Will's Weekly Roundup

Feb 5th - Feb 11th

Will Sullivan
February 12, 2024

"I'd rather be optimistic and wrong than pessimistic and right."

— Elon Musk

Top stories this week:

Facebook turned 20 years old.
Adam Neumann wants to buy back WeWork.
Apple Vision Pro has become a meme.
Musk remains corporate America's most overrated CEO.

Headlines

Headlines you missed (or need to see again)...

ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros are launching a joint sports streaming platform.

Apple Card has given $1B+ in daily cash back to its 12M cardholders.

Chipotle grew restaurant traffic by 7.4%, crushing revenue estimates.

Snap is laying off 500 employees, 10% of its workforce.

Uber posted its first annual profit since its IPO.

Disney’s password-sharing crackdown has hit Hulu users.

Jobs, The U.S. economy added 353,000 jobs in January.

Spotify still isn’t profitable with 236M paying subscribers (602M total MAUs).

OpenAI's Startup Fund raised millions more through an SPV.

Sequoia Capital’s evergreen fund now manages $17B.

YouTube hit 100M paying subscribers across its Music and Premium platforms.

Starship Robotics raised $90M as its sidewalk robots passed 6M deliveries.

Palantir stock jumped after recording AI growth and first time profitability.

WhatsApp will soon work with other encrypted messaging apps.

Anduril unveiled "Iris" sensors for passive airborne imaging and targeting.

Foldable, Apple is still working on foldable iPhones and iPads.

Bard, Google’s AI chatbot, rebranded to Gemini.

Watchlist

Startups and companies I’m keeping an eye on…

Oobit is an Apple-pay-like solution that lets you pay using crypto.

Archive Buttons is the best way to remove website paywalls.

Twin Labs is a text-to-action model that uses AI to complete tasks.

Ezra offers full body cancer screenings for 500+ conditions across 13 organs.

Elroy Air makes autonomous logistic planes that can take-off/land vertically.

Vocode automates phone calls with hyper realistic conversational AI.

Top Picks

Specific articles and podcasts worth taking a look at…

Why the FAA still can’t fix Boeing. WSJ

The state of VC with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner. PODCAST

Meta finally figured out how to sell the Metaverse WSJ

Visuals

Three visuals worth taking a look at...

Weekly Poll

Will Adam Neumann be successful in buying back WeWork? Click the corresponding link to record your answer.

Last Week’s Poll Results: 48% of you use AI chatbots on a daily or weekly basis.

Outside Interests

Interesting internet finds…

Nikki Haley lost the Nevada Primary to “None of these Candidates.”

Disney’s mandatory diversity and inclusion requirements seem extreme.

Not a single student can do math at grade level in 53 Illinois schools.

Uber’s $650M ad business is run out of a Google Form.

Netanyahu rejected Hamas’s demand to release 1000s of prisoners.

College Financial-Aid applications fell 57% because of tech glitches in the government’s latest Fafsa rollout, making it hard for families to apply for aid.