The Leaderboard

When you think back of the breakout stars of 2017, Coinbase comes to mind almost immediately. Its user base is growing at a remarkable pace with up to 100,000 new signups daily, and has been central throughout the surge in Bitcoin and Ethereum this year. Meanwhile, Robinhood announced 3M traders the other week, and Flexport has been the most common answer when we asked the question on Twitter.

Predictions: Who will be the breakout companies of 2018? 🤔

Ben predicts it will be Coda, saying: "3 years in stealth and $60M raised, Coda is taking on Excel ☠️" and has 4 more recommendations.

Sam says HQ Trivia... (no explanation needed).

Andrey says Lemonade is the one to watch: "Amazing customer experience, clear pricing structure. A true disruption for the home insurance industry."

Philip says keep an eye on Grail, a company working on early cancer detection via blood screening, and Virta Health, which is reversing type 2 diabetes without medications or surgery.

View the community's responses and add your predictions here.

P.S. add a 1-2 sentence description for a chance to be quoted in the Breakout Companies of 2018 report by AngelList. ✌️

We wanted flyings cars, all we got was a Chrome extension that blocks tweets longer than 140 characters.

What happened to the Future? (Founders Fund asked, in their famous manifesto). Let us explain.

1. Uber is launching flying cars in 2020. You read that correctly. The company announced an on-demand fully electric vertical takeoff and landing flying car service. The Uber app will have an "UberAir" option to select that is straight out of The Jetsons. Watch the video.

2. All we got was 140 characters. In the 24 hours since Twitter's 280 expansion humanity proved it cannot be trusted with such innovations. Brands, people, social media managers everywhere, have shown their true character posting the longest tweets they could imagine. Luckily, a developer found the cure to the devastation. Download 140 extension.

3. The greatest innovation ever launched over the weekend. 🦄

In response to mounting pressure from Snap on the App Store and Twitter’s unprecedented move to increase its iconic 140 character limit, Facebook has pivoted into the enterprise.

The social network's new customer chat interface allows customers to talk directly with businesses on their websites using Messenger. These conversations are said to have the ability to continue across all devices using advanced syncing technology.

Former PayPal CEO and current Messenger Chief David Marcus shared the news on Twitter, calling it a "Big deal :)".

In response, Intercom CEO Eoghan McCabe took to Product Hunt, welcoming the new direct competition, saying:

"Heeeeey. CEO of Intercom here. All I’ll say for now is, it’s insane to see how big this space has become, and how fast it’s moving. The next few years are going to be fun and interesting!"

Along with Intercom, a leader in the space, Facebook will face stiff competition from Drift, Firechat, and other innovative new entrants.

Our thoughts: This isn’t Facebook’s first attempt at cracking the enterprise and a reminder that Zuckerberg and team have big ambitions (watch out, Elon).

GV Partner and former TechCrunch writer M.G. Siegler is a man of few words, except when writing. Today he shares his favorite writing apps for the iPad, iPhone, and Mac, and writing habits he has developed.

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Back in my (full time) writing days, I was perhaps atypical. I would basically never write a draft of anything. Instead, I would write and publish immediately. It was all about speed, speed, speed. These days, I’m a lot different. I wait. And wait. And wait.

I find myself increasingly using drafts, even beyond simply for long-form writing. Twitter. Instagram. Basically anything that will let you save a post to come back to later. A large part of this has to do with having a day job beyond writing and simply not having the time to devote. But the part I’ve grown to respect is actually getting something down and then revisiting it later with a “different” set of eyes.

These are the apps I use for writing:

For taking notes on the go, I generally use Bear. I love the design and simplicity of the app mixed with the ever-growing functionality. I do use Apple’s built-in Notes app for a few other things, mainly because there’s now a super quick short-cut to get to the app via Control Center in iOS 11 (not to mention the Apple Pencil shortcut for the iPad Pro).

When it comes time to sit down and write, I’ve been switching between Ulysses and iA Writer. Each has different pluses and minuses  — Ulysses has many more features (and is a paid product), but recently I’ve got back to liking the more spartan look-and-feel of iA. I also like Byword, which is more similar to iA, and is featured on Product Hunt today. 😉

When it comes time to actually publish, Ulysses, iA, and Byword all work with Medium via an API to publish directly to that service in draft form. I’ll usually do any last edits there. I’ll also write directly in Medium’s very nice, simple editor if I’m replying to responses or writing shorter things. I’ve never actually lost a draft using Medium’s editor, but old habits die hard — I’ve lost too many in the ether of the CMSes of yesteryear :)

We are living at a time when search engines and social networks hold fancy hardware events, iPhones come with notches (and cost 4-figures), and this weekend emojis started singing. Keeping up with the latest gadgets can take a toll, and you wallet agrees. But what if you can have it all, for free? 🤔

Enter for a chance to win the Dream Tech Lover's Package, including:

💻 Macbook Air by Apple ($999 value)
🎧 BEATS Solo Wireless Headphones ($249 value)
😎 VR Headset ($199 value)
📺 Smart TV ($599 value)
🏃 Fitness Tracker ($149 value)
⌚️ Smart Watch ($299 value)

The winner will also receive more Product Hunt kitty stickers and shirts than they'll know what to do with. 👕🎁😻