el producto #394 🚀
AI agents, Meta's largest open-sourced lang model, Q2 results, Going multi-Product, Experiment review meetings, Revolut's banking license, Brag documents & more
Hey friends,
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$23B: Wiz turned down a $23B acquisition offer from Google, opting to stay independent and shoot for a potential IPO
$900M: Legaltech startup Clio raised $900M at a $3B valuation in a Series F that comes after it crossed the $200M ARR mark
$500M: AI startup Cohere secured $500M in Series D funding. The Canadian startup more than doubled its valuation to $5.5B. The funding will support Cohere's accelerated growth plans, including doubling its 250-employee headcount this year. A day after announcing the funding round, Cohere laid off 20 employees
$157.5M: Payments and lending startup MNT-Halan was minted as a unicorn 19 months ago when it raised $400M. Now, the Egyptian startup is back with $157.5M in fresh funding and an acquisition. Partially using equity, MNT-Halan is purchasing Tam Finans, a Turkish fintech company
$150M: Vanta, a compliance and trust management platform that helps businesses automate their security, raised a $150M Series C
$140M: Chainguard, a Washington state cybersecurity startup, just announced a $140M raise at a $1.1B valuation
💸 Q2 results
Alphabet: reported Q2 results meeting expectations for revenue and earnings but missed on YouTube ad revenue. Overall revenue grew 14% YoY, driven by search and cloud, with cloud reaching $10B in quarterly revenue and $1B in profit for the first time. Ad revenue rose to $64.62B from $58.14B, showing growth despite slower expansion due to rising inflation and interest rates. YouTube ad revenue increased to $8.66B from $7.66B but fell short of estimates due to competition from platforms like TikTok. Net income climbed to $23.6B, up from $18.4B. The "Other Bets" unit, including Waymo, earned $365M, up from $285M, with CFO Ruth Porat announcing a $5B investment in Waymo
Spotify: posted a record Q2 operating income of $288M, reversing a $67M loss from the previous year. Paid subscribers grew 12% YoY to 246M, and MAU increased 14% to 626M. Spotify cut costs by reducing its workforce, scaling back podcast production, and introducing price hikes and new subscription tiers. Q2 sales rose 20% to $4.13B, with projected active users at 639M and paid subscribers at 251M for Q3
📰 What’s going on
OpenAI debuts search product: Long rumored and now finally — partially — here, OpenAI is getting into the search game. A new product from the Microsoft-backed AI giant called SearchGPT is an “AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet.” This is big news not only because AI-powered search is heating up (Bing, Perplexity, etc.) but also because tens of millions of consumers are accustomed to asking ChatGPT questions
Meta unveiled Llama 3.1 405B, its largest open-source language model yet. According to Meta, the 405 billion-parameter model version is the world’s most powerful openly available foundation model. It handles tasks like coding, math, and summarizing documents in eight languages, but it only works with text, not images
Meta launches generative selfies. Imagine Yourself creates images based on a photo of a person and a prompt like “Imagine me surfing” or “Imagine me on a beach vacation.” Available in beta, Imagine Yourself can be invoked in Meta AI by typing “Imagine me” followed by anything that isn’t NSFW
Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash have finally won the Prop 22 gig worker battle. After spending millions on a yearslong campaign against classifying gig workers as employees, the ridehailing services got their way
TikTok rolls out a new feature that lets you find songs by singing or humming them, somewhat similar to YouTube Music’s song detection tool
Microsoft calls for Windows changes and resilience after CrowdStrike outage. Microsoft appears to be starting the conversation about moving security vendors out of the Windows kernel
Apple Maps launches on the web to challenge Google Maps. Apple Maps is now available on the web via a public beta, which means you can now access the service directly from your browser
Revolut, the London-based FinTech company, has finally secured a UK banking license. This achievement concludes a three-year regulatory journey, significantly elevating Revolut’s status in its home market
📚 Good reads
The magic of small engineering teams. How to ship fast and scale at the same time. To keep your startup’s speed and agility as you scale, you need to keep a team that owns an area of the product or company to 2-6 people. As James Temperton says, “This startup-made-of-startups structure minimizes the number of centralized processes and the need for lots of layers of management. It biases to the maker’s schedule – and makers get shit done”
Why you should have a brag document. Ted Goas shares a simple but powerful exercise (and template) to help you with performance reviews and job interviews
Experimentation Review Meetings and other best practices to improve your company’s growth mindset, by Elena Verna
The guide to going multi-Product. First Round Review shares 11 tactics for tackling your next bet, by the founders and Product leaders from Atlassian, Stripe, Gong and more. “When you find product-market fit for your first product, you have to hit that next phase of growth. What’s that next job you can solve for your customers? Unfortunately, I’ve seen many get this wrong by building something that’s tangential to what they're doing today“
Leading Product metrics. Fast and actionable signals to keep on your radar, by Susannah Belcher. “Leading product metrics are ways to define and measure likely business performance in advance of hard revenue or churn metrics. They’re early indicators by which you can hope to impact lagging outputs, like revenue and cohorts. They’re frequently more attractive to try to move since they’re easier and quicker to show impact than later stage outputs“
The rise of AI Agents. The use of AI agents in the software is rapidly increasing, with startups receiving significant funding in this space. These AI agents have the potential to revolutionize software development and redefine knowledge work, with the ability to perform complex and unstructured tasks. Agentic startups, such as 11x and Gradient Labs, are developing AI colleagues to replace knowledge workers, tapping into budgets previously allocated to salaries
That’s all for this week. As usual, feel free to reach out and share your thoughts by replying back to this email or commenting on Substack
Thanks for your support!
Angel