The New Startup Playbook: How New+Improved is Changing Who Gets to Be a Founder
Plus inside Air New Zealand’s plane of the future, Truckometer shows economy still in low gear and Google unveils its vision of 'agentic' AI for 2025.
Happy Thursday!
Just over a week until Caffeine signs off for the year but we aren’t slowing down before the holidays. Today we’re kicking off with a deep dive into New + Improved, the venture studio rewriting the rules of how startups get built.
And because we want to do our bit to give back this giving season, we’re sending out one newsletter free each week so those who haven’t yet subscribed can have a peek what’s happening behind the paywall and what your subscriptions are supporting.
So dig in to your Daily Shot, take a peek at what’s happening worldwide with us and we’ll see you tomorrow for our bumper Friday newsletter. Sneak preview: Judy….👀
Inside Air New Zealand’s plane of the future - batteries included
Truckometer data shows economy still in low gear
Business of Tech in 2024: What happened and what’s next
The Kākā: Ferries delayed again, then handed to Peters, who hits out at Seymour
Google unveils Gemini 2.0, a new AI model for the agentic era
OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation to help users learn languages by talking out loud
What’s still to come in OpenAI’s Christmas announcement spree
Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist
As always, a huge thank you to everyone who has already upgraded to a paid subscription.
Finn and the CAFFEINE team
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Inside Air New Zealand’s plane of the future - batteries included: The EV revolution has been well underway in cars for a few years but the energy demands of aviation make it a much harder sector to electrify. Grant Bradley at the Herald has a lovely longform piece exploring how that could be changing as he visits Beta Technologies, an electric aviation company pioneering commercially viable battery-powered planes. They have inked a deal with Air NZ to bring them to our skies with the first trial flights starting next year. Read more here.
Truckometer data shows economy still in low gear: I am a sucker for interesting data points which might obliquely reveal something about the economy and this one has the best name of them all. ANZ’s Truckometer measures heavy traffic as a proxy for economic activity and reveals it fell 2.5 percent in November on the month before but was up 1.2 percent on last year. Senior economist Miles Workman said it had been a hard year for households and businesses and many are still in belt tightening mode but next year is looking up. Survive to 2025 still the unofficial slogan of this year, it seems. Read more from RNZ here.
Sidebar: Check out the Economist’s ‘Big Mac Index’ for more data dense nerd fun in this vein.
Business of Tech in 2024: What happened and what’s next - It’s getting to the retrospective end of the year and the boys at the Business of Tech podcast have a nice 2024 wrap where they speak to four journalist’s about the state of various sectors and what we can expect looking ahead to 2025. They even had a very special guest this week - me! Listen to the full podcast here.
The Kākā: Ferries delayed again, then handed to Peters, who hits out at Seymour - At Caffeine our core mission is connecting you to resources and people you’ll find valuable. In that vein, if you haven’t already subscribed to Bernard Hickey’s The Kākā Substack, you really should. He condenses the most important stories across the economy and in politics into a digestible snapshot on the daily and for founders in a hurry there is no better way to get up to speed. Today he unpacks the messy ferry saga with impressive conciseness along with a slew of other news. Check it out in the link below.
Google unveils Gemini 2.0, a new AI model for the agentic era: Biggest news in AI this week (which is the theme of this section today apparently) is the reveal of Google’s next generation AI models, which Google claims will kick off its era of ‘agentic’ AI in 2025 as LLMs move from just responding to prompts to taking actions on our behalf. While only the smallest ‘flash’ model is releasing to the public currently, the planned updates include improvements across the board to the Gemini suite as well as some fascinating new applications being tested. For example, ‘Project Mariner’, a prototype Chrome extension which can ‘see’ what you’re working on and take over your browser to perform tasks. Read the full announcement here.
OpenAI-backed Speak raises $78M at $1B valuation to help users learn languages by talking out loud: This story speaks(ha) to one of the most purely positive applications for AI - it’s immense potential for removing language barriers. Speak leverages LLM’s to teach language more like a native speaker would learn it: through conversation. It’s prestigious backer and strong concept has led to a hefty raise and valuation. Unlike some startups which might just add ‘AI’ to their pitch deck somewhere and hope for the best, these guys seem to be onto a genuinely innovative and problem solving application. Read more via Tech Crunch here.
What’s still to come in OpenAI’s Christmas announcement spree: Speaking of OpenAI, Sam Altman is playing at Santa Claus for all us nerds by promising a new announcement every day until December 20. While Sora dropping this week was the biggest so far (good luck signing up though, website is still overloaded) there is still 8 days of reveals to come. The ever dependable Tom’s Guide has a breakdown of what’s already dropped and live coverage of what’s still to come. Read more here.
Google says its new quantum chip indicates that multiple universes exist: I’m used to reading wild headlines out of the tech sector lately but every so often I see one that still gives me a sense of vertigo. We told you about Google’s frontier Quantum computing chip yesterday but one tidbit we didn’t mention was how according to the project lead, the chip is so powerful that it "lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.”
Oh. Just a normal product announcement then. Read the full blog most here.
That’s it for today, thanks for reading. We’ll be back tomorrow morning. Want to get in touch with a news tip, bit of feedback or just to chat? Email hello@caffeinedaily.co