Opposite Day: Elon loves fundraising announcements

Also big tech doesn't love "spatial computing" and Artifact is shutting down.

Author

Adam Hardej
January 22, 2024

Daily(ish) news and live events for venture nerds.

Founders are usually excited about fundraising announcements, but not Elon. He called out Bloomberg for fake news over the weekend. Meanwhile, Big Tech doesn’t seem to be very into Apple’s “spatial computing” push and Artifact - that AI news app thing the Instagram co-founders launched - is shutting down.

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Musk denies report his AI company secures $500 million toward $1 billion funding goal

“The artificial intelligence (AI) startup xAI is discussing a valuation of $15 billion to $20 billion, though terms could still change in the coming weeks, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.”

Elon’s Musk’s AI company is in talks to raise a new round of funding. After exiting OpenAI in 2018, Musk later went on to start xAI in a focus to build AI that helps humanity in the “quest for understanding and knowledge”. xAI debut product Grok, is in beta and uses real-time world data from the X platform.

After Netflix says no, other app makers debate a Vision Pro launch

“It’s notable, to say the least, that many media companies are reportedly passing on Apple’s mixed-reality headset.”

In a interesting move, a slew of companies have opted out of releasing an app for the Apple Vision Pro. Youtube, Netflix, Doordash, and Snapchat are a few of the companies you won’t see on the Vision Pro. These moves come on the heels of a court ruling that upheld Apple’s 27% out-of-app-store purchases fee.

What happened to Artifact?

“Last week, Artifact, a buzzy news app from Instagram’s co-founders, announced it was shutting down after failing to gain critical mass.”

Instagram and Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom explained that the decision to shut down the app came about because they realized the market opportunity wasn’t large enough. This comes as a surprise, but when the last app you started is doing 2B MAUs (Instagram) I can see why it’s hard to get excited about 440K lifetime downloads (Artifact).

Hot Links

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Demo Days Are Back!

Tune in on January 25th at 3pm EST to watch 6 exciting founders present what they’re building to a great group of panelists and a live virtual audience.

Packy McCormick’s favorite investing tool.

A YC backed wholesale marketplace that just hit an inflection point.

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…don’t miss it!

Drizly Discussion Poll Results

Last week I asked if you’d want to learn more about the Drizly brand wind down from one of our readers who ran Growth/Rev for them. Here are the results:

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 That sounds interesting! (32)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ No thanks. I think I mostly get it. (18)

Looks like we’ll get this lined up! Excited to learn more about what the conservation was like inside Drizly. Stay tuned for RSVP details.

Letters From The Editor

Misc. (short for miscellaneous)

Tech Drama

This might be too deep in the Tech-Twittersphere, but there’s some beef brewing between Beehiiv (software I use to write this newsletter) and ConvertKit (a very similar, but older tool). Do we want to learn more from Adam (great name) Ryan? He runs a company called Workweek and is real expert on this stuff. Could even try to get the Beehiiv and ConvertKit CEOs to join for extra spice (no promises)…

Let me know and I’ll get it lined up 🙂 

Should I have Adam (Ryan) come explain the beef?

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Talk soon,
Adam

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