el producto #443 🚀
State of AI in 2025, Claude Extensions, Meta's proactive AI agents, Upcoming Apple Vision, Figma ready to IPO, Grammarly buys Superhuman, How Granola grows & more
Hi friends 👋
Happy weekend, and welcome to a new edition of el producto
🎰 The week in figures
$10B: xAI raises $10B in debt and equity. xAI also started piloting a program letting AI generate Community Notes, its internal “fact checking” system where users who usually disagree must agree on a base truth
$1.5B: Figma is nearing an IPO to raise $1.5B, with 2024 revenue of $749M and a 91% gross margin. It returned to profitability in late 2024. If you want to dive deeper, here’s a great Figma S1 breakdown by CJ Gustafson
$150M: Lovable, the AI web app-building startup plans to raise over $150M at a nearly $2B valuation. Achieving $50M in ARR within six months, it’s releasing a beta AI agent for task automation
4%: Microsoft confirmed plans to lay off 4% of its staff, which the company denies is part of an AI push, but some analysts have tied to their reduced margins from AI and $80B AI data center buildout
📰 What’s going on
Google Sheets is getting a brand new “AI function”. The new function is initiated using “=AI,” and right now it can be used to generate text, summarize information, categorize information and analyze sentiment
Project Omni: Meta has confirmed it’s developing customizable AI chatbots that can initiate conversations with users, remember what they’ve previously said, and proactively follow up with them. According to Meta, the proactive messages from these chatbots will keep users engaged, “provide value for users, and ultimately improve re-engagement and user retention” across Meta’s platforms. As an example, a custom-built “movie” AI chatbot might message a user to ask if they want movie recommendations for their next movie night, or a chef chatbot might suggest a new recipe
Perplexity Max; a new $200/m plan unlimited access to AI advanced search tools
An AI pen? Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s new AI device is likely to be an AI-enabled pen, according to sources. It will not have a screen or be wearable
Upcoming Apple Vision products: Apple plans seven head-mounted products including Vision Air and smart glasses with audio and gesture recognition by 2027
Apple also plans to launch a budget MacBook in early 2026 with iPhone chip technology
Netflix personalization: Netflix is developing technology for personalized trailers and interactive shows to enhance viewer engagement and boost its ad biz.
Netflix also partnered with NASA to offer live space programming, including rocket launches and astronaut spacewalks
Anthropic’s Claude has released a new way to use the “USB-C of AI” applications. Claude Extensions lets users install MCP servers in one click. On launch, there are MCP servers available from Chrome, Apple Notes and iMessage - as well as a local file system MCP server that lets Claude edit your local files. Companies are now racing to adopt MCP internally with Amazon leading the way. Amazon is likely now the global leader in MCP with one engineer saying that “most internal tools and websites already added MCP support.” I’m testing it 👀
Cursor has released a new web and mobile app. It lets you type in a task, and an AI coding agent will get to work on the task in the background. When the agent completes the work, developers can carry on the agent's work directly in the code editor in Cursor
After acquiring Coda a few months back, Grammarly has acquired email startup Superhuman. It’s clearly attempting to join Notion, Google Workspace, Microsoft and others in building an AI-powered set of productivity tools. Its ultimate goal is to become an “AI productivity platform”. Grammarly recently raised $1B to fund the spree
Cloudflare now blocks AI web crawlers by default, shifting from opt-out, to protect sites from excessive requests empower publishers in a blow to the AI giants’ business models. It will also allow companies to monetize crawling activities on their sites
Neuralink reveals patients using brain implants to control robotic hands and play Call of Duty with their minds, marking significant progress in neurotechnology applications
Republic launched “mirror tokens” offering retail investors tokenized equity exposure to private unicorns like SpaceX, Anthropic, and Epic Games
📚 Good reads
Is your product exposed to a high AI risk disruption? Reforge’s Ravi Mehta provides an “AI Disruption Risk Assessment” that can be helpful for you to quickly understand whether your product is at risk of being overtaken by AI. It looks at 3 simple factors: how easily AI can use your product (the interface), whether the principal value is just output (like generating content), and whether your data is unique or easy for others to access. You're more exposed if your product has a simple interface, delivers just outputs, and uses public data. On the other hand, if users come for collaboration or unique processes, and you have proprietary data or feedback loops, you’re in a safer spot. If your product is at risk, start integrating AI yourself, shift your value proposition, and invest in what makes your product hard to copy
How Granola grows. Granola, an AI-powered notetaking app, is making waves with its 'no-bot' approach, targeting influential users like VCs. Its growth strategy focuses on innovative features, user retention, and a pricing model that aligns with its acquisition tactics. Despite potential risks, Granola’s future looks promising
State of AI Report 2025 just launched. Interesting insights, including:
80% of companies use third party APIs to power their AI features.
30-45% of product roadmaps are now dedicated to building AI-driven features. In high growth companies, 43% of roadmaps are focused on AI - up from 31% in 2024.
79% of AI-native and 65% of AI-enabled companies are building agentic workflows
40% include AI features as part of a premium-tier product; 33% include them at no extra cost
The importance of CAC/LTV ratios. Most operators roll their eyes at LTV: CAC as an "output metric" they can't directly fix, but, in a fantastic recap, the always precise CJ Gustafson reveals why investors obsess over it, considering that an improvement from 2x to 3x would translate into a 3x higher valuation. These metrics are overly important: they serve as a proxy measure of sales and marketing efficiency, and become the primary margin factors in mature companies. “Therefore, when you build your operating model, you should deconstruct the metric down to the raw inputs, assigning each component to someone internally to own”
[UX] NN Group shares some best practices for designing effective AI prompt suggestions. Use-case prompt suggestions should balance simplicity for new users with complexity for advanced users, ranging from clickable pills to rich interactive examples that showcase AI capabilities. Designers and PMs should focus on contextual relevance, place suggestions near input fields, and use analytics to optimize which prompts drive engagement while manually curating examples to maintain quality and brand alignment
[UX] A mini-guide to AI prototyping. With practical steps, success metrics, and a roundup of the best tools, this article shows how PMs can validate hypotheses fast. If you want to dive deeper and go further, here’s a guide for Figma + Cursor
That’s a wrap for this week! 🌟
I’d love to hear your thoughts—what stood out to you, and how are you thinking about integrating these insights into your Product strategy? Reply to the email or drop a comment on Substack to share your take. And if you found this valuable, forward it to a fellow PM, Product enthusiast, startup founder or entrepreneur who’d enjoy the read
See you next week! 👋
Angel