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
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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