Gm. Happy Vision Pro launch day. I’ll probably wait till like the 3rd generation to cop, but to those of you who are getting one, please let me know what you think!

— Stephen Flanders

🏠 TECH

Meta, Apple, Amazon, and Alphabet Report

It’s that time of the quarter: big tech earnings season.

Today, we got reports from Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Amazon.

Meta

Q4 continued Meta’s stunning redemption arc:

• Revenue of $40.1B vs $39.18B expected, which is up 25% YoY.

• Advertising revenue of $38.7B vs $37.8b expected.

• 2.11B Facebook daily active users (wow) vs 2.07B expected.

As a reward for their efforts, Meta’s stock rose 15%, and they authorized a $50B stock buyback and their first-ever $0.50 per share quarterly dividend.

The only negative was that their VR unit lost another $4.65B. Let’s see if the Vision Pro can start to turn that around.

Apple

Speaking of the Vision Pro, Apple also logged a decent quarter:

• Revenue of $119.58B vs $117.91B expected, their first revenue growth in a year.

• iPhone revenue of $69.70B vs. $67.82B expected.

• Mac revenue of $7.78B vs. $7.73B expected.

• iPad revenue of $7.02B vs. $7.33B expected.

Besides the obvious miss in iPad revenue (which is to be expected with no new models being released last year), the other concerning data point is a 13% decline in sales in China.

That decline led to a 4% decline in after-hour Apple stock, even with the revenue beat.

Amazon

Amazon put in a very good quarter:

• Revenue of $170B vs $166.2B expected, which was driven by a record holiday season.

• AWS revenue of $24.2B vs $24.2B expected.

• Advertising revenue of $14.7B vs $14.2B expected.

Wall Street recorded the company with an 8% climb in extended trading.

Alphabet

Let’s close things out with Alphabet, shall we:

• Revenue of $86.31B vs $85.33B expected.

• Google Cloud revenue of $9.19B vs $8.94B expected.

• Advertising revenue of $65.52B vs $65.94B expected.

Unfortunately, that miss in advertising revenue led to a 6% drop in Alphabet stock this week.

The Big Picture: It looks like the “Year of Efficiency” worked. Let’s see what they can do this year in seemingly more favorable conditions.

🤝 THE LATEST IN…

TECH

• The Vision Pro is starting with over 600 apps. 

• The Quest is getting spatial video playback.

• Sorry Swifties, Taylor Swift is off TikTok. 

• SpaceX is sending a private space station to the stars.

AI

• Mistral confirmed they have a GPT-4 level open-source model coming. 

• ChatGPT probably can’t make a biological weapon.

• Don’t worry, you’re not late to AI.

• Bye Bard, hello Gemini.

SCIENCE

• It turns out that bacteria can run Doom.

• It can also turn farms into carbon sinks. Wow, bacteria is really something huh.

• The first lab-grown eel meat is available.

• Can a brain implant treat addiction?

CRYPTO

• FTX is going to repay their customers’ crypto, but at the value they were at when the exchange went down. Damn.

• Tether just keeps chugging along.

• Celsius is also getting into the repayment game.

• Here’s your intro to Bittensor.

🏃‍♀️ QUICKIES

Raise: Xreal, the China-based AR headset creator, announced it’s secured $60M in its latest funding round.

Stat: 98%: How much the value of 23andMe has dropped. Sorry man, you’re not getting my DNA.

Rabbit hole: How Math Built The Modern World (Works In Progress)

🛠️ FOUNDERS CORNER

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

🏀 Bounce Doctor makes sure your emails get to where they are supposed to.

🎙️ OpenWidget adds a ChatGPT chatbot right into your website.

🎨 Pagemaker creates convertible landing pages in just 10 minutes.

🎁 FINAL JEOPARDY!

This Final Jeopardy! question stumped every contestant. Can you get it right?

Category: Before They Were President

Clue: On October 4th, 1940, for the premiere of what’s been called his most famous movie role, Ronald Reagan was in this city

💉 DOPAMINE HIT

Twitter for life.

@pasha

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FINAL JEOPARDY! ANSWER

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