I can tell Jess is trying to be nice about the people in her group chat, to varying degrees of success. It's not that the members are bad people. They met a year ago at a vocal workshop for aspiring musicians and artists and decided to keep in touch after it ended. The chat has become a mix of a confessional and a lovefest — people will leave long audio messages rambling about their days and texts about how much support they get from everyone. It's this "quintessential overcomplimentary, masturbatory, 'everybody loves each other so much'" space, Jess says. Plus, they're not good musicians, which is the opposite of the chat's point. She's attended various performances of other group members, and "all of them are bad, across the board," she says. But again, she's really trying to be nice. "In this group, they have so clearly found their people," she says. "I don't hate these people. I just hate being in their stupid group."

And yet she can't just quit. For each member's birthday, the group goes in on a gift together. Her birthday was first, so she felt like she had to stick around for everyone else's. She finally got through the first round of birthdays, opening the door for an exit — but it can't be an Irish exit. "I feel like I have to make a goodbye," she says. "I can't ghost. I can't ghost. It would be against the whole thing of the group." She spoke on the condition of withholding her last name for this story, for obvious reasons.

Jess isn't alone: Many people report feeling overwhelmed by group chats, saying it's difficult to keep up with messages and even comparing it to a part-time job. Many people, like Jess, also have at least one group chat they really hate. It's not just a nuisance but a place that makes their blood boil. It's like scrolling through posts from the most obnoxious people on Twitter, but you actually know them in real life. As much as you may loathe the chat, it's tough to quit — group chats may be contained in the cold, distant trappings of technology, but the contents are often warm and real.

Jess tells me our conversation has reinvigorated her commitment to leave her despised chat ahead of the new year. She's just got to think up her goodbye message first.

The group chat is a complicated invention of our modern technological existence. It can be a useful tool: a place to coordinate Fourth of July plans with extended family or stay up to speed with neighbors on the landlord's latest shenanigans. It can be a fun place: a spot for sending memes and gossip and life updates. The group chat is also often a safer space for spicy takes than social media — it's less likely to get you fired, or indicted, or canceled (though that's not impossible). Group chats can also be wildly irritating. You look away for a few hours and suddenly you've got 63 unread messages about stuff you really do not care about. And sure, you can mute it, but it's still there, haunting you.

Jeremy Birnholtz, a communication professor at Northwestern University who focuses on human-computer interaction, told me there are two features that make group chats unique (and daunting). "One is that texting is happening all the time, so you can't choose to be out of the room and not be with everybody," he said. "Two is that you're either in it or you're out of it. There's not a graceful way to ease yourself out of it as there are with social relationships."

Ignoring the group chat is less obvious than, for example, spending Thanksgiving watching TV in the living room instead of talking to everyone around the table. But eventually everyone will notice and think you're kind of a jerk for it. And if you do engage, it can be tricky to ensure you get your point across. Group texts, like all written communication, lack many of the cues of in-person communication. There's no body language, no vocal inflections or facial expressions. It's easy to misread intentions and meaning, good or bad.

"People fill in the blanks the way that they want to," Birnholtz said. If you think someone is attractive or a close friend, you fill them in in positive ways. If you think someone doesn't like you, you do the opposite.

Sharon does not have a particularly good relationship with her in-laws, a reality that has infected their group chat. She's noticed her messages in a group she's in with her mother-in-law and two sisters-in-law don't get as much attention as she thinks they should. Her mother-in-law doesn't interact with photos of Sharon's kids as much as she does with pictures of Sharon's sister-in-law's kids. In April, Sharon (which isn't her real name) made eclipse-themed pancakes — she put a dark one over a light one and then put eyes on a Mrs. Butterworth's syrup bottle to make it look as if it was watching the eclipse — and posted photos of them in the group. Her mother-in-law didn't respond, but she did pop back in when Sharon's sister-in-law posted a photo of her cat. The chilly reception led Sharon to scale back her participation, and she finally muted the chat in the fall. "I feel so much better," she says. Still, Sharon won't quit. "I wouldn't have a place if I ever wanted to communicate a message with them where I could get them all at once," she says. "So I just leave it there."

From the outside, it's hard not to wonder whether Sharon is perceiving slights where none are meant — her kids are her mother-in-law's grandchildren, after all. At the same time, Sharon is filling in the blanks this way for a reason.

"If you don't get along with somebody in person, if they're passive-aggressive or where they do weird things in person, then it's not going to work on a group chat either," Sharon says. She emphasizes that in group chats she's careful to make sure everyone gets attention for what they post and is celebrated for their achievements. She's just heart reacting away.

Group chats have gone the way of a lot of communication innovations, such as email or AOL instant messaging or, for a more modern example, Slack. It proves itself useful, and then it becomes so useful that everyone's using it all the time, and then it gets overwhelming.

"The other thing is that technologies are not designed for graceful exits for the most part," Birnholtz said. In a WhatsApp group, there's no easy way to do the Midwestern "I suppose I'll let you go" thing that subtly lets the other person know you are very much done with the conversation. You can't really slow-fade a fraternity chat the way you might your fraternity friends in real life.

I reached out to a couple of professional etiquette experts and advice givers to ask if they had thoughts about how to quit a group chat you hate without damaging relationships. Carolyn Hax, an advice columnist at The Washington Post, told me that "good protocol is always that you're in control of your own life and time," and you don't need permission for that. "Anytime you're feeling handcuffed by a group, then it's time to take a deep breath and think about that a little," she said. Group chats are about feeling connected and supported and entertained, and if you're not getting that, it's OK to "dip out," she said. Someone just quit one of Hax's group chats with college friends, explaining that she had a lot going on in her life, and no one batted an eye. "It's like, 'Hey, are you all right?' That's about it," she said. "And if people can't handle that, then that's on them."

If it's a group with essential information — updates from other parents at school, or family members — the mute button is your friend. "You let it accumulate, and then you just check in: Did I miss something important?" Hax said. "Disengage as your health demands, but keep the thread."

Hax didn't say this, but I will: It's probably fine to lie and say you're too busy to keep up with the chat and leave. It's really nobody's business to dig into what you're too busy with. Maybe it's a medical issue, or maybe you just want to peacefully scroll through Instagram reels uninterrupted by a bunch of pings.

Lisa Mirza Grotts, an etiquette consultant, said that while it's important to leave politely, in casual groups it's fine to do a "quiet" exit. "You simply leave without an announcement," she said. She also said there's no one right way to communicate in a group chat; what reads to one person as efficient might read to another as rude. "I just think you have to be mindful that it's not the perfect way to communicate," she said.

Not everyone has qualms about quitting their group chats, like Joe Cardillo, who has cleaned house lately. They've worked in venture-backed startups for about a decade and have several group chats with former colleagues and professional contacts. In one such chat, messages started to come through on what Cardillo called some pretty "inflammatory" topics. In particular, someone said that Elon Musk and Donald Trump would be "amazing" for tech, which started an argument with hundreds of messages. Cardillo spoke up, saying they didn't want to be in an "unstructured space" where people didn't show basic respect and take accountability. Ultimately they left.

"I just consider it healthy to think about what a good conversation feels like. And if this isn't it, then you're like, I'm out," Cardillo said.

Group-chat dynamics are, in a word, messy — and in many messy situations, walking away is easier said than done. One friend confessed that they'd been in a weeklyish-brunch chat for two years without any intention of ever attending said brunch. Everybody seems nice, but it just isn't their jam, and they're scared to quit. Another admitted that they kind of hated their friend-group chat, and they were pretty sure everyone else had a chat without them, but they had no idea how to broach the subject. One person told me about a friend who had abruptly left a chat after someone else in the group posted an old picture of her in which she was quite drunk. The person surmised that the friend's husband saw the photo and "went nuts."

Sometimes you just have to set a boundary, and that boundary can be deciding to not sit in a room with 12 people chattering away all day without any ability to shut them off. You can say you have to go for a reason, or you can just walk away. Who knows if they'll even miss you? Years ago, everyone quit a group chat I was in except for me and one other person. My friend renamed it "WE'RE THE BEST," and we've been talking in it, by ourselves, since. It's fun, and we're still friends with the other people.

As for Jess, she insists she's open to being friends with the people in her mediocre-musician chat on an individual, less intense level, but I have my doubts. The last time they were all interested in going to the same show, she bought a ticket — but for a different night.

"They're wonderful people," she says. "They're just not my people."

Emily Stewart is a senior correspondent at Business Insider, writing about business and the economy.

On Wednesday, OpenAI launched a 1-800-CHATGPT (1-800-242-8478) telephone number that anyone in the US can call to talk to ChatGPT via voice chat for up to 15 minutes for free. The company also says that people outside the US can send text messages to the same number for free using WhatsApp.

Upon calling, users hear a voice say, "Hello again, it's ChatGPT, an AI assistant. Our conversation may be reviewed for safety. How can I help you?" Callers can ask ChatGPT anything they would normally ask the AI assistant and have a live, interactive conversation.

During a livestream demo of "Calling with ChatGPT" during Day 10 of "12 Days of OpenAI," OpenAI employees demonstrated several examples of the telephone-based voice chat in action, asking ChatGPT to identify a distinctive house in California and for help in translating a message into Spanish for a friend. For fun, they showed calls from an iPhone, a flip phone, and a vintage rotary phone.

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ChatGPT is coming to phones. No, not smartphones — landlines. Call 1-800-242-8478 (1-800-CHATGPT), and OpenAI’s AI-powered assistant will respond as of Wednesday afternoon. “[Our mission at] OpenAI is to make artificial general intelligence beneficial to all of humanity, and part of that is making it as accessible as possible to as many people as we […]

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Once, not long ago, booking a table at a hot new restaurant didn’t entail a midnight dash to Resy. Truly, we didn’t know how good we had it then. Hours-long lines out the door are now the norm, not the exception, in major cities from New York to Los Angeles. One reason is that restaurants […]

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• Nima Momeni was found guilty of second-degree murder in Cash App founder Bob Lee's stabbing death.
• Momeni killed Lee after a dispute about Momeni's sister, prosecutors argued.
• Momeni, who was acquitted of first-degree murder, faces 16 years to life in prison, the DA said.

A San Francisco jury found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the fatal stabbing of 43-year-old Bob Lee, the creator of Cash App.

Momeni, a 40-year-old tech consultant, was accused of killing Lee in the early morning hours of April 4, 2023. Police had discovered Lee bleeding heavily from multiple stab wounds on an empty street in downtown San Francisco after he had called 911 for help. Lee later died of his injuries.

Prosecutors successfully argued to the jury that Momeni stabbed Lee three times with a knife he took from his sister's kitchen set.

Prosecutors said Momeni planned the killing after learning Lee introduced his sister to a drug dealer who drugged and sexually assaulted her, Fox News reported.

Momeni had confronted the Cash App founder about his sister, who had been drinking with Lee and a group of friends. Momeni asked Lee if she "was doing drugs or anything inappropriate," according to court documents. Prosecutors said a witness saw Lee reassuring Momeni that his sister had not taken any substances and that "nothing inappropriate had happened."

Later, Momeni lured Lee to a secluded area where prosecutors said he stabbed Lee before fleeing.

Momeni testified in court that he had been acting in self-defense. Momeni said he and Lee were driving together but pulled over because Momeni thought Lee was going to vomit, NBC News reported. Momeni said Lee then attacked him after he had joked that Lee cared more about strip clubs than his family, the outlet reported. Momeni told the court Lee pulled out the knife, and the pair struggled over it before Momeni walked away not realizing Lee had been stabbed.

But Assistant District Attorney Omid Talai argued that Lee was "stabbed through his heart and left to die," NBC News reported.

"In a world where the powerful and well-connected sometimes act as though they are immune to consequences, it is heartening to see a jury of ordinary San Franciscans demonstrate that if you break the law, you will be held accountable," Talai and Assistant District Attorney Dane Reinstedt said in a press release.

Momeni, whose attorneys didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI, was acquitted of first-degree murder charges. He faces 16 years to life in prison, the district attorney's office said.

A San Francisco jury has found Nima Momeni guilty of second-degree murder in the stabbing of Bob Lee, the Cash App creator and former CTO of Block, according to NBC Bay Area on Tuesday. The jury found Momeni not guilty of first-degree murder, meaning jurors decided the murder of Lee was not premeditated. Lee was […]

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In the early days of the pandemic, Josh Kramer and his wife set up a Discord server to stay in touch with their friends. Branched off from the main group of about 20 people are different channels for topics — like AI and crypto, which took over a channel previously devoted to "Tiger King," and another called "sweethomies" to talk about their houses and apartments — that only some people might want to be notified about to avoid annoying everyone all the time. Now, more than four years later, it's become "essential" for the extended friend group, says Kramer, seeing them through the early anxiety of COVID-19 and two presidential elections.

While the chat is made up of friendly faces, it's not really an echo chamber — not everyone has the same ideology or political opinions, Kramer tells me. But it's more productive than screaming into the void on social media. Now, when he has a thought that may have turned into a tweet, he instead takes it to the group, where it can become a conversation.

"It's a way to have conversations about complicated issues, like national politics, but in context with people I actually know and care about," Kramer, who is the head of editorial at New_ Public, a nonprofit research and development lab focusing on reimagining social media, tells me. The success of the server has also informed how he thinks about ways to reform the social web. On election night, for example, using the group chat was less about scoring points with a quippy tweet and "more about checking in with each other and commiserating about our experience, rather than whatever you might take to Twitter to talk about to check in with the broader zeitgeist."

In the month or so since the 2024 election, thousands have abandoned or deactivated their X accounts, taking issue with Elon Musk's move to use the platform as a tool to reelect Donald Trump, as they seek new ways to connect and share information. Bluesky, which saw its users grow 110% in November according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, has emerged as the most promising replacement among many progressives, journalists, and Swifties, as it allows people to easily share links and doesn't rely as heavily on algorithmic delivery of posts as platforms like Facebook, X, and TikTok have come to. But some are turning further inward to smaller group chats, either via text message or on platforms like Discord, WhatsApp, and Signal, where they can have conversations more privately and free of algorithmic determinations.

It's all part of the larger, ongoing fracturing of our social media landscape. For a decade, Twitter proved to be the room where news broke. Other upstarts launched after Elon Musk bought the platform in 2022 and tried to compete, luring people with promises of moderation and civility, but ultimately folded, largely because they weren't very fun or lacked the momentum created by the kind of power users that propelled the old Twitter. But for many, there's still safety in the smaller group chats, which take the form of your friends who like to shit talk in an iMessage chain or topic-focused, larger chats on apps like Discord or WhatsApp.

"Group chats have been quite valued," Kate Mannell, a research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the Digital Child at Deakin University in Australia, tells me. They allow people to chat with selected friends, family members, or colleagues to have much "more context-specific kinds of conversations, which I think is much more reflective of the way that our social groups actually exist, as opposed to this kind of flattening" that happens on social media. When people accumulate large followings on social media, they run into context collapse, she says. The communication breakdown happens as the social platforms launched in the 2000s have taken on larger lives than anyone anticipated.

By contrast, some more exclusive chats are seen as cozy, safe spaces. Most of Discord's servers are made up of fewer than 10 people, Savannah Badalich, the senior director of policy at Discord, tells me. The company has 200 million active users, up from 100 million in 2020. What started as a place to hang with friends while playing video games still incentivizes interacting over lurking or building up big followings. "We don't have that endless doomscrolling," Badalich says. "We don't have that place where you're passively consuming content. Discord is about real-time interaction." And interacting among smaller groups may be more natural. Research by the psychologist Robin Dunbar in the 1990s found that humans could cognitively maintain about 150 meaningful relationships. More recent research has questioned that determination, but any person overburdened by our digital age can surely tell you that you can only show up authentically and substantially in person for a small subset of the people you follow online. A 2024 study, conducted by Dunbar and the telecommunications company Vodafone, found that the average person in the UK was part of 83 group chats across all platforms, with a quarter of people using group chats more often than one-to-one messages.

In addition to hosting group chats, WhatsApp has tried more recently to position itself as a place for news, giving publishers the ability to send headlines directly to followers. News organizations like MSNBC, Reuters, and Telemundo have channels. CNN has nearly 15 million followers, while The New York Times has about 13 million. Several publishers recently told the Times that they were seeing growth and traffic come from WhatsApp, but the channels have yet to rival sources like Google or Facebook. While it gives them the power to connect to readers, WhatsApp is owned by Meta, which has a fraught history of hooking media companies and making them dependent on traffic on its social platforms only to later de-emphasize their content.

Victoria Usher, the founder and CEO of Gingermay, a B2B tech communications firm, says she's in several large, business-focused group chats on WhatsApp. Usher, who lives in the UK, even found these chats were a way to get news about the US election "immediately." In a way, the group chats are her way of optimizing news and analysis of it, and it works because there's a deep sense of trust between those in the chat that doesn't exist when scrolling X. "I prefer it to an algorithm," she says. "It's going to be stories that I will find interesting." She thinks they deliver information better than LinkedIn, where people have taken to writing posts in classic LinkedIn style to please the algorithm — which can be both self-serving and cringe. "It doesn't feel like it's a truthful channel," Usher says. "They're trying to create a picture of how they want to be seen personally. Within WhatsApp groups or Signal, people are much more likely to post what they actually feel about something."

The candid nature of group chats — which some have called the last safe spaces in society today — gives them value and tethers people with looser connections together, but that can also make them unwieldy. Some of the larger group chats, like those on Discord, have moderation and rules. But when it comes to just chatting with your friends or family, there's largely no established group-chat etiquette. Group chats can languish for years; there's no playbook for leaving or kicking out someone who's no longer close to the core group. If a couple breaks up, who gets the group chat? How many memes is a person allowed to send a day? What happens when the group texts get leaked? There's often "no external moderator to come in and say, 'That's not how we do things,'" Mannell says.

Kramer, while he likes his Discord chat, is optimistic about the future of groups and new social networks. He says he's also taken over a community Facebook group for his neighborhood that was inactive and made more connections with his neighbors. We're in a moment where massive change could come to our chats and our social networks. "There's been a social internet for 30 years," says Kramer. But there's "so much room for innovation and new exciting and alternative options." But his group chat might still have the best vibes of all. Messaging there "has less to do with being right and scoring points" than on social media, he says. "It has so much value to me on a personal level, as a place of real support."

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.

WhatsApp announced that it had added new video calling features just before the holidays, including participant selection for group video calls, better resolution, and a revamped call tab on the desktop. This is another step from Meta in making WhatsApp a viable option for both personal and work calls instead of using Google Meet or […]

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• The Pew Research Center surveyed American teenagers about social media and technology.
• Seventeen percent said they used Elon Musk's social media app, X — a steep decline compared to a decade ago.
• More teens use Meta's Instagram, Facebook, and, increasingly, WhatsApp.

American teenagers just don't love X.

It's one of the least used major social media sites among US teenagers, followed only by Reddit and Threads, according to a new study published by the Pew Research Center.

The Washington DC-based think tank surveyed nearly 1,400 teenagers between September and October to collect the data, which showed that 17% of teen respondents said they use X, a six-point decrease from 2022 when 23% of surveyed teenagers said they used the site.

Elon Musk purchased X, formerly Twitter, in 2022.

Representatives for X did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Other popular social media sites also saw a decline in use among teens.

YouTube, owned by Google, attracted the highest percentage of teenage users despite falling from 95% to 90% from 2022 to 2024. ByteDance's TikTok came in second place with 63% of respondents saying they used the app, compared to 67% two years ago.

Snap Inc.'s Snapchat recorded 55%, another slight decline from 59% in 2022.

Instagram, owned by Meta, was used by 61%, about the same as two years ago, while Meta's Facebook also held steady at 32%. Reddit also remained consistent, with 14% of teens saying they used the app, the same as 2022.

Threads, which Meta launched in 2023, was used by 6% of teens.

There was only one social media site that grew in popularity with teens over the past two years: WhatsApp.

The Meta-owned messaging app went from 17% of teens saying they used it in 2022 to 23% this year — overtaking X in teenage users, according to the Pew surveys.

Meta, then Facebook Inc., bought WhatsApp for $22 billion in 2014, an investment that the company says is finally paying off.

On Meta's quarter-three earnings call in November, the company reported a 48% year-over-year increase in non-advertising revenue that was largely attributed to WhatsApp.

The revenue boost was mostly due to the app's product that allows businesses to pay to chat directly with customers.

But WhatsApp is also known to be great for large group chats, which have become increasingly popular with teens.

Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Threads on Wednesday were all experiencing issues to varying degrees as a result of a global outage affecting Meta’s apps. The cause of the outage is not yet known, but Meta has acknowledged a “technical issue” in a post on X. The company at 1:48 p.m. ET wrote, “We’re aware […]

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Back in February, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian teamed up with Brent Montgomery (“Pawn Stars” producer) and Evan Parker (former general manager at The Athletic) to launch Mantel, a social network allowing collectors to share their latest finds, such as sports cards, TCGs (trading card games), comic books, coins, stamps, sneakers, watches, and more.  Initially available […]

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Weeks after a researcher reported the bug to WhatsApp, the company says it rolled out a long-term fix.

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• Former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who once faced a DOJ probe, recently joined Cameo.
• Cameo's CEO told BI that Gaetz and others capture the ethos behind the platform.
• The company says it's now allowing "just about anyone" to join the site.

Days after former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz withdrew his consideration to be Donald Trump's US attorney general in late November, the lawmaker made a move that's becoming increasingly familiar for controversial figures on the Hill.

He joined Cameo, a social platform founded in 2016 that allows fans to request personalized videos from celebrities for a fee.

For Cameo cofounder and CEO Steven Galanis, Gaetz's recent debut on the platform merely captures the ethos of his company, giving figures of pop culture who are, in the CEO's words, "more famous than rich" an opportunity to cash in on their cultural capital.

Whether they faced a federal probe or not is not Cameo's concern, Galanis told Business Insider.

"I think we're a marketplace for people that are notable, right?" Galanis said. "Some are notorious and some are notable, but they're all people that matter in the public zeitgeist. These are all people that people care about."

Gaetz, who was once under investigation by the Justice Department related to sex trafficking allegations, charges $500 or more per video. The ex-congressman has denied the allegations, and the DOJ declined to pursue charges. Gaetz was also under investigation by the House Ethics Committee until he resigned from Congress last month.

A spokesperson for Gaetz did not immediately return a request for comment.

Former Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from Congress last year and pleaded guilty to wire fraud and identify theft in August, is another controversial politician who sought to capitalize on his notoriety through Cameo.

Galanis said Santos had the "biggest first day in Cameo history" last year. The CEO declined to provide exact figures, but the former lawmaker previously said he quickly surpassed the $174,000 congressional salary within a week.

A spokesperson for Santos did not immediately return a request for comment.

To see a Santos-like figure on Cameo may not have always been the case during the social platform's early days, Galanis said. The CEO said Cameo used to have "fairly junior employees" who would decide who to let on the site.

"There might have been someone who said, 'I don't like George Santos so, no, he's not on,'" Galanis said. "And that would've never even got to us."

Cameo also had a criteria that required notable figures to at least have 25,000 followers on any one of their social media platforms.

Now, the company says it's opening its doors to "just about anyone" through an updated policy called CameoX.

"After years of limiting access to select personalities who met specific follower thresholds or were hand-picked, Cameo is now expanding its platform to a broader range of talent through a new onboarding policy called CameoX," the company said in a press release.

With the old onboarding system, Galanis said Cameo may have missed out on "hundreds if not thousands of talent that are the type of people we would've wanted on. But at the time they applied, maybe we didn't realize that yet."

"Imagine a TikToker that hadn't had their viral video. Imagine a baseball player that might've been in college that all of a sudden is starting on the Atlanta Braves," he said.

Cameo's decision to loosen its onboarding policy also comes at a time when the platform is facing financial difficulties.

In 2021, during the height of the pandemic, the platform secured a $1 billion unicorn valuation through a $100 million funding round. Earlier this year, Cameo was unable to pay a $600,000 settlement stemming from the failure to properly disclose ad endorsements on celebrity videos. The company was instead fined $100,000.

Galanis told BI the issue has now been resolved.

"We've moved on," he said.

The company raised $28 million in its latest funding round from March, Galanis confirmed. The Information reported the funding would put Cameo's valuation at less than $100 million — a 90% plunge from its previous value.

With the new onboarding policy, Cameo isn't just open to A-listers or the momentarily famous but also your local beloved high school football coach. But there are still limits, Galanis said.

The platform has moderation rules such as no nudity or inciting violence and hate speech. And like any company, Cameo has to abide by government regulations or sanctions that might bar it from doing business with specific people or entities, the CEO said.

"I can't police what people do off Cameo," Galanis said, "but I can police what they do on it. So we judge people based on their behavior on our platform."

After Vambe pivoted to building conversational AI agents for small and medium-sized businesses, its ARR increased five-fold to $1 million.

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There are plenty of services that let you build lists to track and discover new books, movies, and songs, but often, these lists end up getting siloed. Former Squarespace employee Alfonso Cobo wanted to bring all kinds of lists together, and he’s trying to do that with Hypelist. Cobo said the ethos behind creating Hypelist […]

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Meta, the parent of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, is the second-biggest driver of internet usage globally. Its properties — and their billions of users — account for 10% of all fixed and 22% of all mobile traffic. Meta’s investments into artificial intelligence stand to boost that usage even further. So to make sure it will […]

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• Procreate CEO James Cuda said VC funding for apps has "dried up," making entering the market challenging.
• Cuda advises aspiring app founders to take "bold" risks and avoid following trends to succeed.
• Cuda named Uber as an app that made an impact by doing something different.

Thinking of making your own app? Procreate CEO James Cuda has some bad news: the "gold rush is kind of over."

The CEO of the popular digital art app for iPads and iPhones is referring to the days of VCs pouring money into new apps. In an interview with Business Insider, the CEO discussed how the current landscape has made it more difficult — though not impossible — for apps to enter the market and compete with the major players.

"I think 10 years ago, lots of VCs were just throwing money at the App Store and any developer was getting a lot of funding," Cuda said. "But that's really dried up now."

While the overall startup market has faced a lull, AI startups are receiving significant funding, with firms like Andreessen Horowitz making the sector one of its focuses.

35.5% of VC deals made in the third quarter were related to AI and machine learning, while 64.4% were non-AI or machine learning, according to PitchBook data shared with BI. That's about a 25% jump from the first quarter of 2019, when only 10% of VC deals were related to AI and machine learning.

Cuda said there's still room to create "incredible" apps, but it's not quite as simple. His advice to app founders competing in today's app landscape is to "take a bold risk."

"What I would suggest is doing something that has never been done before," Cuda said, adding that while it may be more of a risky path, the reward, if you're successful, is likely more worthwhile.

Cuda suggests founders avoid hopping on trends because they're "not going to break through" today's competition of well-established products on app stores.

Cuda appeared to follow his own advice even though his app has been a mainstay among iPad design apps. The CEO went viral for speaking out against a major trend, generative AI, in a video posted by the company in August. He told BI the company has kept its decision to leave AI out of its products.

"If you follow trends, you're already going to be competing against products that are, really dominating in those charts, have got lots of eyeballs, they've got lots of brand equity already accrued," Cuda said.

The app CEO named Uber as a prime example of a product that came out of left field with a concept that nobody had successfully tried before. At its inception, the company was called UberCab and founded as a black-car service. Cuda recalls thinking the concept of getting into a stranger's car that drops you off somewhere was "absurd." The ride-hailing app went public in 2019 and in October reported just over $11 billion in revenue in its third-quarter earnings.

"But look at what impact Uber was able to make by doing something completely different and utilizing all of the technology of the hardware that Apple provides and the app store itself," Cuda said.