That Was The Week Keith Teare

Contents


Editorial


Essays of the Week


State of Private Markets: Q1 2023


Fund Size Is Still Strategy - The Growing Disconnect Between Founders and VCs


'ZIRP' No More: A Founder Playbook for the Market Downturn


Series D Hits Lowest Point In Years. What Does That Mean? 


Nearly Half of YouTube’s U.S. Viewership Is Now on TVs, Helping Drive Ad Shift


The Unified Content Business Model




Video of the Week


Greg Brockman at TED


Yejin Choi at TED




AI of the Week


Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI"


Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?


Lina Khan: We Must Regulate A.I. Here’s How.


Google Suffers a Major Loss


Slack updates aim to put AI at the center of the user experience


Profit in AI




News Of the Week


OpenAI closes $300M share sale at $27B-29B valuation


New Unicorns Led By AI Companies In April, And Two Dropped Off


ARM registers for US initial public offering


Twitter Plans to Enable Publishers to Charge Per-Article to Bypass Paywalls in the App




Startup of the Week


Elon Musk Continues to Transform Las Vegas




Tweet of the Week


Paul Graham






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Contents

Editorial: Shrinking

Essays of the Week


These 4 Charts Show That, Slowly But Surely, Startup Funding Deal Sizes Are Shrinking 


The Fintech Funding Crunch In 4 Charts


M&A for venture-backed startups has fallen to the lowest quarterly level in a decade


Elon Musk Is Transforming Twitter, Not Killing It


The Mother of All Pivots


Grimes invites people to use her voice in AI songs




2023 State of AI in 14 Charts


The History of AI in 7 Experiments


Michelle’s Approach to ChatGPT Has Me Convinced Google Will Launch a Direct Competitor




The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born


Facebook Parent Meta Soars After Blasting Q1 Earnings Forecasts; Zuckerberg Sees More Cost Cuts


First Republic Plunges To Fresh Record Low Amid FDIC Receivership Report




Humane




Benedict Evans




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Content this week from: @jonfingas, @harrymccracken, @TurnerNovak, @fredwilson, @kwharrison13, @ballmatthew, @ttunguz, @timoreilly, @davidcummings, @NeilThanedar


Netflix will shut down its DVD rental business in September


The End of Computer Magazines in America


Shuttering of BuzzFeed News Signals Shift to Survival Mode


Can Substack Save the Social Network?


What Is A Protocol And Why Does It Matter?


Building an Actual Unicorn


2023 Private SaaS Company Valuations


Is Twitter finally dying?




Why Every Startup Needs an AI Strategy


Sam Altman: Size of LLMs won’t matter as much moving forward


You Can’t Regulate What You Don’t Understand




China’s new GDP figures may restore faith in its economy


Elon Musk wants to develop TruthGPT, ‘a maximum truth-seeking AI’


Google Looks to Turbocharge AI Efforts With Combined Brain, DeepMind Unit


VCs Challenged by the Downturn


Tiger Global Management’s $12.7 Billion Venture Fund Records 20% Loss


Apple launches Apple Card’s savings accounts with 4.15% interest rate




SeetGeek




@NeilThanedar





This week’s headline is “Gone.” Specifically, Nexflix’s DVD service, Maximum PC and MacLife Magazines, and BuzzFeed News. The latter was “shuttered” today.

We could extend the meaning to include unicorns, later-stage venture funding, and Elon Musk’s first Starship.



In the case of the first three, it is surprising that they survived this long.



But I think these closures are a moment to acknowledge and mark. They have already been replaced long ago, and their passing is a testament to the work Netflix has done with streaming, the emergence of the newsletter and blog, and the frustrations we all have with headline writers seeking clickbait.



The downbeat tone continues with a Vox piece asking (with an implied answer) Is Twitter finally dying? Vox is no longer a news publication when it comes to Twitter, it has become a rag with a campaign seeking to fight against the company’s very existence. It is the Fox News of Twitter coverage.



A more thoughtful piece from Kyle Harrison is still, however, downbeat. It asks why almost all unicorns have never made a profit but overlook that many have enormous free cash flow that they decided to spend on growth as a conscious strategy. Spending profits (thus removing them as profits) is what startups should be doing. Amazon has done so for decades successfully.



Turner Novak writes about Substack, one of the emergent platforms, and asks the question, “Can Substack Save the Social Network?”

He tracks the history of Substack, increasing the tools that enable its writers, creators, and consumers to discover and recommend each other and the impact on subscriber growth. Meanwhile, Tomasz Tunguz of Theory VC states that all startups must have an AI strategy. Fred Wilson says protocols are important but are not well understood.



These articles and others focus on what is new and what comes next. As Leonard Cohen famously wrote, “that’s how the light gets in.”

In Silicon Valley, over $11.5 billion was invested in AI startups in the past three months. Web 3 funding has slowed to a crawl but has not disappeared. And biotech funding remains vibrant, along with new energy startups.



We are entering a phase where a new cohort of companies, funded since the middle of 2022, is attracting capital because of the scale of their ambition and the opportunity it represents. The number of funding rounds at the seed and early stage is declining, but the quality of the investments and the amounts raised are both strong.



2023 will be a big year for the next generation of successful startups, and I can’t wait to see what they bring to the table.


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Editorial:


Product of the Week

Now live for all: Substack Notes


Notes questions answered


Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best




Essays of the Week



‘We have to move fast’: US looks to establish rules for artificial intelligence


Prohibition of AI that ‘subverts state power’ in China may chill its nascent industry


What the End of HBO Max—and the Rise of ‘Max’—Means for Streaming


Crypto VC Funding Slows to a Crawl


Here Comes the Startup Panic


SignalRank Funding Round and the Next Steps





AI of the Week


Y Combinator’s Most Recent Winter 2023 Batch Shows A Shift To AI, DevTools And B2B 



A Brief Note To Our Founders Re: Impact Of Artificial Intelligence



News Of the Week


Garry Tan’s First Big Move as Y Combinator CEO Roils Founders


As tech slumps, SoftBank sells VC unit to Singapore-based firm led by Masayoshi Son’s brother


European VC Funding Drops 66% As Seed Takes A Hit, US Investors Pull Back


Twitter, Inc. is now X Corp.


Twitter partners with eToro to show real-time stock and crypto information


Twitter Rolls Out Creator Subscriptions


More newsrooms bail on Twitter as Musk meddles with account labels



Startup of the Week


Betaworks’ new ‘camp’ aims to fund transformative early-stage AI startups




Apple Savings Account



Tweet of the Week






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Contents



Editorial: An Open Letter

Essays of the Week


Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter


The Open Letter to Stop 'Dangerous' AI Race Is a Huge Mess


Vinod Khosla on how AI will ‘free humanity from the need to work’


Thinking About AI


A Short History of Artificial Intelligence


ChatGPT Gets a Computer

The Accidental Consumer Tech Company; ChatGPT, Meta, and Product-Market Fit; Aggregation and APIs



Video of the Week


Coldfusion - AI is Evolving Faster Than You Think [GPT-4 and beyond]

News of the Week


Are solo GPs screwed?


Death of The Generalist Seed VC


The NFL Is Quietly Investing Millions Into Its Venture Capital Fund, 32 Equity


Apple Mixed-Reality Headset May Not Appear at WWDC as Mass Production Pushed Back Yet Again



Startup of the Week


Good Eggs Cuts Its Valuation 94% in Lifeline Financing as More Startups Get Desperate



Tweet of the Week


Sam Altman




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Content this week from @stuwoo @mvpeers @JuliaAngwin @chloexiang @vice @neuwaves @jason_keobler @tayhatmaker @pkedrosky @blurcon @billgates @theo_wayt



Editorial: Are You a Communist?

Essays of the Week


Who Is Shou Zi Chew, the TikTok CEO Trying to Reassure America?


U.S. Tech Should Support TikTok at This Moment


How to Fix the TikTok Problem


Banning TikTok Is Unconstitutional, Ludicrous, and a National Embarrassment


TikTok CEO says it wasn’t ‘spying’ when ByteDance employees surveilled journalists


Teens Social Media Habits and Experiences


Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment

The Age of AI has begun

Amazon Faces Moment of Truth on Alexa as ChatGPT Steals Its Thunder



Video of the Week


The Age of AI and Our Human Future


News of the Week




OpenAI connects ChatGPT to the internet


OpenAI and Microsoft Are Partners, Until They Vie for the Same Customers


Apple reportedly plans to spend $1B a year to release Apple TV+ movies in theaters


Amazon layoffs will shut down camera review site DPReview.com after 25 years


JPMorgan to acquire Aumni, provider of venture capital analytics software


GitHub Copilot X: The AI-powered developer experience


Adobe Launches Firefly AI

The FTC Just Announced a Solution to an Annoying Problem



Startup of the Week


Character.AI Hits Unicorn Status With $150M Raise As AI Craze Continues



Tweet of the Week


Keith Teare (yes, me)




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