el producto #363 đ
el producto #363 đ
Product books, Adobe won't buy Figma, Mastering Product Discovery, End of year reflections, OpenAI funding, Fintech winners of 2023, Spotify Wrapped UX & more
Hey team,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto, and happy holidays for those of you taking some time off!
đ° The week in figures
$100B: OpenAI is in early talks to raise a new funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at $100B or more
$1B: Adobe abandons $20B acquisition of Figma. Following mounting pressure from regulators in the UK and EU, Adobe and Figma announced on Monday that both companies are mutually ending their merger agreement, which would have seen Adobe acquire the Figma product design platform for $20B. Because of the termination, Adobe is required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1B in cash
$1B: Stripe grew net revenue to ~$1B in Q3 2023, operating income to $150M+ in Q3 and nearly $200M from January to September 2023, vs. losing ~$75M in 2022
$1B: Indian e-commerce Flipkart is in discussions to raise $1B that would value the firm at $33B. Walmart reportedly plans to invest an additional $600M
$750M: Anthropic, an AI startup competing with OpenAI, is in talks to secure $750M at a pre-funding valuation of $18.4B. Google and Amazon have each pledged multi-billion-dollar investments in the company in recent months, making it one of the best-funded AI startups
$500M: e-commerce giant Coupang plans to acquire Farfetch Holdings. The deal will provide Farfetch with $500M in capital to support its operations
$340M: Tamara, a buy now, pay later platform for consumers in Saudi Arabia and the wider GCC, raised $340M at a $1B valuation
11M: Amsterdam-based fintech Bunq has reached 11M users throughout the European Union. This exponential growth, a 55% increase since July 2023, has resulted in the company amassing a total of 7B euros in user deposits. Bunq has just unveiled its own GenAI platform
100k: AWS reportedly has over 100,000 employees and Amazon is planning a major restructure in an effort to reduce costs and address complaints from customers
-40%: The VR market in the U.S. is experiencing a significant downturn, with sales dropping nearly 40% to $664M in 2023. Despite Meta's massive investment in the metaverse, with billions spent each quarter, its Reality Labs unit has incurred losses of about $25B since early 2022
2023 performance for publicly traded Fintech companies. The winners:
Affirm $AFRM +421%
Coinbase $COIN +355%
Upstart $UPST +257%
MoneyLion $ML 176%
Paymentus $PAY +126%
Shopify $SHOP +125%
Inter $INTR +124%
SoFi $SOFI +115%
Nubank $NU + 107%
Stone $STNE +90%
đ° Whatâs going on
Apple has stopped selling the Apple Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 on its online stores. The pause on U.S. sales stems from a patent dispute with medical tech company Masimo over its blood oxygen sensor technology
Samsung is expected to unveil its Galaxy S24 smartphone lineup on Jan. 17. The name of the next Galaxy Unpacked event, "Galaxy AI is coming," suggests the phones could have on-device AI capabilities
Microsoft Copilot gets a music creation feature via Suno integration where users can enter prompts and have the plugin bring their musical ideas to life
Microsoft plans to deprecate Windows Mixed Reality and remove the feature in a future Windows update; most Windows VR headsets launched between 2017 and 2021
Uber has filed a patent for a location-spoofing detection system which determines the probability that a driver falsified their location. The company is cracking down on a trend where some drivers fake trips using GPS signal spoofer
Chrome has announced that from January 4th, it will begin testing Tracking Protection, a new feature that limits cross-site tracking by restricting website access to third-party cookies by default. The gradual phasing out of third party cookies has significant implications for product teams and will mean first party data becomes even more important
Humane says it will start shipping its AI pin, an AI-powered wearable device, in March 2024. Designed to replace smartphones, the device lets users make calls, send texts, play music, and engage with its AI assistant via voice and gestures
Scooter startup Bird has filed for bankruptcy, just 2 years after its IPO in 2021
đ Good reads
Spotify Wrapped: 6 psychology principles that make it go viral every year. A visual case-study by Growth.Desing
47 books to rock the Product world, by David Pereira. Not just âanother book list.â David has become one of my most read authors this year, and a trusted source of knowledge. His book selection is top (Iâve read about half of them). Hereâs the direct link to the list
Look back to leap ahead: 7 questions for your end of year reflection, by First Round Review. Whether youâre a resolution person or not, this article will help you place the starting block for what you hope to achieve in the next 365
Mastering Product Discovery - Quantitative Discovery. Everything you need to know about Quantitative Discovery with stories from Lyft, Patreon, Facebook, Slack and more. An extensive guide by Adam Fishman and Behzod Sirjani
Navigating interim leadership: insights, opportunities, and compensation structures. Great insights for those interested in the interim leadership space, by Elena Verna, who has been an interim leader at Miro, Netflix, Amplitude and Dropbox
How LinkedIn uses machine learning to identify your skills (Technical case study). LinkedIn's new Skill Extraction model helps to build more than 41,000 skills that are used to match users with job vacancies. It extracts skills from user profiles, course completion certificates and job ad descriptions to build a complex skills graph. In this piece by the companyâs engineering teams, they outline the ways they use machine learning to do it
Whatâs the Distribution Shift posed to happen with AI? Casey Winters points out that even if AI is leading a platform shift, a distribution shift hasnât happened yet and - so far - incumbents that already have massive distribution advantages are the ones posed to profit best from it. Is a distribution shift going to happen with AI? What forms could it take? In the article, Winters also offers some parallels to learn from Web and Search, Mobile, and Mobile Ads
đ§âđŹ Cool Products
Worklink - transform the stuff you create at work into assets you can sell, or just build your Product portfolio
Kosmik - a visual canvas with an in-built PDF reader and a web browser with an infinite canvas interface where you can insert text, images, videos, and links
Thatâs all for this week! Let me know what you think by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Angel