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🍌 Canvas Launches 2.0, the Easiest Way to Understand Your Startup

New products from Cruise and BeReal, VC deployment slows 60%, and a look at Temu's internal culture

May 1, 2023

Hi everyone 👋 Turner back again with The Split. Welcome to all new subscribers and the 19,500+ of you tuning in every week! This is our second post back on Substack, please let me know if you’re noticing any issues.

Special day today as Banana portfolio company Canvas is releasing its 2.0 build and launching on Product Hunt. If you don’t have time to read to but want to support, check it out here.

Keep reading for more on Canvas 2.0, new products from Cruise and BeReal, charts on the slowing pace of venture capital deployment, (un)surprising changes in cellphone data traffic across the US, and a long-read on Temu’s internal culture.

We’re also doing Banana Talent Drop #14 in a few hours - join as a candidate here.

Canvas, the Easiest Way to Understand Your Startup

If you opened six bank accounts last month and have been manually comparing balances in Excel or Sheets, this post is for you.

Startup analytics has been the same for 10+ years. To get a chart, you have to cobble together multiple systems and tools and hire a full-time team to run everything. And even then, everyone always ends up exporting to CSVs and re-opening in Excel anyway.

Imagine if Pilot didn’t exist, and as a founder you had to do your accounting yourself in Quickbooks. Or hire full-time engineers to run pipelines from Stripe to your accounting software. Sound weird? It’s how analytics still works in 2023.

The Canvas team thinks this is weird too, and just launched Canvas 2.0 on Product Hunt today to fix it.

Canvas connects to almost any data source (databases, Segment, Stripe, Quickbooks, Hubspot, 150+ others) and has 50+ pre-built templates for things like ARR cohorts, net retention, churn, sales rep efficiency, LTV/CAC, and return on ad spend.

For everything else, they offer a fractional data team of expert analysts, which embed themselves within your team and build dashboards, reports, company metrics, KPIs, and custom data models. They can help with fundraising prep, board metrics, your next product launch, or even just QA your numbers.

Spin up an #ask-data channel without investing in a full-time team of analysts and engineers, and spin it down when you don’t need it.

Canvas is already making analytics simple for dozens of customers.

Head over to Product Hunt and support the Canvas 2.0 launch here.

And mention The Split 🍌 during sign-up for a free initial consult. Find out why CTO’s call Canvas a no-brainer!

🚀 Product Launches

Cruise Now Running 24/7 Across SF: GM-owned Cruise is now running its autonomous taxi service all-day across the city, with a few caveats. Cruise also teased more on its self-driving electric shuttle, the Cruise Origin. Per Kyle Vogt the CEO:

“Operating robotaxis in SF has become a litmus test for business viability. If it can work here, there’s little doubt it can work just about everywhere.”

⚠️ Time to BeReal ⚠️ - Now With Music: Spotify recently announced an integration with BeReal, allowing users to share what they’re listening to in each post. I believe this is also works with Apple Music, but don’t have an account and can’t confirm.

Bonus BeReal Comes to the UK: BeReal unveiled a second new feature last week, allowing users in the UK to post more than once per day. Two “Bonus BeReal” posts are unlocked if someone posts their first photo during the initial two-minute daily window and one additional post if they miss it.

This plays into the trend of people waiting to capture their single BeReal until the most exciting moment of their day, which expands the products use case while keeping its core value prop. BeReal also mentioned it has 20 million Daily Active Users, the same number shared in Q4 of 2022.

🔗 Links and Charts

Sapphire Shares Capital Calls Down 60%: Sapphire Partners, a Fund of Funds that invests in Venture Capital funds, shared internal data showing its underlying fund managers have called capital at a 50-60% slower pace over the past nine months than the prior 15 months. Not a perfect picture, but it would reflect 50-60% less capital being deployed into early stage venture investments.

LLM-Based AI Tool Boosts Customer Support Productivity by 14%: The yearlong study from Stanford and MIT measured productivity of 5,000 customer support agents at a Fortune 500 company, based primarily in the Philippines. Agents that used an LLM-based conversational assistant improved productivity by 14% on average, which is lower than I would have expected. “Novice and low-skilled” workers were 35% more productive, hinting at AI’s usefulness in education and training settings. Without giving specific numbers, it also increased worker happiness and retention.

AI’s Impact on Marketing and Marketing Software: A helpful chart + read from Scott Brinker at HubSpot.

Google Gained Market Share in Q1: The numbers appear to exclude conversational AI products like ChatGPT, which I assume to be stealing a very small amount of traffic (less than 5%) and moreso creating new use cases.

Mentions of Labor Shortage on Earnings Calls Down 70%: In signs the labor market is loosening up, fewer public companies are mentioning labor shortages in quarterly earnings calls.

San Francisco Phone Data Activity down 69%: Fascinating chart from Apollo showing phone data from downtowns across the US indexed to pre-pandemic levels (Fall of 2022 vs Fall of 2019). Salt Lake City is up 35%, and SF had the largest drop, at only 31% of pre-pandemic levels.

The US currently has an 8.5 million car deficit: This low supply of (mostly used) cars will help buoy prices as higher interest rates push prices downward. It also means used cars on the road are now older than ever, which will increase demand for auto repair. Cox Auto predicts used car sales won’t normalize until around 2026.

Asia Sets Extreme Heat Records: Scientists expect 2023 and 2024 to set more records as global warming accelerates and El Nino warms surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.

Will Apple Take a Bite Out of the Big Banks?: That’s what some experts think, as it has an intimate relationship with 1.2 billion iPhone users. Apple Pay volume has been slow to accelerate, but is expected to reach $4 billion next year as 75% of iPhone owners have used Apple Pay by 2022. This is par for the course from Apple: it moves slow and steady, always focusing on new products that reinforce its competitive advantage.

A rare sketch from the early days of Spotify:

📚 Long Reads

Inside Temu: The Fiery Culture and a Perpetual Efficiency Machine: If you’ve followed my writing on Temu over the past year, you’ll like this one.

Per the article, Temu’s org chart involves two completely separate teams that compete against each other (a normal practice in Chinese tech). Each new customer is randomly assigned to one of the teams, who compete against each other to drive the highest business performance. Losing teams are often disassembled and new members are recruited from other parts of the organization.

How to Win on Product Hunt: Enzo Avigo, CEO of June.so, shares his playbook to consistently reach #1 on Product Hunt. The secret? Clear your schedule on launch day, post early, get featured, and get consistent upvotes throughout the day.

How Liveblocks is Bringing Collaboration to Software: In case you missed it last week, I wrote about how Banana portfolio company Liveblocks is building the backend infrastructure for the real-time collaboration layer of the internet.

🔊 Podcasts

I recently went on Repeat Rhyme, the biggest tech podcast in Japan. It was fun to learn more about Japan’s startup ecosystem! (this happened after we stopped recording)

I shared more about Banana Capital, how I got into VC, thoughts content creation, Banana’s investing strategy, working with founders, and LP relationships.

Listen on, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast fix.

💼 Career Services

The Banana Talent Collective now has 228 candidates, hailing from startups to big tech, and investment banking to consulting.,

Get a Job at a Startup

Banana Talent Drop #14 is set to go live in a few hours. We have candidates from Nike, Flexport, Equinox, and some well-known startups set to go to the inboxes of 70 hiring managers.

If you're hiring and want a stream of pre-vetted candidates, join the collective to get in front of potential hires that are both actively and passively thinking about their next role. (And if you're at a Banana portfolio company, reach out for access).

Get Pre-Vetted Talent in Your Inbox

If you’re looking to make the jump into VC, Bessemer is hiring a Senior Associate to work along side Byron Deeter.