Will's Weekly Roundup

May 29th - June 4th

Will Sullivan
June 05, 2023

Will's Weekly Roundup is a curated list of tech, business, and startup headlines from last week to kickstart your Mondays.

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Business

The business headlines you missed (or need to see again)...

India - India reclaimed its spot from France as the world’s fifth-largest stock market. LINK

NBA - Apple, Fox, and Netflix are among the potential bidders to buy the future rights to broadcast NBA games. LINK

JPMorgan - JPMorgan will close 25% of First Republic Bank branches. LINK

Twitter - Fidelity says Twitter is now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price. The company’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin also resigned after Musk publicly rebuked his own staff over a content moderation decision. LINK

Nvidia - Nvidia briefly hit a $1 Trillion market cap thanks to the AI boom. It’s now the fifth publicly traded US company to achieve the milestone (Apple $2.8T, Microsoft - $2.5T, Google - $1.6T, Amazon - $1.3T). LINK

Credit - By some measures, credit card debt across households in the US has reached $1 trillion. LINK

AI - $20 billion has been raised by startups using "AI" in 2023. It’s difficult to define "AI" as a sector since almost every startup looking to raise money now suddenly identifies as an "AI-centered-something-or-other." LINK

23 Wall - JPMorgan has built a unit called 23 Wall that focuses on about 700 families worth more than $4.5 trillion LINK

Jail Time - Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes has arrived at a Texas prison to begin serving her prison sentence for defrauding investors in the failed blood-testing startup. LINK

Okta - The software identity solution Okta, known for their secure (yet annoying) 2-factor authentication system, beat Q1 earnings and revenue estimates, however, shares are down 20% as the CEO expressed concerns about Q2. I didn’t know Okta, whose product I use every day, has a market cap of over $12B, making it a company worth more than both Dominos ($11B) and Zillow ($11B). LINK

Tech

The tech headlines you missed (or need to see again)...

Ukraine - SpaceX's Starlink won the Pentagon contract for satellite services to Ukraine. LINK

Pew - 58% of Americans have heard of ChatGPT but most haven’t tried it, according to Pew Research. LINK

VR - Meta introduced its new $499 VR headset, the Meta Quest 3, strategically timed right before Apple’s expected announcement of its mixed reality headset next week. LINK

Cookies - Google Chrome will begin gradually discontinuing the use of third-party cookies in Q1 2024. Starting in July, Google's alternative on-device targeting tool, 'privacy sandbox,' will be widely accessible for users to utilize. LINK

Neuralink - Musk's brain-interface startup Neuralink has received FDA approval to start human trials, giving the company the go-ahead to implant microchips into actual human brains. LINK

Shark Attacks - After several near-shore shark sightings across the US, New York is deploying a fleet of drones to keep watch for them at state beaches. LINK

Watchlist

Startups and companies I’m keeping an eye on…

VenHub - VenHub has created fully autonomous and touchless stores that have 5x higher margins, are 98% faster to build, and have a more sustainable operation. LINK

FlawlessAI - Flawless AI has created a visually dubbing tool for movies that uses AI technology to change and add new speech to films, making it look like the actors are saying the new lines. This allows movies to be “visually translated” between languages (where the actors’ mouth movements align with the dubbed speech). DEMO, COMPANY

PaletteBrain - PaletteBrain lets you use ChatGPT in every app/website on your computer. LINK

Outside Interests

Interesting internet finds…

Zuck - Mark Zuckerberg completed the Memorial Day “Murph” workout (run 1 mile, 100 pull-ups, 200 pushups, 300 squats, run another mile) in 39 minutes, which is insane. LINK

Netflix - The company estimates that 100 million people are using shared passwords, on 232 million paid accounts. Netflix claims it will start enforcing its ban on password sharing soon. LINK

Stony Brook - Former math professor turned billionaire hedge funder James Simons donated $500M million to his former employer, Stony Brook University. Gifts of that size are rare for universities. They’re even rarer for a public institution like Stony Brook, part of New York’s state university system. LINK

F-16 Fighter Jets - The US scrambled F-16 fighter jets in a supersonic chase of a light aircraft with an unresponsive pilot that violated airspace in the Washington D.C. area and later crashed into the mountains of Virginia. LINK

Youtube - YouTube is turning off its Instagram-like Stories feature on June 26. LINK

Succession - This website shows the numerical rating for every episode in a TV series at once. If you had trouble getting through the first 3 episodes of Succession, this will show you why. Check it out. LINK

Oral Exams - UC San Diego has pivoted to using 10-15 minute oral exams that emphasize critical thinking, discourage cheating, and boost student motivation and grades in the era of online learning and ChatGPT. The University has administrated over 7,000 of these oral exams to date. LINK

Restaurants - Restaurants are catering their menus for TikTok virality by making their food more cheesy, saucy, and all-around extra. LINK

Visuals

Three visuals worth taking a look at...

There are more female CEOs than ever in the S&P 500. There are also a lot of CEOs named "James" and "John/Jon."

The change in Zillow home value over the last 12 months.

Beyond Meat hasn't grown for 3 years. Is the plant-based meat crave over before it even began?

Wisdom

Two quotes of wisdom...

"The four most dangerous words in investing: this time it's different." ― Sir John Templeton

"As a parent, you’re not raising kids, you're raising adults." ― Ryan Holiday