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ConocoPhillips to buy Marathon Oil in $17 billion

Plus: Sam Altman and his husband signed the Giving Pledge

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Cash Nut
May 30, 2024

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In Today’s Edition 

  • Top 10 GTM Mistakes Founders Make 

  • PwC is OpenAI’s first reseller and largest enterprise partner

  • Sam Altman and his husband signed the Giving Pledge

  • Apple's AI plans involves 'black box' for cloud data 

  • Neuralink is recruiting another three subjects for its brain implant study

  • BYD has unveiled a new hybrid powertrain

  • A myopia epidemic is sweeping the globe. Here's how to stop it 

🚀Startups Nuts

Founders often make critical go-to-market mistakes when scaling their startups, such as hiring the wrong executives, cutting marketing budgets too deeply, and prioritizing short-term profitability over growth. To avoid these pitfalls, founders should hire experienced leaders who can effectively sell and market the product, maintain a strong commitment to sales and customer success, and strategically leverage emerging technologies like AI while fostering sustainable growth.

Top Deals

  • Allez Health, a Carlsbad, Calif., biosensor developer, raised $60m in Series A extension funding

  •  FintechOS, a Romanian low-code platform for banks and insurers, raised $60m in new Series B funding

  • Expressable, an Austin, Texas-based virtual speech therapy provider, raised $26m in Series B funding

  • yris (fka RedSea), a UAE-based ag-tech focused on increasing crop yields, raised $16m in Series A funding

🏭Business Nuts 

ConocoPhillips is acquiring Marathon Oil in a $17B deal that will add 2B barrels of resources to the company’s US inventory. ConocoPhillips is the last major U.S. oil company to pull the trigger on a big acquisition as the industry undergoes a wave of consolidation. Share buybacks worth $7 billion in the first year after the deal is completed and $20 billion in the first three years.

Other News

  • PwC is OpenAI’s first reseller and largest enterprise partner. The firm, which invested $1B to scale its AI capabilities, will give ChatGPT licenses to 100k+ employees and sell OpenAI products to its clients.

  • OpenAI has also partnered with The Atlantic and Vox Media (The Verge, Thrillist, and more) to license these publications’ content and data for use in chatbot responses and training.

  • Sam Altman and his husband signed the Giving Pledge, promising to donate at least half of their money to philanthropic causes. Altman is worth a reported $2B+ despite having no stake in OpenAI.

  • Walgreens joined Target, Walmart, and Amazon in dropping prices to lure back everyone rightfully furious about $11 tubes of toothpaste. We know Walgreens’ heart is true because its 16-inch Squishmallow pillows are now just $20 (previously $24.99).

  • EngineOwning must pay Activision $14.4m+ for making “Call of Duty” cheats, the use of which are against the game’s terms. This follows two settlements worth $3m from people tied to the company.

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📱Tech Nuts

Apple's AI plans involves 'black box' for cloud data 

Apple is expected to announce AI implementations into iOS 18 and its other operating systems at WWDC. The company intends to process data from AI applications inside a virtual black box that will use only Apple's hardware to perform AI processing in the cloud. The approach will prevent both Apple and potential hackers from being able to see app data. Using a cloud approach allows Apple to reduce the hardware requirements of its products.

Other News

  • Neuralink is recruiting another three subjects for its brain implant study. It is seeking subjects aged 22 to 75 with severe quadriplegia due to spinal cord injury or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis for at least one year without improvement. 

  • YouTube Playables is now available, for free, to all users — adding another 75+ games to parents’ perpetual screen-time nightmares.

  • BYD has unveiled a new hybrid powertrain that can travel for more than 2,000 kilometers without recharging or refueling. Vehicles with the technology can travel from New York to Miami on a single charge and a full tank of gas.

  • Arm's next-generation Cortex-X925 CPU and Immortalis G925 GPU designs will offer optimized layouts to make it easier for device makers to implement their own system-on-a-chip layouts.

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🎁Miscellaneous

Studies from around the world are finding an increased rate of incidences of pathologically stretched eyeballs among children compared with pre-pandemic levels. The pandemic saw real-life classrooms and playgrounds give way to virtual meetings and digital devices, increasing the time that children spend focusing on screens and other nearby objects significantly. This shift has caused their eyeballs to lengthen to accommodate short-vision tasks. An hour of extra outdoor break time every day can markedly reduce the incidence of short-sightedness.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful

  • Frase - An AI-powered tool easily creates content that ranks on Google

  • Aragon - Helps to create realistic AI photos of yourself that look like they were taken by a professional photographer

  • Softr - Helps you turn your spreadsheets and databases into client portals and internal tools

  • Viz.ai - An AI-powered care coordination platform that accelerates diagnosis and treatment to improve patient outcomes

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That’s it from our side for today.ConocoPhillips to buy Marathon Oil in $17 billion