🍌 How Inngest Helps Developers Build Serverless Workflows

Plus an update on Threads, Meta's new open source LLM, and why you should never drink airline coffee

Jul 19, 2023

Hi everyone 👋 Turner back again with The Split. Welcome to the 23,000+ people reading every week!

Banana Capital portfolio company Inngest just announced its Seed round led by Glen Solomon at GGV. Keep reading and I’ll dive into what they’re doing, plus some follow-up on my last piece on Threads, Netflix’s big June, the burnout problem in US K-12 education, and why you should never, under any circumstance, drink airline coffee.

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How Inngest Helps Developers Build Serverless Workflows

Last week, Banana portfolio company Inngest announced it raised a $3 million Seed round led by our friends of Banana at GGV. Investors like Afore (led their Pre-Seed), Guillermo Rauch (Founder of Vercel), Tom Preston-Werner (Founder of Github), and others also participated in the round.

For the developers reading, Inngest is an open source tool that automates all your serverless events, queues, and background jobs. Retry functions automatically and manage concurrency, rate limiting, and backoffs. Schedule, sleep for months, and dynamically cancel jobs without managing job states or hacking together APIs. All in a beautiful UI that makes it easy to follow and view all your workflows.

No more messing with configs and retries or setting up new infrastructure. From simple tasks to long-lived workflows, you can even use your existing framework (or no frameworks!). Just write code and ship complex workflows in hours, not weeks - it takes an average of four hours to get from zero to production.

For everyone who has no idea what any of this means, Inngest saves developers time. If you’re familiar with products like Zapier or IFTTT, you can think of Inngest in a similar way, but for engineers. If you’ve ever had to manually update a spreadsheet when you get new data, send a meeting invite when a new customer signs-up for your product, or follow-up with a potential candidate after an interview, you can automate and link manual tasks together with a tool like Zapier. It’s not a perfect comparison, but Inngest makes the complicated aspects of modern software engineering simple.

Here’s an example of sending a welcome email when a new user signs-up for a product. You’ll notice it depicts sending the customer an email AND adding them to the CRM, based on pre-defined rules. These rules and triggers would have to be built by an engineer internally (or more likely an entire team), and Inngest also makes it easy to follow the state of each individual action with a dashboard (that would also have to be custom built).

A company could always choose to just build this functionality themselves. That’s actually how Co-founder and CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown came up with the idea! He built similar tools leading engineering at his previous startup, Uniform Teeth, to the point that it became increasingly obvious that every engineering team could use the same product.

Tony left Uniform Teeth two years ago and started building. He teamed up with Dan Farrelly, stayed heads down, talked to customers, shipped new features, and today the product can do everything from welcome emails to LLM and AI chains.

And Inngest is just getting started.

If you’re a developer, check out Inngest’s 👉 Quick Start Guide 👈 And follow them on Twitter to stay up to date on the latest features.

🚀 Product Launches

Meta Open Sources Llama-v2: This means Meta is essentially giving away a similar product as OpenAI, but for free. At least, its free until a product hits 700 million Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This is conveniently just below Snapchat’s 750 million and TikTok’s ~1 billion.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rides a hydrofoil surfboard holding the American flag. July 4, 2021.

Many people will argue Meta’s models will never be as good as OpenAI’s, which is probably true. You could also say Instagram Reels or Stories aren’t as good as Snapchat or TikTok, but its a similar argument to saying Starbucks coffee isn’t as good as your local cafe’s.

So why would Meta do this? Some believe ChatGPT can challenge Google in Search, which ultimately means its also competing with Meta / Facebook’s advertising business as well. Any success for Meta’s open source models steals oxygen from OpenAI, giving it less cash flow to re-invest into what may eventually become a Search-like advertising product that could compete directly with Facebook’s core business. It also pushes Meta’s models to a broader audience, and its generally good for any business to have the rest of the industry built around your products.

Superhuman Launches AI: One of the AI launches I’ve been most waiting for, it integrates all the things you’ve seen generative AI do (email drafts, lengthening, shortening, “write in my voice”) and brings it to the familiar Superhuman UI you know and love.

Friend of The Split Dan Shipper wrote a love letter to Superhuman AI here.

WeeCare Boost is Live: Cool new product from one of my pre-Banana portfolio companies. WeeCare’s software helps in-home daycare providers run their business (I wrote about it three years ago), and Boost is a suite of marketing tools that helps its customers fill daycare centers.

🔗 News and Charts

Threads Usage Is Declining: But its important in the context that Threads was possibly the fastest adopted product of all-time (except for maybe COVID-19 masks in March of 2020). Two weeks into existence and it already has more Daily Active Users (DAUs) than almost every consumer product that isn’t owned by Meta / Facebook itself, Snap, ByteDance, Discord, Roblox, Minecraft, or Twitter.

One way to think about Threads is it essentially copied TikTok’s ad blitz from 2019-2021. Except it did it for free and in two weeks instead of two years. Another way to think about it: Threads still getting about 2 million downloads per day, which is 4-5x more than Twitter.

As long as Zuck wants Threads to exist, he’ll keep funneling traffic from all his other products. It will have extremely high margins when rolled into Facebook’s existing advertising business, and its clear the entire management team is making a full court press. There haven’t been any signs they’ll stop trying to make Threads work.

In case you missed it, I went deeper on Threads initial launch less than 24 hours after it hit the app store (read here). And I did a 70-minute podcast on Threads vs Twitter last week with my friends Trung and Bilal.

(tl;dr is Threads is Twitter for the billion people who churned from Twitter, and I think in a year Twitter will be bigger than it is today, but Threads will be bigger than Twitter)

Companies Who Ship Faster Beat the Market: Aside from financial services, across every industry companies that ship code faster outperform the market.

(This actually hits on a very interesting point that Immad Akhund brought up to me when we spoke a few weeks ago: its bad when banks grow fast.)

This stat feels very relevant in this case of Twitter vs Threads. Twitter’s rate of new features is, and I’m not exaggerating, probably up 50x over the past year. And Meta launched Threads early, just to get it in the wild sooner. Both teams are moving incredibly fast, which is hopefully good news for anyone who uses their products.

Netflix’s Has Record June: This chart doesn’t show churn, but Netflix had over 3.5 million new account sign-ups in June, or 25% of all new sign-ups across all Premium SVOD streamers.

Rough math shows Netflix added 665,000 new subscribers to its ad-supported plan, which is probably faster than any other ad-based product that isn’t called Threads.

My hunch is this is largely being driven by its crackdown on password sharing, meaning a) Netflix is spending nothing to acquire these new customers and b) it’s not even incurring additional streaming costs since these customers were already watching anyways.

This also means that a) aside from taxes, this is practically entirely new cash flow its unlocking and b) new accounts gives it even more granular data around what content people are watching. This will feed back into the system and improve how it decides to develop and acquire new content.

Liquid Death Preps for 2024 IPO: This is one of my favorite companies, yet its chronically misunderstood. It’s a case study on how to build a CPG business. It’s also a good time to remind everyone that Monster Beverage is one of the best performing US stocks of the past few decades, and that China’s richest man got there selling premium bottled water. I wrote about this back in October.

Employers and Workers Are Taking Insurers to Court: Fed up with exorbitant costs, we may be hitting a tipping point in the healthcare system that is now almost 20% of US GDP.

Energy Consumption in the US Over Time: h/t Liberty for sharing

New Report Finds Most US Kale Samples Contain ‘Disturbing’ Levels of ‘Forever Chemicals’: These are called PFAS, and they’re chemicals that never break down inside of our bodies. They sit there forever. We’re just starting to learn how these affect us, and my guess is there’s going to start hearing a lot more about them and all their side effects.

Men Are Paying Off Their Student Loans Faster: I’d assume this has to do with a) post-college earnings power and b) workforce participation / parenthood. h/t Noah Smith.

K-12 Workers Have Highest Burnout Rate in the US: Of all K-12 education employees in the US, 44% say they’re “always” or “very often” burnt out at work, which the highest of any industry. Interestingly, college and university workers have the next-highest level of burnout at 35%.

The burnout particularly hits teachers, and even more specifically, female teachers.

Teacher Turnover Reaches 35-Year High: Other data shows that despite the average age of teachers continuing to increase, it’s primarily early-career educators leaving the workforce, not the late-career teachers who should be retiring. It doesn’t paint a good picture.

If you missed it two weeks ago and want to go deeper, I talked to Ryan Delk about this problem and how he’s turning teachers into super heroes at Primer.

💌 ICYMI

Other worthwhile headlines in case you missed them:

📚 Long Reads

The Zoomer Question / What’s Wrong With Gen Z: A fascinating (and slightly depressing) look at the current state of Gen Z. In the US:

10% of high school students reported attempting suicide, 20x the national average
25% of high school girls have made a suicide plan, and 30% have seriously considered it.
47% of college students have screened positive for a mental disorder (44% for depression), and 37% have screened for anxiety
Between 2010 and 2019, bipolar disorder, anorexia, substance abuse, and schizophrenia in college students increased from 33 to 100%
And finally, 60-70% of Americans teens live with a borderline to severe sleep debt

The piece doesn’t really have an answer or prescription to fix these things. And while some of these trends show up in other countries, there doesn’t seem to be a specific pattern that matches what’s going on in the US. Is it the iPhone? Is it car-centered cities? A lack of space for unstructured, unsupervised play? Or just over diagnosis and a heightened awareness of what has always been true?

It’s all alarming data that I’m continuously thinking about.

Trophy Jobs: A “trophy job” is one that people covet for status more than substance. This piece by Anu Atluru explores trophy jobs, the psychological drivers behind them, and alternative ways to think about status and substance.

Is the Chocolate Monopoly Under Siege? A deep dive on Mr Beast’s healthy chocolate bar business, Feastables. "Hershey's and Mars do 75% of the chocolate revenue in America... and they don't innovate."

Q&A With Head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri: He’s also technically the Head of Threads, which is probably the more interesting title nowadays.

🔊 Podcast / Video

Why You Should Not Drink Airline Coffee: This blew my mind. You can listen to the podcast, but the tl;dr is here and below: “The water tanks on planes are notoriously grimy. A 2004 EPA sample of 158 planes found that 13 percent contained coliform, and two had dangerous levels of E. coli.”