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X is officially worth less than half

Plus: Facebook and Instagram launch a paid ad-free subscription 

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Cash Nut
October 31, 2023

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In Today’s Edition 

  • Entrepreneurs Have to Be Hungry

  • The big reset in Seed to Series A graduations

  • Facebook and Instagram launch a paid ad-free subscription 

  • The architecture of today’s LLM applications 

  • Meta’s AI research head wants open source licensing to change 

  • World's smallest particle accelerator is 54 million times smaller than the Large Hadron Collider — and it works 

It Took 15 Years to Disrupt the iPhone🤳

Tech Startup With Traction: Turn your phone from a cost to an income source. Intriguing idea, isn't it? This is why, we have our eyes on the launch of Mode Mobile’s Pre-IPO Offering. It’s the latest in a series of impressive raises among smartphone innovators, likely spurred by Apple’s recent $3+ trillion valuation.

Mode saw 150x revenue growth from 2019 to 2022, a leap that has made them one of America’s fastest growing companies. Mode is on a mission to disrupt the entire industry with their "EarnPhone," a budget smartphone that’s helped consumers earn and save $150M+ for activities like listening to music, playing games, and ... even charging their devices?!

Over 11,000 investors already acquired shares — and with only days remaining prior to their bonus tier closing, allocations are limited.

*Disclosure: Please read the offering circular at invest.modemobile.com. This is a paid advertisement for Mode Mobile’s Regulation CF Offering.

🚀Startups Nuts

‘Fire-in-the-belly’ is hard to quantify but it is something that definitely drives the (serial) entrepreneur. This in-depth read shares a bit about that hunger and how to make sure you keep it alive and burning through all phases of your career or startup lifecycle.

Series A funds are sitting on more capital now than ever before, but the rates of startups receiving Series A funding are low. Series A fund sizes are huge, so the required exit potential of companies they fund needs to be even bigger. This means investors are being really particular about what they invest in – the bar has been raised.

🏭Business Nuts 

X employees were awarded equity in the company at a valuation of $19 billion on Monday. At $45 per share, X's self-assessed value is at a 55% discount to Musk's original purchase price. The equity is in the form of restricted stock units, so employees will have to wait for a liquidity event to sell them. Employees will have to pay tax on any sales as income.

Meta is launching a paid subscription for people aged 18 and older in the EU that will remove ads from Facebook and Instagram on the web for €9.99 per month and on iOS and Android for €12.99 per month. The subscription aims to address concerns by the EU about Meta's ad targeting and data collection practices. Free access with ads will remain available and the experience for nonpaying users will not change. The ad-free subscription will initially apply across all linked Meta accounts, but the company will start charging extra for linked accounts starting in March 2024.

📱Tech Nuts

This blog post aims to give readers everything they need to know to build their first LLM app. It also introduces some problem spaces that readers can start exploring today. The blog covers the emerging architecture of LLM apps and the real-world impacts of LLMs. Resources for further reading are available.

While Meta's Llama 2 is free for many, it was released under a limited license that doesn't meet all of the requirements of the Open Source Initiative. Releasing AI models as completely open source may have potential risks and accountability issues for the companies that release them. Acknowledging these risks while providing an avenue for feedback isn't currently a standard part of the open source discussion, but it should be a norm for anyone creating AI models.

🔥Video

Building a Multi-Million Dollar Newsletter: The Morning Brew Blueprint

🎁Miscellaneous

A new particle accelerator known as a nanophotonic electron accelerator is around the size of a small coin. The device consists of a small microchip that houses an even smaller vacuum tube made up of thousands of individual pillars. Researchers can accelerate electrons by firing mini laser beams at these pillars. The main goal of creating these devices is to use the energy given off by the accelerated electrons in targeted medical treatments that can replace damaging forms of radiotherapy.

💡What else are we reading and seeing?

😎Fun Fact

The concept of the "time value of money" in finance means that a dollar received today is worth more than a dollar received in the future

🔥 Hot Book of the Day

Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader.

These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries.

One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous.

“Thomas Sowell “both surprises and overturns received wisdom” in this indispensable examination of widespread economic fallacies.”

🐦Joke of the Day

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