Halloween has been just the break I needed from the mounting tension, five days out from election day.

͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­͏     ­

	Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more Happy Halloween! Joyce Vance Nov 1   READ IN APP   Halloween has been just the break I needed from the mounting tension, five days out from election day. I’ll be back tomorrow night with a very special Five Questions. It’s about election disinformation on the internet and how we can outsmart it—you won’t want to miss it! And I’ll be around all weekend and next week to make sure we’re up-to-date on court cases involving the election and other issues that develop. But for tonight, feast your eyes on my favorite Halloween costume of the evening! I loved all of the fairy princesses, the vampires, the ninjas, and the wizards we saw tonight. But most of all, I loved my neighbor’s dog, dressed as a hot dog. It was just the giggle I needed tonight. I hope it makes you happy too! We’re in this together, Joyce Upgrade to paid Share Joyce You're currently a free subscriber to Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. Upgrade to paid   Like Comment Restack   © 2024 Joyce Vance 548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104 Unsubscribe

Shopify attacks Salesforce

Rule the herd. GenAI behind the wheel. Crayon chaos.   View in browser October 31, 2024 Billion-dollar babies Hi there,    Here is this week's Hot or Not.   Hot: AI unicorns   AI unicorn births (private companies reaching $1B+ valuations) more than doubled QoQ to reach 13 in Q3'24.    This means AI accounted for 54% of all unicorns born across the venture landscape in Q3. More than half of the AI unicorns born in Q3'24 are genAI startups, and they are working across a variety of areas, including: AI for 3D environments (World Labs) Code generation (Codeium) Legal workflow automation (Harvey) Among the new genAI unicorns, Safe Superintelligence — co-founded by OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever — landed the most sizable valuation ($5B). Learn more about the newest AI unicorns in our State of AI Q3'24 Report.   Not: Salesforce's e-commerce business vs. Shopify's   Shopify is eyeing bigger companies — and nabbing them from Salesforce.   It says brands like Toys R Us and the mattress co Casper have made the move thanks to its lower prices for its e-commerce services.   Bloomberg mapped how Shopify's business passed Salesforce's marketing and commerce business in 2021: Source: Bloomberg Shopify, which built itself by going after small businesses, is betting that large retailers can drive growth and move it beyond the post-pandemic e-commerce plateau. Meanwhile, Salesforce's marketing and commerce segment has been its slowest-growing business unit.    The CRM leader is focusing its attention on Data Cloud — its fastest-growing product — as part of its AI monetization strategy.   Hot: GenAI in AVs   Generative AI is accelerating the timeline for autonomous driving.    The AV sector is in the spotlight after Alphabet's robotaxi unit Waymo's blockbuster $5.6B round earlier this week.   On the tech front, we're watching how startups, big tech, and mobility incumbents are leveraging LLMs and other genAI advancements to: Reduce self-driving cars' training costs using synthetic environments (i.e., virtual training) Improve safety and transparency for self-driving cars (e.g., Waymo is using language models to better predict the motion of road agents like pedestrians)  Facilitate passenger-car interactions and personalization (think giving your car more nuanced/complex commands) CB Insights customers can get all the details in the full brief. Not: CVC-backed deal activity   ​​Global CVC-backed funding dropped 5% QoQ to $15.7B in Q3'24.   But the drop isn't overly significant — Q3'24 still marks the second-highest CVC-backed funding tally since Q3'22.   CVC-backed deals, on the other hand, declined 10% QoQ to 773 deals — the lowest total since 2018. ​​Amid the deal downturn, our data shows that CVCs are concentrating their bets on fintech, with the sector drawing more CVC-backed deals than digital health and retail tech in Q3'24. Dive deeper into CVC activity in our State of CVC Q3'24 Report. The +1 Doing lines. The graph is terrible, but the legend looks pretty useful, right?   I love you.   Anand @asanwal  Co-Founder & Exec Chair   P.S. The clock is tickin' on applications for the Digital Health 50 — our annual list of the most promising digital health startups in the world. Apply before the deadline on November 7. Get started with CB Insights Start your free trial CB Insights' emerging technology insights platform provides all the analysis and data from this newsletter. Our data is the easiest way to discover and respond to emerging tech.  Was this email forwarded to you? Sign up here Copyright © 2024 CB Insights, All rights reserved. 498 7th Avenue, NY, CB Insights, New York,10018 About Us | Update Preferences | Research | Newsletter