This Week in Startups

It's a Friday TWiST and Jason and Alex are FIRED UP about this internal Meta doc laying out appropriate vs. inappropriate AI behavior… You won't BELIEVE with what Zuck approves for 8-year-old users. PLUS… AI job displacement is HERE, at least in the Big Apple… Jason's getting kind of paranoid about the surveillance state… AI remains frothier than ever through new Cohere and Cognition rounds… and w...

Today's show: We're back with another all-star VC roundtable discussion. Joining Jason are Dave McClure of Practical VC, NVNG's Grady Buchanan, and Tomasz Tunguz of Theory VC. Together, they're having a deep insider discussion of the state of venture, secondary markets, running funds of funds, the legacy of Lina Khan, the difficulty of recruiting, and why the pendulum has potentially swung in foun...

Today's show: On an all-new Monday TWiST, Lon joins Jason and Alex to talk about a whole bunch of stories at the intersection of tech, business, and pop culture. First up, is GPT Psychosis real? And if so, what are the warning signs that your loved ones have been ONESHOTTED. Then, why did Jason get so upset at the NY Times piece about Mark Zuckerberg's Palo Alto compound? PLUS we're discussing Tru...

Today's show: Jason and Lon recorded a Thursday night special edition, so no Alex this time, but still lots to talk about. First up, Jason thinks it's time for Tim Apple to exit the stage in lieu of a product obsessive innovator. Speaking of new products, GPT-5 is here and the hosts are… not exactly blown away. Are we in the midst of the AI trough of despair? PLUS we're talking Ripple's acquisitio...

Today's show: It's a brand-new PACKED episode of TWiST. Jason and Alex welcome guest Zach Dive of Adam.new, to tell us why he made a deepfake AI ad starring Jason and the All-In besties. PLUS a rundown of the biggest tech and startup news of the day, including Disney's decision to sunset Hulu, OpenAI's new open-weight models, the Cloudflare vs. Perplexity feud, Uber's newly-announced stock buyback...

Today's show: Jason and Alex are running down the biggest tech, startup, and business stories of the day on a brand-new Monday TWIST.Which countries are leading the AI race, based on academic papers? Why Jason thinks covert agencies are spying on Meta's superintelligence team. Lina Khan's taking a victory lap on the Figma IPO but what did she REALLY accomplish during her Biden administration tenur...

Today's show: Alex is back with three more awesome interviews with founders on the bleeding edge of innovative tech. Dr. Hon Weng Chong walks us through the basics of biological computing and Cortical Labs' first-ever commercial computer running on living human cells. Turing founder Jonathan Siddarth unpacks the secrets of LLM benchmarking, and explains why even our most advanced tests need to get...

Today's show: It's another All Star Investor Panel! Jason and Alex welcome TrustFund VC founder Sophia Amoruso AND WeekendFund investor/Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover. Together they're going DEEP on the current environment for startups, founders, and investors. How do tell durable from brittle revenue… Everyone's different approaches to follow-on investments and recycling… Strategies on when to...

Today's show: SYDNEY SWEENEY'S AMERICAN EAGLE AD DIVIDES OUR PANEL!PLUS WHAT STARTUPS CAN LEARN FROM THE VIRAL ASTRONOMER RESPONSEJason, Alex, and Lon are looking at some of the biggest media stories of the day before returning to their favorite topic, tech. Tune in for deep dives on IMAX's new AI film festival, Figma's big IPO and much more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show!...

Today's show: Jason's back and filling us in on his experiences in Washington DC, at the All-In AI Summit, including getting a Trump shoutout from stage, debating immigration with VP Vance, and calling out Sec. Wright for dismissing solar power. THEN Jason and Alex talk about the immense promise of open-source robotics and check out Hugging Face's Reachy…PLUS picking apart the White House's new AI...

Today's show: TWiST is back with a three more hugely insightful (and also fun!) founder interviews. First up, Trey Holterman from Tennr tells us why getting in to see a specialist is so time consuming, and how AI is making the entire health care industry more streamlined. THEN Gill Verdon from Extropic AI unpacks deterministic vs. probabilistic computing, and how thermodynamics can make everything...

Today's show: TWiST is back with a trio of can't miss interviews with some of our favorite TWiST 500 founders. First up, John Harris of Harbinger Motors tells us about making his EV batteries right here in the USA, and why the loss of EV tax credits might not hurt the business as much as you'd think… THEN, we're talking to James Hawkins of PostHog about how keeping his burn rate low opened up a we...

Today's show: WHY DOES @SUBSTACKINC NEED $100M IN NEW FUNDING?HOW DO THEY PLAN TO STAY AHEAD OF @BEEHIIV?Jason and Alex are debating the future of indie publishing on an all-new TWiST, considering the future of these rival platforms, plus Patreon and more. PLUS they're digging into Lovable's latest raise and what it says about the current economics of vibecoding, surveying the automated driving la...

Today's show: Jason and Alex tackle a full tech and business news docket on today's show, including Jason's big SF trip with Launch Accelerator's 34th cohort, some peculiar social media posts from VC Geoff Lewis, a look inside the HUGE seed rounds being commanded by early-stage AI startups, crunching the numbers on how much compute data centers need to sell before they're profitable, Polymarket as...

Today's show: On today's show… Jason and Alex are considering the fallout of Windsurf's OpenAI deal, the company's latest agreements with both Google and Cognition AI, and how "blitzhiring" is actually playing out in real-world startups. Plus Jason's short- and medium-term predictions for AI's impact on the job market, Tesla's latest expansion of its Austin robotaxi service, Mistral giving the EU...

Today's show: Grok 4 just leapfrogged OpenAI to become the top AI model—and it's not just hype. In this episode, @Jason and @alex break down Grok's AGI-level performance, the massive drop in LLM pricing, and why some companies are raising prices anyway. They also dive into the Missouri AG's investigation into AI "bias," the future of First Amendment protections for LLMs, and how autonomous vehicle...

In this episode of AI Basics , Jason sits down with Yoav Shoham — Stanford professor emeritus and co-founder of AI21 Labs , creators of Jurassic-2, Wordtune, and the new orchestration system Maestro . They unpack: Why enterprise AI struggles with reliability What orchestration really means (and why LLMs alone aren't enough) The pitfalls of "agent-washing" Small vs large models, agent-to-agent prot...

On a brand new TWiST, Jason and Alex ponder… What if every Tesla doubled as a Starlink-powered Wi-Fi hotspot? Plus, Nvidia's historic $4T valuation, Perplexity's fancy new AI browser that literally books flights, Linda Yaccarino steps down as X CEO, Waymo launches teen accounts, and maybe recording everything all the time has some disadvantages? Later, Tim Ranzetta joins to explain how his nonprof...

Today's show: Cloud seeding startup Rainmaker faced a viral backlash after deadly floods in Texas—so @Jason hosted an emergency X Spaces with founder Augustus Doricko to unpack what really happened. Did Rainmaker cause the floods? How much water can cloud seeding actually produce? Is it safe, and should we even be doing it? They dive into the science, conspiracy theories, regulation, and how cloud...

Today's show: Startup exits are heating up with $67.7B in Q2 activity, QSBS just got a major expansion, and Robinhood is pushing boundaries with tokenized SPVs. In this episode, @Jason and @alex break down what it all means for founders and investors, plus the rise of Elon's "America Party," TikTok's potential reboot, and why SaaS startups must rebrand around AI to stay competitive. A must-watch f...

Today's show: It's another blockbuster panel of insiders, as Alex sits down with Astasia Myers from Felicis, Matt Turck from First Mark Capital, and D.A. Wallach of Time BioVentures. AI is reshaping early-stage investing, with startups raising record-setting rounds adn chasing $100B+ markets. Meanwhile, biotech faces a "Great Depression" as public markets stay shut, putting added pressure on priva...

Today's show: Grammarly is acquiring the beloved email app Superhuman! In today's extremely timely episode, @alex sits down with Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra and Superhuman founder Rahul Vohra to unpack why they're merging, how they plan to combine apps and AI agents, and what it means for the future of email and work. PLUS they reveal how Grammarly's 40M+ daily users already rely on email—and w...

Today's show: Jason sits down with Balaji Srinivasan in Singapore to explore how he's turning years of theory into reality with Network School—the first node of a broader vision for internet-native, decentralized societies. Balaji explains how these "sharp societies" combine education, co-living, and startup culture to create physical communities aligned by values, not geography. From digital noma...

Today's show: EVs are igniting a global tariff war, and Xiaomi's shockingly cheap, high-quality electric cars threaten to obliterate Western automakers, sparking fears of a manufacturing wipeout. In today's brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex dive into the EV price war, Uber's rumored plan to team up with Travis Kalanick on a self-driving takeover, and DoorDash's mega-drones giving us a glimpse of the...

In this episode, Jason dives deep into the future of multi-agent systems with Saurabh Tiwary , VP & GM of Cloud AI at Google. They explore how teams of AI agents —not just single models—can collaborate to solve complex problems, helping startups scale faster with fewer resources. Saurabh introduces Google Cloud's open frameworks: Agent Development Kit (ADK) for building flexible, debuggable agents...