Gm. I see nothing wrong with this image, but maybe that’s just me. Thank you Elon.
Welcome to Issue 01 of The Quest Digest, where we break down Silicon Valley news for you every week, in 3 minutes.
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Tech's Response to Russia-Ukraine
In the past week, tech companies have escalated actions in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Recap So Far:
Apple has paused all sales in Russia and limited Apple Pay services
Meta has restricted access to Russian news outlets across the EU and turned on encryption for Instagram messages
Google has blocked YouTube channels linked to Russian state-funded media
Twitter paused advertisements in Ukraine and Russia
The crypto community has also banded together by forming DAOs and selling NFTs to raise money for the Ukrainian people and military.
Crypto isn’t foreign to the tech-savvy country as it ranks 4th on the Global Crypto Adoption Index.
The country’s official Twitter account has said it accepts Bitcoin, Ether, and Tether.
So far $33.8 million in cryptocurrency has been donated to Ukrainian groups since Russia attacked the country on Feb 24th.
Our Take
Big tech companies seek to monopolize global communications but in the midst of international conflict want none of the responsibility of choosing sides.
On the flipside, the response from the blockchain community has shown testament to the impact of NFTs and DAOs outside of just CryptoKitties and P2E games.
The Ukrainian war effort is being partly crowdfunded. And we’re looking forward to seeing how these decentralised vehicles evolve to help more people in the real world.
Indian Startups Raised $3.7B in February 💰
In recent years India has become a startup powerhouse. In 2021, India saw 11 tech IPOs and half of the country’s 88 unicorns were minted last year alone.
In terms of funding amount, February saw a minor decline compared to January, where $4.6B was raised in funding. Even so, the country saw 5 new unicorns.
By the Numbers:
$3.7B → amount Indian startups between 1 Feb 2022, and 26 Feb 2022
164 → how many deals startups raised across
2.6x → how much higher funding this year Feb as compared to last year Feb
Our Take
This news comes at a time where Tim Ferriss, Elad Gil, and Naval Ravikant-backed Galaxy, a $45M fund aimed at creating angel investors out of Indian startup founders.
The fund’s founder, Utsav Somani has said that
“the next decade belongs to Indian tech startup founders… The ecosystem is robust. There is quality talent. Overall, the ecosystem has now come of age where we are finally on the map and people are taking India more seriously”.
By the looks of things, this is holding more and more true.
Meta Language 🗣
During a company live-streamed event, Mark Zuckerberg announced Meta was working on AI research to build a universal speech translator and a way to generate worlds through speech.
Executives who spoke during the event acknowledged that the level at which this AI technology needed to be at for their metaverse ambitions to become reality was at least several years away.
Our Take
While there is a lot of noise and jokes surrounding the metaverse, Zuck is making a billion-dollar bet that the metaverse, will be the successor to the mobile internet.
Many features mentioned during the event definitely see to Meta’s mission of bringing the world closer together, and the company has the data and tech talent to execute.
The only concern is as these language models become more and more powerful how Meta will make an effort to control them and ensure they’re used appropriately.
🔥 Press Worthy
YCombinator Summer 2022 applications are open
Electric Capital raises $1B for 2 new crypto VC funds
Netflix acquired Next Games, publishers of Stranger Things and The Walking Dead games
GGV builds an index for API-first startups
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The Quest Digest is written by Hannah Ahn and edited by Brent Liang, two dropouts who hate long tech newsletters. You can sign up to our next issue below.