Gm. We were granted access to OpenAI's popular image generator Dall-E 2 yesterday. You'll see some of its handiwork later in this newsletter.

Now the countdown is on for when the entire newsletter is written by robots and we're all out of a job.

Or maybe it already is 🤖

Looking at three funds that recently topped up their coffers.

Marky Mark is in a spot of bother

When your cousin Greg shills a crypto investment that goes south, it might make for an awkward Thanksgiving. But when Mark Cuban does it, things get a lot more awkward...and illegal.

The Shark Tank investor was named in a class-action lawsuit yesterday that alleges Cuban misled unsophisticated investors when he promoted the now-bankrupt crypto platform Voyager Digital. Voyager CEO Stephen Ehrlich and the NBA team Mark Cuban owns, the Dallas Mavericks, were also named as defendants.

Voyager was one of the many crypto instituions that lent money to the now-infamous Three Arrows Captial (3AC) hedge fund. When the latter went bust, the former was dragged down with it and eventually filed for bankruptcy.

• The result: Over 3.5 million American customers have nearly $5 billion in frozen funds tied up on the platform.

They want answers

The lawsuit centers around Cuban's promotional activities saying that he touted the company “as a Voyager customer himself, in a ploy to dupe investors into believing that Voyager was a safe platform.”

Toss in tasty promotional deals at Mavericks games and quotes from Cuban where he labeled Voyager “as close to risk-free as you’re gonna get in the crypto universe,” and its clear there is some validity to the suit.

Cuban did disclose the partnership between Voyager and the Mavericks, but he could be in trouble if he failed to disclose a personal agreement with Voyager (if there was one) given his quotes above.

Zoom out: For a long time, crypto companies operated as if they were immune to normal financial laws and regulations. But as the euphoria of the bull run gives way to a chilly crypto winter, regulators and casual investors alike are coming for potential offenders—famous or not.

Who’s the pod god now?

Apple may have blown a 3-1 lead when it comes to podcasts, but its eyeing a late career resurgence. Yesterday, it signed a $10 million deal with Pulitzer Prize-winning media company Futuro Studios for the rights to repurpose its original podcasts into TV series for Apple TV+.

An MJ-like return?

Apple practically invented the podcasting medium, but has lost ground to Spotify in recent years. While the latter has splashed out ten figures for the rights to exclusive studios and shows like Gimlet and The Ringer, Apple mostly sat on the sidelines.

• But Spotify lost $110 million on podcasts in Q1 and some of its bigger bets, like signing Prince Harry and Megan Markel to a deal, haven’t paid off.

• Now, Apple is taking a different approach and betting that it can establish a rich podcast-to-TV pipeline in order to funnel listeners to its more premium subscription, Apple TV+.

Zoom out: Apple’s content initiatives brought in nearly $1 billion last year. Impressive on its own, but a drop in the bucket compared to the $400 billion in total annual revenue it generated.

Seed Round

Stat: SoftBank is winding down one of the greatest investments in history. According to a WSJ report, it reduced its stake in Alibaba from 24% to around 15% by selling shares worth roughly $22 billion. The move comes as SoftBank loads up on cash for a rainy day. In its latest financial report released Monday, it revealed a cash position of $34 billion to “strengthen its defenses” against a downturn according to Masa Son. Never know when a future, “valley of coronavirus,” might hit.

Story we’re watching: Circle your calendars. Ethereum devs have finally set a date for the upcoming switch from a proof-of-work system to the much more energy efficient proof-of-stake. Dubbed the point of “Terminal Total Difficulty” the merge will take place when a specific block is mined around September 15 or 16 signifying the end of the old network and the beginning of the new.

Rabbit hole: Some types of stress could be good for brain functioning (Science Daily).

• The FCC rescinded more than $2 billion in grants from SpaceX after the space company failed to meet requirements for expanding broadband access in rural areas.

• BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, launched a bitcoin private trust for its institutional clients.

• LinkedIn introduced a variety of new features to help creators go viral. Crying selfies from CEOs are not among them.

• Disney+ passed Netflix in total global subscribers for the first time.

Disney finally passed Netflix, right? Well, it depends.

Netflix still holds a higher revenue per membership across the board, with its US and Canada market generating $16 per subscriber compared to only $___ for Disney.

Can you guess how much the Mouse makes per subscriber?

A helpful thread breaking down how the valuations of companies change at different levels of traction.

The biggest jump in valuation unsurprisingly comes when you move from the idea stage to a money-generating product.

Notable layoffs this week

Pollen: 750 people (100%)

Hootsuite: 400 people (30%)

Wix: 100 people

We finally got Dall-E 2 access

Apparently, this is what artificial intelligence thinks “a blonde male manically writing on his laptop while riding a rocketship flying through an infinite universe, vaporwave” looks like.

We kinda dig it.

If you have a sentence you want us to generate an image for, submit it here.

We’ll feature some funny ones next week.

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

➗ A helpful formula for valuing early-stage companies

🛠 The best tools for web-scraping in 2022

🧑‍💻 A running thread on the best no-code tools for entrepreneurs

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