trending 📈

📦 Amazon extends Prime to external sites. Ever wished that your favorite D2C brand offered free, two-day shipping like Amazon Prime? You’re in luck - Amazon announced that it will be rolling out “Buy with Prime” to third-party merchants. Brands no longer need to sell their products on Amazon to tap into the company’s powerful fulfillment and delivery network. Instead, they’ll pay a fee to Amazon to store, pack, ship, and deliver their orders.

💸 ChatGPT ponders paid plans. OpenAI is exploring monetization options for ChatGPT, its wildly popular AI chatbot that launched in late November. The company unveiled a waitlist for a paid plan that will offer “higher limits & faster performance.” In other news, OpenAI released a new version of the model that should be more factually accurate - but has some users complaining that it’s now too restrictive. 

🛑 JPM shutters Frank. In late 2021, JPMorgan acquired Frank - a financial planning platform for college students - for $175M. This week, JPM shut down Frank’s website and accused founder Charlie Javice of fabricating 4M accounts (more than 90% of the company’s customers). JPM reportedly discovered the issue after trying to email a subset of customers and finding that 70% of messages bounced back. 

The bank is now suing Javice and Frank’s Head of Growth. Meanwhile, Javice is also suing JPMorgan - she claims that the investigation (and her subsequent termination from JPM) were “groundless,” and that the bank is trying to retrade the acquisition. 

👨‍💻 SBF joins Substack. Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried continues to mount his own defense online. This week, he launched a Substack and published a “pre-mortem” on what went wrong. The main takeaways? He believes FTX’s U.S. business is solvent, and asserts no customer funds were stolen. He blames FTX International’s collapse on two things - (1) Alameda (FTX’s associated hedge fund) failing to hedge market exposure, and (2) a run on Alameda precipitated by Binance CEO CZ.

what we’re following 👀

A deep dive on Target’s Red Card - is this the future of debit?

As U.S. governors ban TikTok, college students are losing access on campus WiFi.

YouTube will compete with Roku via new free streaming channels.

What HBO’s new show The Last of Us means for screen adaptations of video games.

We’re only 15 days into 2023, but one company is dominating the App Store ranks thus far: Temu! The shopping app has held the #1 spot on iOS for 75% of the year, continuing its momentum from 2022. Temu launched in the U.S. in September, and by December saw more than 2x the monthly downloads of apps like Amazon and Shein.

If you haven’t used Temu yet, it’s the U.S. version of Pinduoduo - a publicly traded Chinese social commerce app. Pinduoduo has been a success story in China, with $18B USD in revenue over the past 12 months!

The core of Pinduoduo is group buying, where users can unlock discounts on specific items by recruiting a “team” to join their order. Users have 24 hours to form a team, and often share links on platforms like WeChat to find buyers to join them (outside friends and family). Pinduoduo is gamified in other ways as well - such as mini games with real world prizes and vouchers that you earn via daily check-ins.

Temu is developed by the same parent company as Pinduoduo. But so far, it’s a much more streamlined product, focused around cheap prices on products from blenders to pianos. Users can’t (yet) unlock discounts through group buying, but can get rewards for other users signing up via referral codes. This includes one promo that gives new users and their referrer $20. On most apps, referral bonuses are given as credits for in-app purchases - but on Temu, users can withdraw the cash. (To be fair, it’s not quite this easy! The new user also has to refer friends to fully unlock the cash.)

Other promos earn users a chance to win money every time someone clicks on their referral link. Unsurprisingly, this has encouraged “click for click” behavior, where users on forums like Reddit click on each other’s codes as many times as possible across devices. Temu also gamifies engagement in clever ways within the app itself. One of our favorites? Fishland, where you can claim a free item if you come back for six days in a row to feed fish (or speed up the process by inviting friends).

Given the low prices and cash giveaways, some users are, understandably, suspicious about how legitimate the app is. But other than delayed shipping times (given most items are sent directly from manufacturers in China), reviews have been largely positive. The value prop of Temu seems particularly strong in times of economic instability, where users will put in more effort to get discounts on products.

The bigger question for Temu would typically be how they can afford to spend so much on customer acquisition, especially given product prices are so low. After the payout to the manufacturer, it’s unlikely Temu makes much on each order. There’s an interesting parallel here with TikTok, which was also backed by a deep-pocketed Chinese parent company (Bytedance) and spent heavily on early advertising. But once TikTok reached a critical mass of users, the tables turned…and the rest is history!

jobs 🎓

AI Fund - Senior Associate, Venture Studio (Remote)

Wheelhouse - Business Operations Associate (Remote)

Vestwell - Associate Product Manager (Remote, NYC)

Ribbit Capital - Associate (SF)

OMERS Ventures - Analyst (Palo Alto)

Upfront Ventures - Technical Chief of Staff, Infrastructure* (Santa Monica)

Perry Health - Chief of Staff* (NYC)

a16z - Enterprise Infrastructure Investor (NYC)

BBG Ventures - Associate* (NYC)

Seedcamp - Visiting Analyst (Europe)

*Expects 3+ years of experience.

internships 📝

Mercury - Venture & Ecosystem, Product Design Interns (Remote)

HBCUvc - VC Interns (Remote)

One Medical - Enterprise Marketing Intern (Remote)

XRC Labs - Interns (Remote)

Amplitude - GTM Strategy & Ops, Biz Systems Interns (SF)

Cambridge Associates - MBA Intern (SF)

Discord - MBA Strategy & Biz Planning, Product Eng Interns (SF)

Nuro - Technical PM Intern (Mountain View)

Duolingo - MBA BD, Finance Interns (NYC)

Harry's - Retail Partnership, Brand Comms Interns (NYC)

puppy of the week 🐶

We’re switching it up this week to give you a PSA: Lensa (the app behind the AI avatars that went viral last year) now does pets!

We made avatars for our dog Tilly and her BFFs Kai and Moka. Click through to their Instagrams (linked in their names) to see more for each of them.

All views are our own. None of the above should be taken as investment advice. See this page for important information.