Hi friends 👋
Welcome to a new Week in Product!
🎰 The week in figures
$20B: Oracle said it will raise $20B through $10B in stock and $10B in bonds for its AI buildout, and its shares fell nearly 6%
$1.5B: Zipline, the California drone delivery startup, raised $1.5B at a $21.5B valuation, and plans up to 300 new Walmart sites
$1.3B: Fal, the AI inference startup that helps developers deploy and scale models without managing GPUs, closed a $1.3B round, doubling its valuation to $16B
$500M: CrowdStrike acquired Fiddler AI, a Ca. AI observability startup that raised $31.8M, and Dreadnode, for ~$500M combined, a bet on securing AI agents
$115M: Revolut hit a $115B valuation in a secondary share sale, up 53% in a year, as it prepares to launch a U.S. bank in 2027
10K: Uber aims to have 700 driverless taxis on the roads by EOY, and 10K by 2028
4: Uber said that just 4 rides were booked by third party AI Agents during Q3 while Uber Eats orders by agents stood around 500 during the week of Halloween out of a total of 320M rides and orders
💰 Q3 earnings
Apple: In its first quarter under CEO John Ternus, Apple grew revenue 12% to $114.5B and EPS was $2.10, both above the $113.4B and $1.99 analysts expected. iPhone set a September-quarter record at $57.6B, Services hit an all-time high of $31.6B, and the fiscal year was a record $479B. Shares still slipped after hours.
Dropbox grew revenue 0.5% to $637.3M, with non-GAAP EPS of $0.88 and a 42.2% non-GAAP operating margin. It also announced a roughly $350M deal to acquire Tigris Data and DBX Agent Cloud for AI object storage
Duolingo: Revenue grew 14% to $309M and bookings rose 12% to $316.1M. DAU increased 29% to 64.9M (!!), while paid subscribers grew 14% to 13.1M. Duolingo raised full-year guidance to $1.221B in revenue. The notable product move: it’s sunsetting Max and bringing unlimited AI Video Call practice to all Super subscribers by year-end, prioritizing learning quality and user growth
Figma: Revenue grew 43% to $391.4M, and adjusted EPS of $0.10 beat expectations. Net dollar retention reached 131%, with 1,717 customers spending over $100K annually. Figma raised its full-year revenue outlook to roughly $1.5B, but shares fell about 7% after hours as gross margin disappointed
Snap: Revenue grew 14% to $1.72B, and Snap swung to a $56M profit from a $104M loss. Daily users rose 4% to 495M, below expectations, while monthly users reached 977M. Subscription and other revenue jumped 84%, versus just 4% growth in advertising. Shares fell more than 10%
Uber: Revenue grew 10% to $14.77B, with gross bookings up 20% to $59.82B and trips up 16% to 4.1B. Operating income rose 30% to $1.45B, while adjusted EPS increased 35% to $0.88. Uber forecast Q4 bookings of $63.25–65.25B
📰 What’s going on
Anthropic adds personal finance to Claude. Paid US subscribers can now link bank accounts via Plaid and query balances, spending, and bills in plain language. Read-only access, no investment advice, no ads
Anthropic says self-improving AI may be close. Its updated IPO filing says it "may imminently" reach its own threshold for progress driven by AI, though no model has crossed it yet
OpenAI released GPT-6 Cyber, a hacking model rated Critical for cyber risk that only approved Daybreak Red users can access
OpenAI is merging the Chat and Work tabs in ChatGPT. Following a similar move by Claude earlier in the year, users will now be able to get access to all of the capabilities that were previously separated into one interface
OpenAI agreed to acquire Pierre Computer, the startup already hosting Codex’s code repositories, a step toward GitHub’s turf
Meta acquired Conductor, a startup whose interface directs several coding agents at once; its hosted service shuts down November 20.
Meta rolls out video chat with Muse AI avatar. US users can now voice and video-call an animated AI character that responds with gestures and expressions. Feature arrives ahead of "Muse Charm" wearable device launch before year-end
Muse also got a new feature called Spaces, which lets you create custom experiences in one place and works a bit like Projects in Claude
Apple announced the ability for Siri to use apps on a user’s behalf with App Intents. It works by combining new APIs with Skills that combine several actions into one request
Apple's HomeView Ultra, their upcoming tabletop robot, may slip to 2028 over unfinished software. It's expected to pack a 9-inch swiveling display @ $1K+
Perplexity announced AI Teammates that act as always-on agents, each taking on a specific role. Every team mate gets its own thread inside the Perplexity app and you can work alongside them in Slack. Their CEO says that “over time, we envision every org having hundreds of team mates working for each person”
Stripe now lets you analyze your product’s financial data with agents via MCP and API. Clients like Claude now have structured access to data to build reports, and it’s free until January 2027
Airbnb said its AI travel agent will arrive in the first half of 2027 and build maps, comparisons, calendars, and itineraries around each request
Atlassian’s Code Reviewer product is now available in Jira and Teamwork. Code Reviewer will automatically review pull requests in Bitbucket and GitHub and is grounded in the Teamwork Graph, which Atlassian says makes the review process faster
Aina’s smart ring lets users command AI agents with a tap, proposing wearables as a better interface than phones to interact with agents
🤖 Futurism
China is planning to send AI and deep-sea robotics on a huntfor its ancient past
📚 Good reads
How Peter Yang is using AI to help his mom fight cancer. When his mom's cancer came back, Peter found ways to use AI to help him with the admin side of care, and researching tratment options. An inspiring story that makes me more hopeful about practical use-cases for general-purpose consumer AI apps. In this podcast, Peter shares a similar experience of using AI to fight cancer by an OpenAI VP
Copying is cheap now, so build the stuff that can't be copied. Casey Winters explains how well-funded rivals are cloning his SuperMe's UX down to its custom icons before there's any sign the product is even winning. His take for PMs is that taste gets you from zero to one but won't hold a lead. Put your energy into distribution and networks. We experienced the same pre-AI already while building Yayzy a few years ago, which got copied by competitors, just for all of them (and us) to end up failing
AI might finally make feature discovery someone else's problem. Elena Verna argues that once users can just say what they want and the AI picks the right features for them, our years of tooltips and nudges start to look a bit pointless. PMs now need to earn enough trust that people hand bigger work to the product
Your next power user is an AI agent. MIT Technology Review looks at how agents like Meta's Muse now browse, shop and book on people's behalf, and why that's upending the ad-driven web (Amazon has already blocked Muse). If you're deciding whether to design for agents too, the cautionary tale is Ethan Mollick's agent-targeted book page, which newer models flagged as manipulative instead of recommending the book
Your voice is the one thing AI can't prompt. David Pereira explains how AI flattened his writing to the point that readers started unsubscribing. And if you skip customer conversations, you will end up shipping polished products nobody wants. His advice is to start your strategy doc or decision on a blank page, and only then let AI poke holes
🎧 Good listen/watch
[Podcast] Why the best leaders give teams context instead of answers. Norma Løvhaugen of Neat explains how a team can ship exactly what the customer asked for and still miss fixing the problem. Sharing the Why behind a request gets you better ideas than handing over the fix
🧑💻 Worth learning
[Podcast] Which personal AI agent wins? Claire Vo tested 4 personal agents and landed on Grok Bot for work and Muse for personal life. Claude Duet lost points for being slow and asking permission too often. In this episode she also talks to Figma's Ezra Mechaber, who walks through PM OS, a shared repo of 31 AI skills that his fellow PMs use for everything at Figma
🔧 Products to try
Claude’s Personal Finance hub connects to your bank and credit-card accounts through Plaid so you can ask it to sort spending, catch duplicate charges, and explain fees (read-only); included in US Pro, Max, and Ultra plans
Images 2.6 turns a character or sketch into a looping GIF and remembers saved reference images; now free in ChatGPT, Codex, and the API
Kimi K3.1 Pro is Moonshot's downloadable open-weight model that reads text and images with a 1M-token memory (custom license), and you can try it free on HuggingChat
That’s all for this week.
Feel free to drop your comments/questions/feedback. Would love to hear what you’d like to see more about in WiP, so I can make it better for you.
Have a great start to your week!
