el producto #408 🚀
Tech Q3 results, Meta search engine, How Figma built its AI Product, Tips for applying to Product roles, Chrome AI assistant, New Notion Products, The importance of generalists & more
Hi folks 👋
Happy weekend and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$14.6B: Klarna valuation raised to $14.6B as FinTech preps for IPO. Chrysalis Investments Ltd increased the value of its stake to £120.6M, up from the £100.3M it assigned the holding in Q2. Klarna’s valuation, while rebounding from a $6.7B low in 2022, is still well below the $45.6B peak it reached in 2021
$500M: Insider, a Turkish marketing technology startup that helps its customers “deliver personalized customer experiences across digital channels,” raised $500M. Insider claims that the funds will go to its AI work, expanding into new and existing markets and acquisitions
250M: OpenAI’s CFO says that ChatGPT now has over 250M Weekly Active Users (WAU) and that 5-6% of those sign up for the paid Product. Consumer subscriptions account for 75% of their revenue
$175M: With $175M worth of new capital under its belt, Sierra, an AI startup working to bring AI agents to the corporate landscape, is now worth $4.5B
$110M: Now reportedly a unicorn, Lagos-based Moniepoint just raised a $110 Series C that was worth more than all the capital it had raised previously. The company offers payment and banking tools to other companies. We aren’t seeing that many new fintech unicorns lately, and nine-figure rounds for African startups have become thin on the ground in recent years
60%: Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are the top selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores in EMEA
20%: Dropbox is laying off 20% of its staff - 528 employees
18%: Miro laid off 275 employees - about 18% of their staff
💸 Q3 results
Alphabet's Q3 sales of $74.54B beat estimates of $72.84B by 2% and rose 16% from $64.05B in the prior-year quarter. Google’s cloud unit grew 15% YoY to $88.3B in Q3 driven by server rentals and AI, helping Alphabet overcome a 1% ad growth slowdown
Amazon’s cloud computing division is experiencing a renaissance of sorts, reaccelerating its growth in the AI era. Not only is the business group growing faster than its overall results (19% for AWS, 11% for all of Amazon), it drives an outsized fraction of Amazon’s operating profit ($10.4B out of $17.4B)
Coinbase reported a profitable Q3 driven by strong trading volumes that more than doubled to $185B, pushing transaction revenue to $572.5M. The company’s total revenue rose to $1.21B, benefiting from increased interest in crypto as regulatory clarity advances. With 2024 elections on the horizon, CEO Brian Armstrong noted growing political support for crypto, further positioning Coinbase within mainstream finance
Meta reported strong Q3 results, with revenue growing 19% YoY to $41B. Profitability also improved, with operating margins expanding 300 basis points from a year ago to 43%. Capital expenditures remain elevated due to heavy AI investment
Microsoft: Revenue was $65.6B, an increase of 16% and beating analysts' expectations of $64.57B, while net income rose 11% to $24.7B
PayPal: revenue forecast fails to impress as profit push puts growth behind. Q3 revenue jumped 6% to $7.85B but missed estimate of $7.89B. Adjusted profit grew 14% to $1.23B. The company is moderating growth in Braintree and other low-margin businesses, shifting its focus to high-margin opportunities
Uber’s Q3 revenue rose 20% to $11.19B, surpassing Wall Street’s expectations, though gross bookings slightly missed estimates at $40.97B. Uber posted a substantial net income of $2.6B, aided by a $1.7B gain from equity investments. Mobility and delivery segments reported robust growth, up 17% and 16% in gross bookings, respectively
Snap: reported revenues of $1.3B, up 15% YoY and 443M DAUs, up 9% YoY
Reddit: unique WAU increased 53% YoY to 365.4M, and Revenues were up by 68% to $348M. A big driver of its growth was the rollout of its ML technology which has allowed it to expand to additional countries. Reddit says more than half of user growth was driven by international traffic
📰 What’s going on
OpenAI launches search. OpenAI has taken its nascent search product out of early access, making it available to paid subscribers with free access coming in a few weeks
Meta wants to get into search. Meta wants to rely less on Google’s eponymous search service. If Meta managed to make a search engine that handled real volume, it would undercut the argument that Google is a monopoly, and potentially add a real use case to all those AI query boxes Meta has copy-pasted around its digital footprint
Chrome is getting a new AI assistant that can perform actions on behalf of users. It’s known internally as Project Jarvis, and looks set to be one of the most transformative changes ever to come to Chrome
Apple announced new products. The new iMac and MacBook Pros get M4 chips for faster AI access. The new Mac mini is a tiny beast with M4 chip and 16GB RAM to tackle some serious workloads.
Google won’t be shipping its AI agents until next year. The delayed Project Astra is a wide-ranging effort to build AI apps and “agents” for real-time, multimodal understanding
Google’s AI search features — that overview box at the top of your results — are coming to 100 more countries this week. Presumably Google likes what it is seeing from the rollout of its AI answers. Search is rapidly changing with the expansion of Gen-AI, and other players (like Meta) getting into the space
LinkedIn launched a hiring assistant, creatively called Hiring Assistant. It’ll help recruiters with things like writing job descriptions, ingesting notes, and sourcing and engaging with candidates
Notion unveiled a series of new Products during its global conference “Make With Notion.” These included a new form building tool, customizable layouts for published sites, enhanced automations and perhaps the two biggest of all: a new Notion Marketplace and Mail. The marketplace will allow users to buy and sell custom built templates and Notion will take a 10% off all purchases. The network effects of launching a marketplace should mean more users building and sharing templates within the Notion ecosystem
Miro has announced a new “Innovation Space” which promises to let users turn boards into arctifacts like Product briefing documents and interactive prototypes. The waitlist is open now
Shopify has launched a dedicated new finance Product for sellers called Shopify Finance. It consolidates everything a seller needs to know about the financial side of their business, including revenue, tax calculations, payouts, and new financial Products like small business loans
GitHub has announced a major new product called GitHub Spark - a new AI tool that allows users to describe what they want to build using natural language and build a “micro-app” or “Spark”. To build a micro-app, users start with an initial prompt and then Spark will show you a live preview within a few seconds. From there, users can fine-tune it by going back and forth with the bot
Brazilian fintech Nubank is diving into new territory unveiling NuCel, a mobile phone service that’s set to redefine connectivity in Brazil and expand the company’s portfolio beyond financial services. NuCel is mobile phone service with flexible, no-commitment plans and exclusive benefits for its Brazilian customers, including 5G connectivity and integrated savings options
Python has overtaken Javascript as the most popular programming language on GitHub in 2024
📚 Good reads
How to build a billion dollar marketplace. Lessons from Casey Winters, the Growth expert behind GrubHub, Pinterest and more. In SaaS, teams can spend years building, prototyping, designing and layering on slick features. Marketplaces don’t need the most elegant tech in the beginning, consumers will forgive some clunky software if they’re getting connected to loads and loads of choices — whether it’s for food delivery, handmade goods, or drivers. But stocking your fledgling marketplace with tons of high-quality suppliers is far from straightforward. “When you’re building a marketplace, you’re tasked with generating demand and supply — so it can take longer to get the product to fully unlock. Marketplaces tend to take longer to reach product-market fit because you're effectively building for two customers at the same time.” Read how companies like Uber, Etsy, Faire and Doordash have navigated this cold start problem and built scalable, multi-billion dollar marketplaces
How Figma built its new AI search tool - case study. Figma’s Product and Design teams spent months building their new AI search tool. They started out with some basic assumptions which later proved to be wrong. Figma's AI search feature evolved from an initial design autocomplete idea during a hackathon to a more comprehensive search solution. In this piece, they explain the principles they followed and why they ultimately changed direction to build something users actually wanted
How to design products that won’t be become obsolete, by HBR. Teslas receive software upgrades that regularly improve their performance, tunable eyeglass lenses can adjust for changes in vision, Toys can be reconfigured to suit children of varying abilities. In a market that increasingly emphasizes flexibility, durability, and environmentalism, companies that make the shift from static offerings to products that grow will position themselves for success
The importance of high-output generalists in driving projects and businesses forward. Every team can benefit from having a high-output generalist due to their unique skill set; however, identifying and recruiting individuals with these capabilities can be challenging but critical for team success. In a competitive market, we’re looking for high-output generalists – team members that can move projects (and the business) forward, fast and at any moment
Applying for Product & growth in 2024. Leah Tharin shares some good advice for folks looking for a new role. “Don’t describe your job title in your CV, describe your outcomes under two dimensions wherever possible: Distribution and Impact” - this is something that I often encounter in my coaching clients - consider how your CV is a reflection of how you handle work
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