This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud: https://Plaud.ai/twist Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain NetSuite: https://netsuite.ai/twist The Conservation Fund: https://conservationfund.org. Today’s show: At packed concerts, festivals, and stadiums, your phone gets WORSE with every person who shows up. Totem gets better. Carter Fowler of Totem jo...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lightfield: https://lightfield.app/ Rippling: https://Rippling.ai/twist Upwork: http://upwork.com 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 event...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist Odoo: http://Odoo.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent: http://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Quo: https://www.quo.com/perks/twist 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, Chris...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Vanta: https://www.vanta.com/twist DigitalOcean: https://do.co/twist Sentry: http://sentry.io/twist Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist 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-hour...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every.io: http://every.io/ Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Odoo: http://Odoo.com/twist Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist 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 behind th...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist CLA: https://claconnect.com/tech Sentry: http://sentry.io/twist Lightfield: http://sentry.io/twist 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 peg...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every.io: http://every.io/ Northwest Registered Agent: www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Sentry: http://sentry.io/twist 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 submissions...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: PayPal - https://paypal.com/business Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Odoo - https://Odoo.com/twist 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 AD: PayPal...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: https://lightfield.app/ http://getpaper.ai/twist https://conservationfund.org/ http://Plaud.ai/twist https://www.athena.com/jcal 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 tale abou...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent: https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Odoo: http://Odoo.com/twist Rippling: http://Rippling.ai/twist Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist Harmonic: http://harmonic.ai/ 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. J...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Vanta: https://www.vanta.com/twist DigitalOcean: http://do.co/twist Lightfield: https://lightfield.app/ Plaud: http://Plaud.ai/twist 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. Then, Jaso...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman:⁠ http://superhuman.com/⁠ Paypal:⁠ http://paypal.launch.co⁠ Odoo:⁠ http://Odoo.com/twist⁠ Plaud:⁠ http://Plaud.ai/twist⁠ Harmonic:⁠ http://harmonic.ai/⁠ 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 happene...

The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google for Startups! 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. On today'...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quo: http://quo.com/TWiST The Conservation Fund: https://conservationfund.org CLA: https://app.notion.com/p/withyou-help-eb83a84d32cf43f59af13cb11e2f56c3?source=copy_link 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 panic. Jas...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean — Want to see what building on a true AI-native platform looks like? Head to do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%. Odoo: The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started for today at Odoo.com/twist Upwork helps businesses find highly skilled fr...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Wilson Sonsini: https://www.wsgr.com/en/ 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 a dolla...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain NetSuite - https://www.netsuite.ai/twist Vanta - http://www.vanta.com/twist 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. His cowor...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo - http://Odoo.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Rippling - http://Rippling.ai/twist 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 how sic...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: 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 also c...

VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333 This Week In Startups is made possible by: partner 1 - link partner 2 - link partner 3 - link 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. Paige exp...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain CLA https://claconnect.com/withyou Rippling https://Rippling.ai/twist 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 weekend. Jason...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean https://do.co/twist Every.io https://every.io PayPal https://paypal.launch.co 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 unmetered...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lightfield https://lightfield.app Northwest Registered Agent https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain Rippling https://Rippling.ai/twist 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 institut...

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 mi...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo https://Odoo.com/twist Quo https://quo.com/TWiST Conservation Fund https://conservationfund.org 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's no...