In today’s top story, Cisco makes a mega acquisition of Splunk. The $28 billion deal gives Cisco an observability platform that Ron Miller reports “could fit nicely into its security business to help customers better understand security threats, while also helping parse oodles of log data to resolve other problems like helping understand system failures or troubleshoot myriad issues across a broad array of enterprise systems.” Get the scoop.

Meanwhile, over at YouTube, there is a lot going on. Its Shorts features are getting some generative AI love with Dream Screen, there is a new app called YouTube Create and new AI creator tools.

And our Startup Battlefield winner is . . . BioticsAI!!!!

More top reads

Nothing but net: Harness launches Gitness, an open source GitHub competitor. Learn more.

New in social media apps: Mastodon’s latest release makes the open source Twitter alternative easier to use. Find out when you might see it.

Seeing stars: True Anomaly lands a $17.4 million contract from U.S. Space Force for space domain awareness tech. Read more.

No driver: Waabi and Uber Freight partner to accelerate autonomous trucking. Here’s how they plan to do it.

Come together: Mesh, which helps people manage their digital assets, raises $22 million. Now get to transferring that crypto.

Matar Pulao or not Matar Pulao: Khosla-backed HealthifyMe introduces an AI-powered image recognition for Indian food. Read more.

Cruisin’: Cruise CEO says company would join the call to ban human drivers in city centers and that a winter version of Origin AV is two years away.

What is your superpower?: Artifact co-founder Kevin Systrom doesn’t believe in AI doomerism. Here’s why.

Another investigation: Poland opens privacy probe of ChatGPT following GDPR complaint. They say it will get difficult.

Limitless: Can large language models and the systems they enable continue growing in size and capability? According to Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, that is a yes.

More for your Thursday:

Meredith Whittaker reaffirms that Signal would leave UK if forced by privacy bill

Snapchat now has over 5M paying users for Snapchat+

Roblox cuts 30 on talent acquisition team as hiring slows

Banish cumulative graphs from your pitch deck (TC+)

GGV splits off China business following congressional panel probe

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How to spend your first $10K on paid ads

For his latest TC+ column, growth marketer Jonathan Martinez dug into a topic every startup faces at some point: How to allocate a budget for your first paid marketing campaign.

Starting with a hypothetical $10,000 budget, Martinez answers the following questions:

• Which channels should a startup leverage?
• How should a budget be created?
• Which tests are the most important in the early stages?

“In the early days of your startup, it’s important to be as efficient as possible, not only with this $10K budget, but also with your time,” he writes.

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