el producto #401 🚀
Duolingo's evolution, New iPhones and other Apple devices, Waymo+Uber team up, An optimistic perspective on crypto, Operating in Founder mode, Challenges of the PM job market & more
Hi folks 👋
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto!
🎰 The week in figures
$30B: Apple is spending $30B on R&D every year to try to find its next big thing. iPhones still account for 52% of all revenues but the hype around new phone launches is fading
$7B: OpenAI is reportedly in talks to raise $7B at a $150B valuation. It also aims to secure a $5B credit from banks
305M: OnlyFans now has over 4.1M creators and 305M users, both growing at close to 30% YoY, with revenues of $6.6B in user payments. The company’s owner pays himself all of the profits as dividends
$260M: Glean Technologies Inc. raised over $260M at a $4.6B valuation to enhance its enterprise AI platform and expand globally. Founded in 2019 by former Google engineers, Glean initially launched as a company search engine and now offers an AI assistant and custom app-building platform
$230M: Spatial intelligence startup World Labs raises $230M. The company will develop advanced AI models that can construct entire virtual worlds with realistic physics, logic, and detail, moving beyond current language-based generative AI
$1.5M: eToro will stop offering nearly allcryptocurrencies and pay $1.5M as part of a settlement with the SEC
84%: Waymo says its driverless cars resulted in 84% fewer airbag deployment crashes, 73% fewer injury-causing crashes and 48% fewer police-reported crashes
📰 What’s going on
OpenAI releases o1, a new "reasoning" model designed to answer complex questions and solve multistep problems more accurately. Alongside o1, a smaller, cheaper version called o1-mini is also being released. While o1 excels in coding and math, surpassing models like GPT-4o, it is slower, more expensive, and lacks the ability to browse the web or process images. Trained with reinforcement learning, o1 simulates human-like reasoning, moving OpenAI one step closer to its goal of creating human-like AI
Apple revealed the new iPhone 16. The release provided more detail on the integration of Apple Intelligence AI features as well as news about an AI smart glasses plan. We can also look forward to other new products like updated AirPods, and a new Apple Watch feature to detect sleep apnea. In a surprise move, Apple also hinted at its development of non-AR smart glasses like Meta's Ray-Ban model. No coincidence that Qualcomm also just revealed a partnership with Samsung and Google to develop mixed reality smart glasses as a companion for Android smartphones.
Apple announced that its AirPods Pro 2 headphones could soon be used as FDA-cleared hearing aids for adults with mild to moderate hearing loss. This feature amplifies sounds based on a user’s hearing test results, making hearing aids more accessible and affordable than traditional options
YouTube has officially branded its new generative AI feature “Ask Music”. It lets users create new personalized radio stations using text prompts
Waymo and Uber team up: Starting in early 2025, Uber users in Austin and Atlanta can book Waymo robotaxis through the app, building on their existing partnership in Phoenix. Waymo will handle the operation and testing of its autonomous vehicles, while Uber will manage fleet logistics such as cleaning and repairs. Despite facing a federal investigation over safety concerns, Waymo continues to expand its services, providing around 100,000 trips per week through its Waymo One platform in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles
Audible to train AI voice clones: Amazon’s Audible is introducing a program that lets a select group of professional narrators in the US train AI models on their voices. This initiative allows narrators to create voice replicas that can be used for audiobook recordings, replacing company-owned synthetic voices. Narrators will receive free voice replication, compensation through royalty-sharing, and control over which projects use their AI voices. Audible, in turn, hopes to expand its audiobook library and offer more exclusive content
Telegram discreetly updates its platform: Following the arrest of founder Pavel Durov, the messaging app - notorious for its lack of supervision of user interactions - updated its FAQs to highlight ‘Report’ buttons that allow users to flag illegal content to moderators. Few days ago, the company also removed its People Nearby feature in an effort to combat bots and scammers. Durov’s recent arrest seems to have opened the company’s eyes to user protection, which makes sense, considering they have almost one billion MAUs and over 10M subscribers
Alibaba partnered with Mastercard in the US to launch co-branded business credit cards – powered by Cardless – to reward businesses for cross-border and domestic sourcing purchases through Alibaba
Starting in 2025, Y Combinator will increase its annual cohorts from two to four. This doesn’t mean more companies will join YC each year, but the cohorts will be smaller. This means there will be twice as many demo days, giving investors more opportunities to engage with startups
Anthropic has launched a new API management feature called Workspaces that allows companies to manage Claude deployments. For Product teams, this means control over things like monthly spending limits and access / user permissions settings
Mistral releases multimodal model: The French AI startup has released Pixtral 12B, a 12-billion-parameter model capable of processing both images and text. The model can answer questions about images given via URLs or base64 encoding and is comparable to other multimodal models like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4
📚 Good reads
This week two articles highlight the current divide in tech leadership styles: The crisis in tech leadership vs Founder mode. Paul Graham explains the idea of Founder mode (vs Manager mode), and why Brian Chesky is bullish on it at Airbnb. As companies scale, founders are told they need to change the way they run their companies, but lately Chesky has been defending another perspective. Dave Feldman explains what’s wrong with that perspective, which accepts ineffective and tyrannical founders, diminishes non-founders, and denies founders the necessary resources and expertise. Feldman emphasizes the importance of empowering people and investing in leadership for better outcomes: “you needn’t pursue some mythical “founder mode” all by yourself, or isolate yourself even further from your team. Lean on the expertise and resources around you, and forge your leadership perspective on that foundation“
What’s wrong with the Product Management job market? A useful analysis of current trends and challenges, by James Gunaca. Drawing from interviews with over 50 product managers, hiring managers, and recruiters across three continents, this article explores the new challenges facing candidates and employers, the rise in competition, and how recent trends are reshaping the hiring process in tech
Why iOS 18 will destroy product referral and growth programs. Soon the world will update to iOS 18, and it will add significant friction for users to invite their friends, hurting the growth prospects of many consumer apps. Why? Andrew Chen explains all
Duolingo’s onboarding - what’s changed since 2022? Personalisation, animation, speed, … I find it always useful and inspiring to see what one of the best gamified products you can find are doing. Rossie Hoggmascall shares useful lessons from Duolingo’s recent updates
Good things take time. Gaby Goldberg and Bridget Harris offer an optimistic perspective on crypto, countering the recent negativity. Tangible use cases—like stablecoin adoption in developing countries or prediction markets like Polymarket—are already happening, and even some consumer-facing brands are taking baby steps. Infrastructure maturation is laying the groundwork for future innovations, and—even if progress feels slow—the message is clear: crypto's breakthroughs are happening, but they take time to fully materialize.
What happened when the EU forced Google to remove maps from search results? An interesting piece of analysis on the impact of the Digital Markets Act (DMA) on consumer behavior, focusing on changes in Google’s search result presentation in the European Union (EU). in January 2024, Google was forced to remove clickable maps in search results. The result was a drop in Google Maps visits - but no discernable uptake in alternative mapping services
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