI made ChatGPT custom instructions, a feature that allows users to customize character counts and the tone of ChatGPT answers, available to all users
OpenAI introduced GPTBot, a web crawling bot that extracts website data for training and improving large language models; websites can block GPTBot's access by using methods like IP blocking or adjusting their robots.txt files
Google is working on a feature for Android users to link their devices together, similar to Apple's Continuity features; Android devices signed into the same Google account would be able to communicate with one another
Google is moving forward with a plan to delete accounts that are inactive for two years or longer; Google will start deleting unused accounts in Gmail, YouTube, and other services in December; the goal is to enhance security as older accounts are more susceptible to security risks like phishing and hacking
UMG and Google are in talks to license artists’ voices and melodies and voices for AI-generated songs; Warner Music has also been in talks with Google for a similar product
Lyft CEO David Risher said the company is trying to do away with surge pricing due to consumer resistance and a higher supply of drivers
Meta has disbanded its team of ~12 scientists working on ESMFold, its protein-folding AI project
A team of researchers from UK universities trained a deep learning model that can steal data from keystrokes recorded using a microphone with 95% accuracy
Amazon started warning employees who are not returning to the office, saying it expects them to show up at least three times per week; an email was sent to employees who came into the office fewer than three days a week for five or more of the past eight weeks or three or more of the past four weeks
X, formerly Twitter, will soon feature video chat, according to CEO Linda Yaccarino; users will be able to make video chat calls without providing a phone number as part of its ongoing transformation
Disney has formed an AI task force to explore further AI applications across all of its businesses, with a focus on cutting costs; Disney wants to use AI to reduce the steep price of TV and movie production, as well as power new advertising features and enhance customer support at its theme parks
Verizon is shutting down its Zoom competitor BlueJeans, which it acquired for $500M in April 2020; Verizon said it will sunset BlueJeans products due to "changing market conditions in a post-pandemic landscape"
📚 Good reads
How Booking.com is transforming into a Fintech power house, by Marcel van Oost. For years, Booking.com was simply a conduit, connecting guests with hotels and vacation homes. But with time, Booking.com recognized an opportunity to better serve its customers and augment its business operations: the issue stemmed from the numerous inquiries and complications faced regarding payments
How the most successful B2B startups came up with their original idea, by Lenny Rachitsky. “Every prosumer product (e.g. Notion, Figma, Airtable, Miro, Slack, Coda) took two to four years of wandering in the dark before they found something that worked“
How Headspace grows: the monk who built a $3B meditation app. Lessons on category design and creation, the power of unshipping features, onboarding, and content-driven growth.
What to do when Product growth stalls. Andrew Chen shares some insights and thoughtful questions to help re-igniting growth. “Even great products stall on growth. Famously, Facebook grew in its early years to take over colleges, but then saw a stall as saturation effects took over, and the product needed to be expanded past universities. Then there was another period of flatness, just before they expanded internationally. And in recent years, TikTok stalled as a platform for dance videos before it was acquired, and a very large paid marketing effort helped push it over the top based on building out a massive library of content.”
Failure stories of Facebook and Netflix, by Adam Fishman. Netflix attempted to grow virally by integrating with Facebook, but the feature of automatically sharing viewing history on Facebook was not well-received by users…
18 Product OKR examples, by ProdPad. Good examples under different contexts: Product usage, commercials, retention/churn, customer satisfaction, different Product lifecycle-based stages, and velocity/productivity
Mindful context switching: multitasking for humans. As always, Anne-Laure Le Cunff hits the nail with some actionable advice on boosting your productivity and improve the quality of your output, all while maintaining healthy relationships at work and outside of work
What’s the business model for generative AI: how are we going to price it? How are we going to sell it? Financial Times points out how tech companies are unwilling to predict impact of generative AI on finances. Big tech companies have reported earnings without predicting the impact of generative AI on their finances, and the uncertainty surrounding generative AI has caused frustration among investors
That’s all for today! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel