TikTok becomes the fifth mobile app to reach $10B in gross revenue, US teens survey: 93% use YouTube, 63% use TikTok

Top News

TikTok reaches $10B in gross revenue, including $3.84B in 2023, $3.32B in 2022, and $1.72B in 2021, making it the fifth mobile app and the first non-game to do so. - Link

US teens survey: 93% use YouTube, 63% use TikTok, 60% use Snapchat, 59% use Instagram, and 33% use Facebook; ~33% use at least one of these “almost constantly.” - Link

Dealroom: Nvidia is the most active large-scale investor in AI startups in 2023, excluding accelerator funds like YC, with 35 deals, almost 6x more than in 2022. - Link

Oracle Q2: revenue up 5% YoY to $12.94B, vs. $13.05B est., net income up 44% to $2.5B, and cloud and on-prem license revenue down 18% to $1.18B; ORCL drops 8%+. - Link

Tesla's 2023 Holiday Update introduces an automatic 911 call feature in case of airbag deployment, along with the addition of Apple Podcasts and other enhancements. - Link

BlackBerry appoints John Giamatteo, the president of its cybersecurity business since 2021, as its CEO and no longer plans to spin off its IoT business. - Link

Founder University is a 12-week pre-accelerator program run by Jason/LAUNCH for builder founders. We're investing $25k in 20-30 companies from Cohort 7. Apply at founder.university/letsbuild.

Startup Funding

SumUp, a fintech startup that provides payments and related services to 4 million small businesses in Europe, the Americas, and Australia, raised $307M. The round was led by Sixth Street Growing, with previous backers Bain Capital Tech Opportunities, Fin Capital, and Liquidity Group also participating. The company has now raised $1.5B. - Link

Mistral AI, a Paris-based startup that provides technology for businesses to implement AI-driven chatbots, search engines, and online tutors, raised $415M. Investors include Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company is said to be valued at ~$2B. - Link

Armada, which aims to bring AI-grade computing to remote places like oil rigs using Starlink, raised a $40M Series A, a source says at a nearly $250M valuation. The company is led by former DataRobot CEO Dan Wright. - Link

Product Demo & Launches

Freepik Pikaso is a real-time sketch-to-image AI image generator. You can add icons and photos, move them around, draw on top of them, or play with the prompt. - Link

FuseBase is a client collaboration platform. It’s like Notion but tailored for professional services. Features include project management, knowledge management, and client collaboration. - Link

Campedia is an AI Camera that answers any question. It can be used for identifying plants, animals, coins, wines, landmarks, etc but also for more complex tasks like creating a recipe from ingredients in your refrigerator. - Link

Advice of the Day

How to Increase Your Cold Email Open Rate

A well-written email can land a dream hire or a huge sale, but poorly written outreach is skimmed and ignored. Rahul Vohra shares how to craft a compelling email in 3 steps.

1. Lead with the "reciprocity principle"

2. Optimize for "F-shaped scanning"

3. Edit down to <100 words

We tried this at LAUNCH for an outreach campaign and achieved a 68% open rate (3x the average). - Link to the full article

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This Week in Startups

E1861: Kevin O'Connor, traces his tech journey from DoubleClick to venture capitalism. Covering AI's transformative impact, startup evolution, and the challenges of convincing companies to use data, O'Connor provides insightful perspectives on successful entrepreneurship, remote work debates, and the current landscape of startup valuations and venture capital funds. - Watch

E1860: Scott Orn discusses the challenges of founder salaries, emphasizing the trade-offs in entrepreneurship, dangers of underpayment, and gender disparities. The episode also covers the importance of structured approaches to compensation, managing personal and company finances, and the dynamics of salary distribution within a company, including the impact of investor expectations. - Watch

E1859: Jason welcomes Michael Putz, CEO of Blackshark.ai, to discuss lessons from video game creation, the vision behind a digital twin of the planet, and Blackshark's programming methods. The conversation covers modern data training, In-Q-Tel's investment, a live demo of Orca Huntr, satellite imagery updates, remote work perspectives, and how Blackshark's team uses AI for efficiency. - Watch

E1858: Anne Wojcicki of 23andMe discusses the transformative journey of genome sequencing, highlighting the dramatic cost reduction to $99 and its impact on proactive health management. The conversation delves into pivotal moments in health understanding, strategies for healthcare integration, and the need for policy shifts, concluding with reflections on Wojcicki's 17-year journey and her vision for the future of health and genetics. - Watch

E1857: Sunny Madra joins Jason to showcase Figma's FigJam, a collaborative whiteboard tool. The discussion covers AI-generated images, company copyright challenges, and FigJam feedback. Sunny also demonstrates Fal, an AI tool for photo transformation, and showcases the Real-Time Latent Consistency Model. The session concludes with a demo of Alibaba's Animate Anyone. - Watch

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