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
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 happened, why
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: https://web.plaud.ai/s/pub_c2b45bfe-abad-43ce-b7ef-41118f55f738::Vo2MH6PuXBzTCaxKRDjHH0zu8FbzgDpQL5OnfBfMzLP22CQRxciqE
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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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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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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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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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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
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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Today's show:
*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
3D-Printed Homes for $99K: ICON's Jason Ballard on the future of housing | E2277
This Week In Startups is made possible by:IM8 Health - https://IM8health.com/twist Grasshopper Bank - https://grasshopper.bank/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistToday's show:Is 3D printing the key to not just solving the housing crisis but bringing us all into a more beautiful and utopian future? ICON founder Jason Ballard t
This 22-Year-Old Built TikTok for Mobile Games, and It's Growing Fast | E2276
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Today's show:
*Imagine scrolling through mobile games the way your flip through your TikTok feed. What if you could build your own game in 90 seconds and share it with the world? That's what over 100,000 users are enjoying right now on Nanogram.
On TWiST, we meet the co-f
Bittensor's (alleged) $10M rug pull (feat. Mark Jeffrey) | E2275
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*TAO just had its worst week since launch. One of Bittensor's most prominent subnet operators allegedly dumped $10 million in tokens and walked away. We're digging into what we know, how this could change
Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274
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Today's show:
TAO, the token associated with the Bittensor network, fell sharply last night after a major project declared
Anthropic's Mythos is a cyber-weapon, so you can't have it | E2273
Anthropic just built a model so dangerous, they're not even going to release it (for now). On TWiST, Jason, Alex, and Neurometric CEO Rob May discuss whether or not this is just another frontier model or a potential weapon of mass internet destruction.
Claude Mythos Preview is already in the hands of over 40 Anthropic partners — including Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — as part of
3 AI Agents That Actually Replaced Human Jobs | E2272
Anthropic just pulled the plug on Claude subscriptions for OpenClaw and every third party agentic tool. So Jason and Lon welcome back three of our top TWiST OpenClaw experts to break down what it means, how much it's going to cost now, and whether this is truly the end of the subsidized AI era.
And they all brought demos! We're checking out ClawChief from Ryan Carson, Alex Finn's agent Henry, and
AI Rebuilt Every YC W26 Startup. Should Founders Be Scared? | E2271
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An AI "holding company" rebuilt dozens of YC Winter '26 startups in one weekend. Now we're bringing the founder responsible into Jason's Courtroom to defend himself.
PLUS a live demo of Boardy, the AI that acts like a virtual board me
How 3 CEOs Use AI to Run $10B in Companies | This Week in AI
This Week in AI, JCal sits down with three CEOs building the infrastructure, intelligence, and interfaces for the next era of AI: Jeremy Fraenkel (CEO, Fundamental), Victor Riparbelli (CEO, Synthesia), and Nick Harris (CEO, Lightmatter). We break down what's actually happening beneath the AI hype: the data modality LLMs completely missed, why copper is the real bottleneck in AI data centers, OpenA
Venture Roundtable: SpaceX IPO, AI's PR Crisis, and the Defense Tech Bubble | E2270
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Today's show:
Silicon Valley just lined up its biggest liquidity event in years: SpaceX filed confidentially for an IPO that could target a $1.75 trillion valuation — potentially the la
The 5-Step Framework for AI Agents That Improve While You Sleep | E2269
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
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Today's show:
Google project manager Shubham Saboo is running 6 AI agents on a Mac Mini that handle all of his side business autonomously, from research, to social posts, to newsletters.
He joins Jason and Lon to wal
The $60 billion resource hiding in space, and the start trying to mine it (feat. Matt Gialich, Astroforge) | E2268
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Today's show:
AstroForge is building low-cost, replicable spacecraft to mine platinum group metals from near-Earth asteroids — a $60 billion annual market for materials that are running out on Earth. Founder and CEO Matt Gialich joins the show t
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