• Cash Nut
  • Posts
  • Meta is reportedly offering millions to use Hollywood voices

Meta is reportedly offering millions to use Hollywood voices

Plus: Uber said its advertising business hit $1B in revenue

Author

Cash Nut
August 07, 2024

In partnership with

In Today’s Edition 

  • Founder CEOs at IPO: Do They Really Matter for Stock Returns? 

  • Tech Sell-off Leads US Stocks Lower and 10-year Yield Sinks 

  • Bending Spoons, the powerhouse behind Evernote, has acquired WeTransfer

  • Uber said its advertising business hit $1B in revenue

  • Nvidia has been scraping heaps of copyrighted YouTube videos

  • Return-to-office mandates hurt employee retention, productivity, survey says 

🚀Startups Nuts

Conventional wisdom suggests that founder-led companies perform better post-IPO. However, Ilya Strebulaev's research turns this notion on its head. Analyzing 260 unicorns, he found no significant difference in stock returns between founder-led and non-founder-led companies at IPO. This counterintuitive finding challenges long-held beliefs about leadership in high-growth companies.

Other News

  • Seeq, a Seattle provider of industrial analytics and monitoring, raised $50m in Series D funding

  • Spineology, a St. Paul, Minn., spinal fusion startup, raised $25m

  • Andrena, developer of a decentralized physical infrastructure network protocol, raised $18m

  • HouseAmp, a Seattle-based home-financing startup, raised $12.4m

  • Branch Energy, a Houston energy retailer that leverages batteries, raised $10.8m in Series A funding

  • Wisedocs, a Canadian medical records and insurtech company, raised C$4.5m

  • MixRift, an Irish mixed-reality gaming startup, raised $1.6m

Take a demo, get a Blackstone Griddle

  • Automate expense reports so you can focus on strategy

  • Uncapped virtual corporate cards

  • Access scalable credit lines from $500 to $15M

🏭Business Nuts 

Tech Sell-off Leads US Stocks Lower and 10-year Yield Sinks 

Wall Street took a rollercoaster nosedive, with tech stocks bearing the brunt. However, it's not just about numbers. This article weaves together economic data, investor psychology, and geopolitical tensions to paint a complex picture of market dynamics. The very factors driving stocks down are simultaneously boosting bonds, creating a "double-edged sword" for investors.

Other News

  • Bending Spoons, the powerhouse behind Evernote, has acquired WeTransfer. With WeTransfer's significant user base and Bending Spoons' often transformative approach to acquisitions, we can likely anticipate innovative shifts in service, pricing, and strategy.

  • Microsoft claims Delta was repeatedly offered help amid the CrowdStrike outage but failed to respond. Delta was hit harder than other airlines, canceling 5k flights and, per Delta CEO Ed Bastian, losing $500m.

  • Uber said its advertising business hit $1B in revenue. Uber Ads launched in 2022 and sells ad spots across Uber and Uber Eats in apps, emails, in-car tablets, and on cartops.

  • Dell is cutting around 10% of its workforce. Impacted employees were mostly in the company's sales and marketing teams. The company is switching up its sales teams to put more emphasis on AI products and changing how it handles data center sales.

  • Google TV Streamer is an HDMI set-top box that costs $100 - it adds several amenities that weren't available in the dongles, like an Ethernet port.

📱Tech Nuts

Meta is negotiating with celebrities like Awkwafina and Judi Dench to use their voices for its AI digital assistant, seeking extensive usage rights across its platforms. Striking a deal could mean millions in fees for the actors, with safeguards from SAG-AFTRA for AI-generated likenesses. After recently canceling a celebrity voice chatbot project, the company aims to present these AI features at its Connect conference in September.

Other News

  • Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently introduced Segment Anything 2 (SA2), an ML video segmentation model demonstrating notable progress from last year's image-only predecessor.

  • According to leaked documents, Nvidia has been scraping heaps of copyrighted YouTube videos to train its AI models. The company reportedly used “virtual machines” to automatically change IP addresses and avoid detection by YouTube.

  • Google is launching an updated version of its Nest Learning Thermostat for the first time in nine years, this time using Gemini AI models.

  • Amazon Music launches Topics to make podcast discovery easier with AI. It analyzes transcripts to tag episodes by subject matter. The number of topics and content under this feature is still limited. It’s now available in the US on iOS and Android.

🎁Miscellaneous

Employee retention improves when employees have a say in where they work. A recent survey on employee satisfaction found that those who are allowed to choose between in-person, remote, or hybrid work are three times more likely to want to stay at their company. It also found that workers facing return-to-office mandates are 14 times less likely to 'quit and stay'. Several other studies have found similar results.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

🔥 Few tools many people are finding useful

  • Me bot - Turn your ideas into an AI life coach

  • SpreadSite - Turn spreadsheets into interactive dashboards

  • Stormy - Dynamic notifications to keep you focused at work

  • Delphi - Scale 1-1 personalized video calls with your audience

  • Rosebud - Thoughtful journal partner that helps you work through your problems

🐦Joke of the Day

Enjoy The Cash Nut? Consider forwarding it to a co-worker, colleague, classmate, or whoever you think might be interested.