Thursday Sep.16, 2021

🖼 Canva's big $40B

_The world is your canvas [Westend61 via GettyImages]_
_The world is your canvas [Westend61 via GettyImages]_

Hey Snackers,

Lots of startup ideas sound like: "The Uber for..." "The Facebook of..." This one has no parallel: Colossal raised $15M to bring the woolly mammoth back to life from extinction.

Stocks rebounded yesterday with their best daily gain in two weeks, as oil and the energy sector rallied.

BTW: We know some of you aren't snacking today. Happy New Year and an easy fast to Snackers observing Yom Kippur!

Tap

Design startup Canva notches a massive $40B valuation in the era of "tap-onomics"

Presentation deck looking like a Picasso... Sydney-based startup Canva wants to make graphic design accessible to non-design pros. You might've used it to create snazzy flyers, Insta carousels, and that presentation you forgot was due yesterday. Those DIY design templates just helped Canva raise $200M at a whopping $40B valuation, up from $15B barely five months ago.

  • The big $40B: With its new valuation, Canva is now the world’s most valuable female-founded and female-led startup — and the world's fifth-most valuable private startup.

Like a blank Bob Ross canvas... Canva went 0 to 60 real quick. CEO Melanie Perkins and her team launched Canva as a free product in 2013, and eventually introduced "freemium" and enterprise layers. Canva now has:

  • 60M monthly users across 190 countries, double what it had just over a year ago. And it's not just individuals looking for design help...
  • 500K+ teams pay for Canva, including corporate giants like Salesforce, Marriott, PayPal, and American. In 2019, Canva said 85% of Fortune 500 companies use it.
  • $1B: Canva has been doubling its revenue each year, and is expected to exceed $1B in annualized revenue by the end of 2021.

Canva is fuel for the era of “Tap-anomics”... We've gone from in-store shopping, to Instagram shopping. During the pandemic, corporate America realized the importance of tap-ability: the number of "taps" companies receive is closely related to their posts' aesthetic. Companies don't need to hire a million pro designers — they just need professional-looking designs that are easy for employees to collab on. That simplicity helped Canva notch its eye-watering valuation.

R1T

Rivian is the first to bring an e-pickup to market — but the truck wars are just beginning

Sorry, Elon… Earlier this week, Rivian produced the first electric truck that will actually end up in customers’ driveways — competitors like Tesla, Ford, and GM merely unveiled prototypes. The e-truck startup has raised $10.5B+ from investors including Amazon and Ford, and is seeking to go public at an $80B valuation. The deets on its R1T pickup:

  • Fully charged: The R1T has a range of 314 miles per charge and starts at $68K — a longer range, but higher price tag than most upcoming e-trucks.
  • Fully stocked: R1Ts come with off road-ready air compressors, built-in drink coolers, 11K pound towing capacity, and tailgates that can be lifted via app — bound to impress at any MIT tailgate.
  • Ready to roll: R1Ts trucks are now certified for sale in all 50 states. Rivian expects deliveries to start this month.

A truckload of competition… Some analysts expect the e-truck industry will more than double between 2020 and 2026. Large automakers like Ford, GM, and Tesla have spent years developing smaller EVs. But by staying laser-focused on trucks, Rivian crossed the e-truck finish line first. Others are expected to follow:

  • Tesla expects to start production of its $40K Cybertruck in 2022.
  • Lordstown plans for limited production of its $55K Endurance this month.
  • GM says production of its $113K Hummer EV will begin later this fall.
  • Ford hopes to start producing its $40K all-electric F-150 Lightning in 2022. The non-electric version has been America’s top-selling vehicle for 39 years straight.

Trucks could be the real EV ambassadors… America may be the home of the brave, but it’s also the land of the F-150. Pickup trucks accounted for half of the US auto industry’s top 10 best-selling vehicles last year, and the three best-sellers were all pickups. The best bet for automakers to pull Americans into an EV future could be towing them there... with e-pickups. If the US builds as many EV charging stations as Biden hopes, the success of e-truck makers may come down to pricing, timing, and range.

What else we’re Snackin’

  • Vax: President Biden met with the CEOs of giants like Disney, Microsoft, and Walgreens to drum up support for employee vax mandates.
  • Macro: Microsoft will buy back $60B of its own stock in its largest-ever repurchase program.
  • Jibbitz: Crocs shares soared to a record after the ugly-chic icon said it expects sales to surge over $5B by 2026.
  • Robo: Ford, Walmart and self-driving startup Argo AI are teaming up to launch an autonomous vehicle delivery service.
  • UniTube: Spanish language TV giant Univision just made three of its networks available for streaming on YouTube TV.
  • Ace: Roger Federer-backed shoe company On is now valued at over $6B before it steps into its IPO.

Thursday

  • Jobless claims
  • National Guacamole Day

Authors of this Snacks own shares of: Tesla, Ford, Disney, Walmart, Microsoft, and GM

ID: 1839045

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What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from “publicly available sources.” Which sources? Meta told The Verge’s Alex Heath that it didn’t include Meta user data, but didn’t give much more in the way of specifics.

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Meta, of course, isn’t the only company that’s tight-lipped about where its AI data is coming from. In a now infamous interview with WSJ’s Johanna Stern, OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati was unable to answer questions about what Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, was trained on. YouTube? Facebook? Instagram — she said she wasn’t sure.

Meta’s battle with ChatGPT begins now

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What is that training data? There the company is less loquacious.

Meta said the 15 trillion tokens on which its trained came from “publicly available sources.” Which sources? Meta told The Verge’s Alex Heath that it didn’t include Meta user data, but didn’t give much more in the way of specifics.

It did mention that it includes AI-generated data, or synthetic data: “we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.” There are plenty of known issues with synthetic or AI-created data, foremost of which is that it can exacerbate existing issues with AI, because it’s liable to spit out a more concentrated version of any garbage it is ingesting.

AI companies are turning to such data because there’s not enough good, public data on the entire internet to train their increasingly greedy AI models. (Meta had reportedly floated buying a publisher like Simon & Schuster to satisfy its insatiable data needs.)

Meta, of course, isn’t the only company that’s tight-lipped about where its AI data is coming from. In a now infamous interview with WSJ’s Johanna Stern, OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati was unable to answer questions about what Sora, OpenAI’s video generating app, was trained on. YouTube? Facebook? Instagram — she said she wasn’t sure.

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Amazon’s spy ops on rivals: shell companies, printed docs, and a fake Japanese streetwear brand

Some companies check out rivals’ websites, stores and public filings to stay abreast of the competition. Amazon made its own fake shell company and brands, transacted hundreds of thousands of dollars per year undercover on competitors’ platforms, and kept its intel operation a secret for nearly a decade even from others at Amazon, according to a fascinating investigation by the Wall Street Journal.

Working as a seller called Big River, a secret group of Amazon employees gained access to rival platforms, including Walmart, FedEx, and Alibaba. They used Big River email addresses and went to seller conferences as Big River employees. They even stayed hidden within Amazon itself. These employees would take screenshots of competitors’ systems that they would then show others at Amazon in person to avoid an email paper trail.

Perhaps most strange of all, the company created a fake Japanese streetwear brand called “Not So Ape” (clearly a play on A Bathing Ape) and continues to sell products from the brand on a Shopify store, presumably as an attempt to learn the inner workings of the shopping platform. Of course, copying is old hat for Amazon.

In meetings where they’d use this clandestine information to inform Amazon’s own business practices, the group resorted to literal paper. “[T]he team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies."

Exclusive | Inside Amazon’s Secret Operation to Gather Intel on Rivals

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Working as a seller called Big River, a secret group of Amazon employees gained access to rival platforms, including Walmart, FedEx, and Alibaba. They used Big River email addresses and went to seller conferences as Big River employees. They even stayed hidden within Amazon itself. These employees would take screenshots of competitors’ systems that they would then show others at Amazon in person to avoid an email paper trail.

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In meetings where they’d use this clandestine information to inform Amazon’s own business practices, the group resorted to literal paper. “[T]he team avoided distributing presentations electronically to Amazon executives. Instead, they printed the presentations and numbered the documents. Executives could look at the reports and take notes, but at the end of the meeting, team members collected the papers to ensure that they had all copies."

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