That Was The Week

By Keith Teare

That Was The Week is an editorialized and curated weekly look at developments in tech, startups, and venture investing with a video and podcast for paid subscribers. All free subscribers get a 6-month... more

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FAQs about That Was The Week:

How many episodes does That Was The Week have?

The podcast currently has 213 episodes available.

That Was The Week episodes:

April 21, 2023Gone: DVDs, Magazines and Buzzfeed News
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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29min
April 15, 2023Substack and Twitter: Launch of Notes is a significant move
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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35min
April 01, 2023Embrace AI Experimentation
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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34min
March 24, 2023Are You a Communist? TikTok CEO Abused in Congress
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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36min
March 18, 2023As The Crisis Deepens
That Was The Week 2023, #9

Content this week from @AlphaSignalAI, @kleinerperkins, @thegeneralistco, @theinformation, @htaneja, @om, @mslopatto, @geneteare, @reidhoffman @garrytan, @techcrunch, @wsj

Contents
Editorial
Essays of the Week
Venture Capitalists Made a Big Mess of SVB

What happens to Silicon Valley without Silicon Valley Bank?

Where the Venture Community Goes From Here

A Tough Weekend

The Silicon Valley Bank fallout is just beginning

In Their Own Words: What Silicon Valley Bank Meant To The Valley

Impromtu - A Book Written by Reid Hoffman and GPT4

Changes at YC
Video of the Week
The BBC visits CYBERIA Café
News of the Week
TikTok Is in Deep Trouble

First Republic Gets Additional Funding From Fed, JPMorgan

GPT-4 will arrive next week and will be multimodal

Microsoft’s new Power Platform AI copilot will build your apps for you

LinkedIn Adds AI-Generated Profile Summaries and Job Listings

Robots Don’t Make Art

AI Will Make Human Art More Valuable

Mark Zuckerberg Ends the Tech Party

Tiger Global Writes Down Venture Funds’ Bets by 33% in 2022

Uber, Lyft Score Victory as California Court Affirms Right to Treat Drivers as Contractors
Startup of the Week
⁠The Remaking of Kleiner Perkins⁠
Tweet of the Week
@AlphaSignalAI
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37min
March 13, 2023Silicon Valley Bank: Canary in the Coal Mine?
Contents
Editorial: Silicon Valley Bank. Canary in the Coal Mine?
Essays of the Week
Silicon Valley Bank CEO Tells VC Clients to ‘Stay Calm’

Silicon Valley Bank shoots self in foot

A Great Thread by Genevieve Roch-Decter

Another Good Thread, by Turner Novak

Some SVB customers are struggling to wire funds out of the bank

Silicon Valley Bank’s Stock Plunge Sends Jitters Through The Startup World

Banks Lose Billions in Value After Tech Lender SVB Stumbles

Generative AI And The Future Of Creative Jobs

Yes, ChatGPT Is Coming for Your Office Job

How ChatGPT Will Restructure Engineering Teams & Create Opportunity for Startups

OpenAI President on Musk Criticism: ‘We Made a Mistake’

Substack: Empire of Narratives
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37min
March 04, 2023 Venture Apocalypse?
That Was The Week 2023, #7, with content from:
@pmarca @chamath @eladgil @annimaniac @Cookie @hunterwalk @SignalRank
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33min
March 03, 2023 Bubbles and AI
Bubbles and AI, by @kteare
That Was The Week 2023 #6

Content from @hunterwalk @altairvc @krishnanrohit @micsolana @johnbattelle @BessemerVP @stephen_wolfram @emollick @thecontentmines @tferriss @bgurley @Altimor
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35min
February 18, 2023"Here's Sydney"
That Was The Week 2023, #5

Contents
Editorial: “Here’s Sydney”
Essays of the Week
The Ascent of ChatGPT - Open Data Science

Bing’s A.I. Chat: ‘I Want to Be Alive. 😈’ - Kevin Roose (NYT)

A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled - Kevin Roose (NYT)

Inside the Heart of ChatGPT’s Darkness - Gary Marcus

From Bing to Sydney - Ben Thompson, Stratechery

We’ve Seen This Before: Investors Take To The Next Shiny Toy — AI - Chris Metinko

Microsoft explains Bing's bizarre AI chat behavior - Steve Dent

ChatGPT clearly has a place - Dave Winer

Feedback loops, and Google’s home-field advantage with LLMs - Sarah Tavel

VC-Unicorns Vs. Real-Unicorns: The 2 Disastrous Impacts Of VC Hype - Dileep Rao

Growth Investing - All Change - Rob Go

Section 230 is On Trial. Here's What You Need to Know. Josh Richman

Sydney and the Bard - Mike Loukides

AI Platforms, Markets, & Open Source - Elad Gil
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38min
February 10, 2023 AI Can't Be Stopped
AI Can't Be Stopped.

https://thatwastheweek.substack.com/p/ai-cant-be-stopped

Content from @IndexVentures @a16z @azeem @GaryMarcus @Ljungman @krishnanrohit @bradleytusk @karanslala @pmarca @Samirkaji
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23min

FAQs about That Was The Week:

How many episodes does That Was The Week have?

The podcast currently has 213 episodes available.

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