Gm. If 2 self-driving cars are in a car crash, whose fault is it?

FRESH POWDER

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

TL;DR 

The top 10 startup news stories from this week in tweet-sized bites:

EARNINGS

Big Tech Takes A Tumble

This week was Q3 earning report szn for many of the mega tech companies, which means as an investor, this is your chance to see who’s doing well and who’s shooting bricks. 

Unfortunately, it looks like Q3 had more Westbrooks than Steph Currys.

A Tough Quarter

The earning reports made clear that it’s been a challenging quarter for the big guys:

• Meta (META) revenues declined for the second straight quarter, although they did beat analyst expectations. 

• Alphabet (GOOGL) earned $69.09 billion, missing their expected mark of $70.58 billion. 

• Microsoft (MSFT) also outperformed expectations, with $50.12 billion in revenue vs. $49.61 billion expected, but its Azure cloud revenue was a bit low, and guidance for the next quarter was not the most reassuring. 

• Apple (AAPL) did as you would expect Apple to do, pretty easily beating revenue expectations. However, iPhone sales were lower than expected. 

Overall, investors were not impressed with these earnings. This displeasure was evident throughout the stock market, as GOOGL is down 10%, MSFT is down 8%, and META is down a whopping 22% since the earnings reports. 

So, What Gives?

Although these numbers aren’t pretty, it’s not yet time to start writing obituaries. 

The primary cause for most of these misses is the overall macro environment. When the word on the street is that we're heading for a recession, people stop spending as much money.  Simple as that.

Meta is another story. Its ad business has been plundered by Apple. And Zuck is betting big on VR despite investors begging him to give up his dream. Zuck refuses, and you know what, we at Homescreen are all for it. 

Zuck said on the Lex Fridman show that he doesn't want us spending more time in VR. He wants us to switch the time we already spend online to VR.  VR is already being used for gaming and work. Who's to say it won't happen with consumer social? 

Just putting this out there. Poking people in VR could potentially be even more fun than poking on Facebook circa 2013. 

AUTOMOTIVE 

Self-Driving Cars Hit A Yellow Light

If you’re anything like us, regardless of how big the spot is, your palms immediately get sweaty while parallel parking. We're writers hopped up on coffee. 

We'd gladly pay good money for a car that takes away this stress, and that is exactly what self-driving car companies have been attempting to build. Sadly, they’ve recently run into a bit of a speed bump.

Argo AI Closes Its Doors

The big blow came on Wednesday, as news dropped that autonomous vehicle company Argo AI was shutting down.

Argo had previously been one of the industry’s brightest prospects. Armed with billions of dollars in funding and backed by major car companies Ford and Volkswagen, Argo had plans to bring self-driving technology to market by 2021. Obviously, this did not come to fruition, and its failure to attract new investors ultimately put the nail in the coffin.

To put the cherry on top, Ford announced that they are deprioritizing fully autonomous driving technology and instead focusing on advanced driver assistance tools. In other words: cyborg cars, not robot cars.

Tesla Under Investigation

Elon might be lucky his Twitter adventure is dominating the news, as yesterday’s Tesla report was able to fly relatively under the radar. 

Basically, the U.S. Department of Justice is calling BS on Tesla having self-driving cars. Although getting called out for BS and picking up extra cards is undoubtedly annoying, it’s much worse when the DOJ is involved. For Tesla, hearing BS means a criminal investigation is on the way.

It’s still early days for the investigation, but it’s not what you want to see. 

Don’t Give Up Hope

Although it’s been a rough week for fully autonomous vehicles, there's still hope. With Rivian envisioning a future with self-driving cars and Waymo and GM Cruise already offering driverless vehicles, the dream of a future free from parallel parking is still alive. 

QUICK HITS

Seed Round

Stat: PayPal can take $2,500 out of your account for spreading misinformation. If PayPal ran honest advertisements, it’d be “PayPal: we’re crucial to the internet’s payment infrastructure, but we haven’t updated our app in 20 years. Also, we’ll take your money for your tweets!” 

Story we're watching: FTX is considering developing its own stablecoin. SBF's face will be on it. The monument in Washington is coming next.

Rabbit hole: Video gaming may be associated with better cognitive performance in children (NIH)

WHAT ELSE IS GOING ON

• Elon addresses Twitter advertisers, saying good ads are “like content” and welcome on the platform. Somebody tell the paid media people this, plz and thank u. 

• LooksRare switched to optional NFT royalties and instead will be sharing 0.5% of trading fees with their creators.

• Telegram is launching an auction platform for usernames on the TON blockchain. Will we still get a TON of useless notifications? You bet.

• ForeVR Games raised $10 million to build the Wii Sports of VR. Ok, finally we have a decent use case!!!

GUESSTIMATE

How much did Google just pay for a Twitter-backed AI avatar creation company?

FUNDRAISING FRIDAY

Newsletter Jericho dropped a market map of 120 US-based web3 VC funds. Incredible.

LAYOFFS TRACKER

GoFundMe: 94 people (12%)

Zillow: 300 people (5%)

Argo AI: 1,800 people (100%) 

FOUNDERS CORNER

The best resources we came across this week that will help you become a better founder, builder, or investor.

📈 Clubhouse founder Paul Davison chats to TechCrunch about the downsides to hypergrowth.

🤯 Finance writer Jack Raines explains how he went viral on LinkedIn through satirical posts.

🦆 How do you balance technical and non-technical aspects when doing marketing and branding? Former DuckDuckGo employee Daniel Davis gives his thoughts.

GUESSTIMATE ANSWER

$100 million.