trending ๐
๐ป Snap launches AI chatbot. Snapchat announced โMy AI,โ a chatbot powered by OpenAI. You can message the bot within Snapchat - itโs essentially an in-app version of ChatGPT (with some restrictions). This is an experimental feature that is currently only available for Snapchat Plus subscribers who pay $3.99 per month, but the team plans to eventually roll it out to all 750M+ Snap MAUs.
๐ OpenAI releases APIs. More big news in the AI world: OpenAI announced APIs for ChatGPT and Whisper (its speech-to-text model). Some apps have already been using these APIs - for example, language learning app Speak leverages Whisper. Weโre now officially in the chatbot era, with a number of new ChatGPT-powered products announced this week from Shopify, Instacart, Quizlet, and Snap (see above).
โณ TikTok controls screen time. TikTok is making strides to limit the amount of time that minors spend on the app. The company announced this week that every account belonging to a user under 18 will now have a default daily screen time of 60 minutes. If they want to extend their screen time, the user will have to enter a passcode - and if theyโre under 13, a parent passcode will be required to unlock another 30 minutes.
In other TikTok-related news, Canada has banned the app on all government devices due to privacy and security concerns. This follows a similar decision from the European Commission (the executive branch of the EU) last month.


File this under โcrazy if true.โ A paper submitted by a team of researchers in Japan posits that Stable Diffusion can read minds (via fMRI outputs).
Subjects were shown an image and their brain activity was recorded with an fMRI. The researchers then used Stable Diffusion to re-generate images from the activity data - and the results are pretty impressive.
what weโre following ๐
What happens to all the office furniture when tech companies scale down?
Commerce guru Nik Sharma digs into whatโs behind all the seasonal Oreos.
Meta has dropped their VR headset price as Bytedance edges into the space.
Are you a builder, investor, or fan of consumer social apps? Check out a new piece from our a16z colleague Bryan Kim on the metrics that matter.
After years of leading growth at Snapchat and then investing at a16z, Bryan has identified a few factors that are early predictors of whether an app will go mainstream or sputter out. For the first time, heโs shared these + internal a16z benchmarks of okay vs. good vs. great metrics for early stage social apps.
His takeaways?
โGreatโ seed stage social apps have 50%+ MoM growth - ideally, this should be almost all organic. If your consumer social app doesnโt have an element of virality, you may not have product-market fit quite yet! Unfortunately, no amount of marketing dollars can fix a product that isnโt capturing user attention.
Even more important than growth is engagement. The most straightforward way to measure this is DAU / MAU - the % of monthly active users who are on your product daily. Social giants like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok all have DAU / MAUs ratios around or even above 50%, which is our โGreatโ benchmark.
The most important metric of all isโฆretention! Bryan measures retention in the most strict definition, called n-day retention. For example - if you have 100 users sign up for your app today, and 25 of those users use the app 30 days from now, your day 30 retention is 25%. Our โGreatโ benchmark for n-day retention is 70% at d1, 50% at d7, and 30% at d30.
If youโre working on something in consumer social with โGreatโ metrics, reach out to Bryan on Twitter. And if youโre not there quite yet, donโt worry - social apps often take a few tries to hit it big!
jobs ๐
Rhino - Associate, Special Projects (Remote)
AngelList - Venture Associate (Remote)
Vial - Chief of Staff (Remote, SF)
Cameo - Chief of Staff* (Remote, Chicago)
Hinge Health - Senior Associate, Biz Ops & Strategy (Remote, SF)
Slow Ventures - Analyst (SF)
Rippling - Business Operations Manager* (SF)
Company Ventures - Associate (NYC)
Ramp - Marketing Tech & Ops Associate (NYC)
Duolingo - UX / Product Designer (Pittsburgh)
*Expects 3+ years of experience.
internships ๐
Neeva - Marketing Intern (Various)
Cider - EU Marketing Intern (Remote)
Reddit - Communications Intern (Remote, NYC)
thredUP - Marketing Analytics Intern (Oakland)
Uber - Technical PM Intern (SF)
Patreon - Software Engineering Intern (SF)
Roblox - Marketing Science, Consumer Comms Interns (San Mateo)
PLUS Capital - MBA Intern (Venice)
Epic Games - Brand Marketing Intern (Raleigh, NC)
VoyceMe - Product Experience Intern (NYC)
Fanatics - MBA M&A Intern (NYC)
puppy of the week ๐ถ
Meet Riley, a 2.5-year-old Aussie / hound mix, and Koda, a 2.5-year-old Catahoula, who both live in New Jersey.
They enjoy wandering around in the woods, going for hikes, and making IG Reels.
Follow them on Instagram @roda_irizarry_!
All views are our own. None of the above should be taken as investment advice. See this page for important information.