This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis covers startups, tech, markets, media, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. He also interviews the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators.
Episodes
The Gadget That's Better in Crowds Than Your Phone + Ring’s Founder Before Amazon Bought It | E2349
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Today’s show:
At packed concerts, festivals, and stadiums, your phone gets WORSE with every person who shows up. Totem gets better.
Carter Fowle
Jason Reacts To Japanese Founder Pitches + Fireside Chat With Yuki Shirato
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Today’s show:
AssetHub built an AI agent that recreates licensed characters in 3D while respecting copyright rules... But Jason says he needs to think BIGGER. 11 founders pitched their companies to Jason and Yuki Shirato of Techstars Tokyo at our Osaka
What VCs Really Think About Personal AI Agents | E2347
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Today’s show:
A personal AI agent that’s still invite-only just hit a $10 billion valuation. Guest host Deedy Das of Menlo Ventures is joined by Kanu Gulati of Khosla Ventures, Chr
Jason Mentors The Next Generation + Why AI Is Bad at Teaching (Aristotle Interview) | E2346
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Today’s show:
The smarter AI gets, the more it just does the work for you, and the less helpful it becomes as a tutor.
Shan Reddy of Aristotle joins Jason to demo a voice-first tutor built to run a session the way a $200-an
Inside The Startup Building Uncensored AI (Abliteration AI) | EP 2345
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Today’s show:
What can AI do with the guardrails OFF? Devon Thomas of Abliteration.ai thinks defenders should have access to the same kinds of tools, rather than having one hand tied be
Justin Kan & Brian Chesky: The Rejections That Built Twitch and Airbnb | E2344
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Today’s show:
Google once interviewed the entire Justin.tv (now Twitch) team and then walked away from an acquisition deal, saying they weren’t good enough. Seven investors passed on buying 10% of Airbnb for $150,000, a stake
Jason’s Put a $5K Bounty on His Dream Chrome Extension | E2338
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Today’s show:
A product that would have cost $500,000 to build in 2006 now costs less than a used car. Jason put up $5,000 on an idea he'd been sitting on for 20 years, and so far, we’ve received dozens of amazing submissio
The 5 Companies Apple Must Buy
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Today’s show:
Timestamps:
0:00 Will Ternus take "massively big swings"?
3:43 Round 1: ElevenLabs
4:46 Round 1: Disney
6:18 Round 2: Sony
8:22 Round 2: Boston Dynamics
9:23 Round 3: Perplexity
10:02 A
A rogue OpenAI agent hacked Australia’s government. Does this matter? | E2342
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Today’s show:
An OpenAI agent breached Australia's Medicare statistics portal in June, and it took 84 days for the Frontier Lab to publicly acknowledge it. Jason and Lon dig into whether this is an important cautionary ta
VCs Would Bet on Open-Source AI Over OpenAI and Anthropic | E2341
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Today’s show:
Anthropic and OpenAI released cheaper models on the same day with Claude Opus 5.5 and GPT-6, and these VCs would still bet on open source
Elon's New Hyperloop, Trump's AI Rename, and a Model That Won't Talk | E2340
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Today’s show:
Elon revives the Hyperloop, promising a 30-minute commute between Austin and San Antonio. It's the kind of project that could reshape how Texans think about getting between two major cities entirely.
Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source, Microduck, and NVIDIA | E2339
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Today’s show:
Hugging Face built a $399 open-source robot duck as a side quest, and sold 16,000 units off a single tweet. Co-founder Thomas Wolf joins Jason and Lon to explain Microduck happ
90% of AI prototypes never reach production (w/ Temporal's Samar Abbas) | AI Basics
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Build context-aware AI workflows using DeepMind models and orchestration tools with Google for Startups' new Startup technical guide on generative media. Get the guide here: https://goo.gle/technical_guide
Today's show:
The demo works, the vibes are immaculate, but then the app falls apart the second real users touch it. O
Ask Jason: AI Extinction, Grok's Rogue Meme Coin & Weed Farms as Data Centers | E2337
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Today's show:
A 27-year-old Anthropic researcher quit last week warning that AI could cause human extinction, and by Friday, a caller's 76-year-old mother was texting her in a pa
The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336
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Upwork helps businesses find highly skille
Becki DeGraw on founder vesting, advisor equity & the 4-term-sheet play
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Today's show:
One of YouTube's three co-founders left for grad school and walked away with a fraction of what his partners made on the Google sale. Becki DeGraw of Wilson Sonsini joins Jason for Startup Legal Basics to explain the vesting schedule behind that gap, and why you want one even if you never take
Did OpenAI Steal the Navier-Stokes Solution? | E2335
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Check out a full transcript and summary of today's show, created by Plaud:
Today's show:
An Anthropic researcher quit this week, saying both leading labs are gambling with everyone's lives.
Dr. Mark Hyman on Function Health & GLP-1 microdosing | E2334
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Today's show:
Your doctor almost certainly isn't testing your insulin. Dr. Mark Hyman sits down with Jason to explain the broken system that Function is fixing, and what 100 million biomarkers say about h
Becki DeGraw on spinouts, IP licensing & clean exits | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics
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Wilson Sonsini
Today's show:
Spinouts are everywhere right now, and most founders get the cap table wrong. Jason sits down with Becki DeGraw, partner at Wilson Sonsini, to break down how to do it right, starting with his 80/20 rule for splitting the new cap table and why letting the old company keep too much of it kills your ability to raise.
Becki
VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333
VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333
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Today's show:
Are we one step closer to data centers in space? Katelin Holloway of Seven Seven Six and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures break it down what it would take.
Plus investor interest is surging in Physical AI companies.
Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332
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Today's show:
Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this week
Breaking down Nvidia's Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331
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Today's show:
*Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside's coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises u
Bill Gates foresees massive AI job loss: these VCs disagree | E2330
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Today's show:
*Bill Gates dropped a 6,000 word warning: AI will be "the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst sort of injustice." The Microsoft icon has an AI agenda for the US: new national
You Can't Fire a VC From Your Board: Here's Why | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics
Today's show:
Can a founder actually fire a board member? Short answer: almost never. And the reason why may surprise a lot of founders.
On this edition of Legal Basics, Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw joins Jason for a deep dive into who really controls your board, when investors start earning seats, and the differences between a board member and a board observer. Check out an episode that
China wants you to cheer for the robots taking your job | E2329
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how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube
Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there'
Open source is going to win it all: Harvey proves it | E2328
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Today's show:
Jason's been saying it for years now (and we've got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, tra
Taste is the new programming language (w/ Astrocade CEO Amir Sadeghian) | AI Basics
The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud!
Build context-aware AI workflows using DeepMind models and orchestration tools with Google for Startups' new Startup technical guide on generative media. Get the guide here: https://goo.gle/technical_guide
Astrocade is building super-intelligence for the interactive world. Build the future of fun: https://www.astrocade.com/careers
Tod
Neurosymbolic AI outperforms chatbots and product search | E2327
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Today's show:
Frontier AI models can ace PhD-level exams, but it's still bad at tracking down the product you want in the style that suits you. Onton's Zach Hudson tell us that the problem is that models are a black box.
His solution? A neurosymbolic mo
Bittensor creator Const on Affine, dTAO, "mining reasoning," and more | E2326
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Today's show:
We've been going deep on Bittensor and how it works all year on TWiST, meeting with the creators of some of our favorite subnets, and exploring how the system decentralizes inference, compute, and storage
What we'll learn from Anthropic's $2-$3T IPO | E2325
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Today's show:
*Anthropic is likely headed for the largest IPO in history. A reported 2-3 trillion October debut would blow past SpaceX's recent record. Jason breaks down why the. numbers matter less than what they'll reveal about the entire AI econo
These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns
These robots could cut delivery costs by 80% | Next Unicorns
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Today's show:
*Cytronic built a robotics-first fulfillment network, packing and shipping orders for cents instead of dollars, from small, city-adj
Zuck's AI manifesto is a data center PR masterclass | E2323
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Today's show:
*Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg published a 6,500 word essay about the future of AI, and Jason thinks it's his smartest PR move in years.
The thinkpiece, "The Future is for Everyone: The Path to a Positive AI Future," arrives alongside a ne
How AI splits startups into winners and losers | E2322
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Today's show:
A hedge fund just blew up shorting SaaS stocks. In turns out, the software companies that went all in on AI are bouncing back. Figma's CEO — still riding high on strong revenue — forfeited roughly $46 million in stock awards to ease inve
Airtable's 80% off value crash: VCs explain why it's still a win | E2321
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Today's show:
*Airtable just sold for $2.25 billion, an 81% drop from its peak of $11.7 billion. On this week's TWiST VC Roundtable, Aditya Agarwal (South Park Commons), Niko Bonatsos (Verdict Capital), and Rick Heitzmann (FirstMark Capital) break down why the ve
How Bespoke faked AI until it actually worked (w/ Akemi Tsunagawa) | E2320
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Today's show:
*Before Bespoke's "travel concierge" chatbot could actually hold a conversation, founder/CEO Akemi Tsunagawa and her team quietly answered customers themselves. That "fake it till you make it" strategy paid off.
Why AI has no taste and how to fix it (w/ Thais Castello Branco) | E2319
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Today's show:
AI models can solve PhD-level math equations and code an app in minutes… So why does everything they design look like identical slop? Thais Castello Branco, founder of Taste Labs, raised $18.5M in seed funding to teach frontier models abou
Banning Chinese robots isn't regulatory capture | E2318
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Today's show:
The FCC's decision to ban Chinese humanoid robots over security concerns is a boon to American startups, which now face a narrower competitive market. But where should we draw the line on security over competition? Menlo Vent
While other cultivated meat companies are collapsing, this one turned a profit | E2317
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Today's show:
*Most lab-grown meat companies have already gone under. It's expensive to produce, and there's little demand from real-world consumers. But Tokyo's IntegriCulture is still standing after selling their proprietary serum to cosmetics companies.
On Episode
Why quantum has been "10 years away" for 30 years | E2316
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Today's show:
*For three decades now, we've been told that breakthroughs in quantum computing are right around the corner. So why hasn't anything materialized?
On TWiST in Tokyo, Jason sits down with Yaqumo CEO Kazuhiro Nakashoji and discusses w
Why this longevity startup raised in Japan, not Silicon Valley | TWiST Tokyo | E2315
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Today's show:
French ex-martial artist Bilal Kharouni is building his longevity startup from Okinawa, one of the world's "blue zones." (These are regions with the most people living long, healthy lives.) In this TWiST taping
The AI Securing Your Workforce Before a Mistake Ever Becomes a Breach | E2314
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Today's show:
*Cybersecurity has long focused on cleaning up a system AFTER a breach but Ent founder Brandon Dixon says that's backwards. He just raised a $100M seed round to put an AI agent on everyone's company laptops that catches the risky
The dawn of surgery bots + buy a home for $250 (w/ Andromeda & Mogul) | E2313
The dawn of surgery bots + buy a home for $250 (w/ Andromeda & Mogul) | E2313
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Today's show:
*Andromeda Surgical is building the autonomy layer that could one day allow robots to perform surgery. Rather than buil
A Startup Is Trying to Buy PayPal… Craziest Deal of 2026! | E2312
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Today's show:
Hustle Fund's Eric Bahn and Chapter One's Jeff Morris Jr. join our venture capital roundtable directly following the news breaking that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. The possible transaction highlights how little interest today's leading startups have in going
Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311
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Today's show:
*Jason spent $11 building out PodMeme, an AI tool that tracks down the best segments from top podcasts about a specific topic, then stitches them together into a single stream. His post laying out how he
Danny Bernstein left Big Tech to fund farm-bots | E2310
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Today's show:
*America posted 400,000 farm jobs last year, and fewer than 1% got a single domestic applicant. Danny Bernstein of Reservoir believes it's time to start automating this backbreaking labor, like picking stone fruit in 110°
Why Data Is the Next $1 Trillion Market
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Today's show:
How many startups matter in tech? Fewer than you think. That's why venture capitalists are tripping over themselves to get onto their cap tables, no matter the cost. Why? Footwork's Nikhil Basu Trivedi argues that the Valley has never been more "power-law-pilled"
$100T is managed by "human duct tape" | E2308
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Today's show:
*There are $100 trillion in global assets sitting on top of what Hanover Park co-founder/CEO Chris Hladczuk calls "human duct tape": armies of accountants in offices patching together work from vario
Why the VC Hype Cycle Always Gets It Wrong | VC Roundtable | E2307
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Today's show:
Forget the triple-triple-double-double-double; the new bar for startups hoping to raise venture capital has reached the stratosphere, though our venture panel is worried that startups are focusing too much o
Chamath on why young people need more agency, risk, and adventure
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Today's show:
*It's another All Star Summer, as we welcome back some of our favorite guests from throughout "This Week in Startups" history.
Chamath Palihapitiya's developm
Why F1 Teams are Replacing Wind Tunnels with Smart Tape | E2305
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Today's show:
F1 teams spend up to a third of their budgets on aerodynamics, often utilizing wind tunnels to simulate what happens on the track.
But Lyall Davenport of SKN Systems creat
Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table
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Today's show:
Jason sits down with Brynn Putnam, CEO and founder of Board, to learn more about her company's tabletop gaming console. The pair talks about how to raise capital for yet-to-launch hardware projects, the screen-time d
The hottest running app has nothing to do with speed | E2303
This Week In Startups is made possible by:Agree - https://agree.comQuo - https://quo.com/TWiSTSuperhuman - https://superhuman.comToday's show:In this double-header, Jason and Lon chat with Louis Phillips, founder of the gamified running app INTVL, which turns a quick job around the block into a worldwide turf war competition. Find out how he grew the app to over 1 million downloads without any pai
Why SpaceX Buying Cursor Changes Everything
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Today's show:
Anthropic stabbed Cursor in the back. Then SpaceX swooped in with $60 billion. Today, TWiST connects the dots on the biggest deal in AI since the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership, and why it's
The Startup Building the First Hotel on the Moon…
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Today's show:
The next SpaceX won't be building rockets; it'll build the first hotel on the Moon. Today on TWiST, GRU Space founder Skyler Chan brings a brick made from lunar soil into the studio and lays out a plan to manufacture on the Moon as early as next year. We g
SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300
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After watching Elon build out his rocket (and AI) company over the past 20 years, Jason celebrates the SpaceX IPO on a new TWiST. He explains why some investments are evaluated based on earnings and current numbers, while other
Why the most expensive Seed deals are the cheapest | E2299
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Two days before SpaceX launches the largest IPO in history at a flat $135/share, our VC roundtable drops a scorcher: The top 1% of seed deals might actually be underpriced. Plus: the "Sequoia scam" dual-tranche controversy, tokens-for-equity deals, and whether
The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298
The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298
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Today's show:
*Schools teach kids to memorize formulas. AI helps them skip thinking entirely. Brilliant founde
Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297
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Today's show:
Anthropic wrote a blog post calling for a global AI slowdown. Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders wants the government to seize 50% of every major AI company's stock. Find out why JCal is recon
The project SpaceX's first employee raised $500M for
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Today's show:
Want to get to space? Several launch companies can help you. SpaceX, Rocket Lab, the Russians, the list goes on. But what about once you make it upstairs, then what? Impulse Space CEO and CTO Tom Mueller is building the next sta
This Startup Fused Human Brain Cells with Silicon Chips | E2295
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Today's show:
Cortical Labs is the world's first company selling biological computers. Their CL1 fuses lab-grown human neurons (derived from stem cells, not actual folks) with silicon hardware to create Synthetic Biological Intelligence (SBI).
Founder
How to Raise a Seed Round in 2026: Ask Jason | E2294
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Jason breaks down the real math behind raising a seed round. Here's the funnel: contact 150 firms, get 50 first meetings, convert 2o into second meetings, and close 2 term sheets.
The Drone Company Quietly Taking Over Delivery
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The "Ryanair of drone delivery" just raised $50 million and plans to bring its technology from Europe to the United States. Manna founder Bobby Healy explains to TWiST how his Dublin-based company completed 300,000 deliveries
From hypercars to cruise missiles: Lukas Czinger on the future of US defense | E2292
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Startups like Divergent Technologies are producing components and aircraft for the military through new systems that are better, faster, and cheaper than conventional methods. CEO and co-founder Lukas Czinger s
Avi Patel on the startup that copied Kled and why he called out General Catalyst by name | E2291
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Why raise $200 million if you are already profitable? That's the question Jason and Alex put to Mercury's founder and CEO, Immad Akhund, after the entrepreneur ra
Why does Gen Z hate AI?
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AI is the villain of the 2026 commencement cycle, with business luminaries — including Eric Schmidt — booed for discussing or praising the technology. As students graduate into a job market forcibly reshaped by AI, increasingly negative public polling on the potentia
The Self-Driving Startup Nobody Saw Coming | E2289
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Self-driving just stopped being a science problem and became an engineering challenge instead. That's the through-line of today's double-header with the CEOs of two of the most important AV companies in the world — Wayve's Alex Kendall and Waabi's Raquel U
How Many Startups Will Survive OpenAI? | E2288
This Week In Startups is made possible by:Pilot - https://Pilot.com/TWISTGrasshopper Bank - https://Grasshopper.bank/TWISTQuo - https://Quo.com/TWiSTPlaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistAnthropic just declared every unauthorized secondary sale of its stock "void" — naming Hiive, Forge, Sydecar, Upmarket, and others in a public hit list. Jason and Alex sit down with Jenny Fielding (Everywhere Vent
How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)
The future of AI isn't a smarter chatbot. It's a model that watches your screen, listens to the room, and acts on what it sees. We dug into Thinking Machines' new interaction model, what it means for compute, and the layoff wave that's already here.This week's roundtable: Anastasios Angelopoulos (CEO of Arena, formerly LMArena), Nick Harris (CEO of Lightmatter, photonic computing chips), and Phili
Cerebras's IPO goes vertical, and the death of OpenClaw? | E2287
Today's show:
Cerebras just jacked its IPO range to $150–$160 a share, OpenAI bought a consulting firm to seed its $4 billion private-equity joint venture, and a startup in Oakland is electrolyzing magnesium out of seawater for one-third the going price. Alex Wilhelm and Jason Calacanis go deep with AI21 co-CEO Ori Goshen on why model orchestration, not bigger LLMs, will decide who wins enterpris
5,000+ Tech Workers Laid Off This Week. It's Just The Beginning. | E2286
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Banks don't want to hand over their data to AI labs. So David Moscatelli built a $250,000 box that runs AI on-prem. He already has 1,600 pre-orders. On today's episode of TWiST, Jason and Alex sit down with the Go Abacus founder and Yanez's Jose Caldera to u
The end of Venture Capital? (VC Roundtable) | E2285
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The top 5 U.S. venture firms captured 73% of all LP commits in Q1, and three veteran VCs say the math may have officially broken. Aleph's Michael Eisenberg argues we may be witnessing the end of
Naval's GP, Ankur Nagpal, Breaks Down The Viral "USVC" Fund | E2284
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Have you wanted to invest in venture capital alongside your 401k contributions, but struggled to find a way to place a bet? Search no more, for the AngelList team has created USVC, a new fund that will accept investments of as little a
Can an AI Agent Legally Own a Company? Christian van der Henst's Wild Experiment| E2283
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An AI agent named Valerie is running a real vending machine in San Francisco — setting prices, ordering inventory, managing a bank account, and posting to Instagram. And it's not just a stunt. We're getting an early lo
Mastering AI Video Marketing w/ Magnific CEO Joaquín Cuenca Abela | AI Basics
The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud!Check out Google Cloud's new report, "Future of AI: Perspectives on generative media for startups," Featuring thoughts from today's guest, Joaquín Cuenca AbelaVisit: goo.gle/futureofgenmedia to check it out!Today's show:In today's edition of TWiST AI Basics, J-Cal is joined by Joaquin Cuenca Abela, co-founder and CEO of Magnific (formerly
The $10M+ Bet on a Beanie That Reads Your Brain | Sabi & the Future of BCI | E2282
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A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, an
China Kills Meta / Manus Deal (Story Of The Year) | E2281
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What's the technology story of the year? No, it's not Anthropic's Mythos model, nor any other AI model. Upcoming IPOs? Wrong again. Jason thinks it's China's government's decision to block Meta's acquisition of Manus. The multi-billion-dolla
Naval's $500 VC fund, the Maduro Polymarket scandal, and NYT defends theft and murder | E2280
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It's a News and Off-Duty weekend roundup!
AngelList's USVC fund is open to anyone with $500, but it's getting pushback on social media. Do the critics have a point?
A Special Forces soldier made $409K betting on the milita
The Defense Tech Startup YC Kicked Out of a Meeting is Now Arming America | E2280
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The US military is running low on missiles, but now, Firehawk Aerospace is using 3D-printed solid rocket propellant to cut production costs in h
SpaceX and Cursor team up to topple Claude Code | E2279
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This week, SpaceX announced that it was partnering with AI coding startup Cursor on new AI models. xAI's parent company is bringing compute, while Cursor brings developer market share and recent successes, training its own coding models.
Th
Why Your Company Should Own Its AI Model | E2278
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*Eragon CEO Josh Sirota believes that you should "own your intelligence." He demos a live enterprise AI operating system connecting email, Slack, calendar, and financial data into a single agentic layer that's
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