Term Sheet

Reed Jobs, the son of Steve Jobs, wants to prevent deaths caused by cancer. Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle sits down with the Yosemite founder to discuss his $350 million VC fund, why nearly 95% of cancer drugs fail and how philanthropic grants can reduce risk in early stages of scientific research. They also explore AI’s role in drug discovery, the potential of GLP-1s, and why Jobs says making cancer...

Can the U.S. replenish weapons stockpiles fast enough for modern conflicts? Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle sits down with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf to discuss weapons production, the challenges of scaling manufacturing, and the testing needed to make complex systems reliable in the field. They also explore AI’s role in defense, lethal autonomous weapons, and why Schimpf says human commanders must remai...

Soda is one of the hardest categories to break into, where a few legacy giants dominate shelf space. Yet Poppi, the prebiotic soda company, turned a Texas farmers' market side hustle into a $1.95 billion sale to PepsiCo. On Term Sheet, Fortune's Allie Garfinkle sits down with co-founder Allison Ellsworth to unpack how she cracked the Gen Z code, how she turned three-day TikTok trends into lasting...

An automated assembly line inside a Wonder kitchen can churn out 500 customized burrito bowls with zero order errors. This is a system CEO Marc Lore views as merely the baseline for his $9 billion food-tech enterprise. Fresh off acquiring Sweetgreen’s robotic kitchen technology, Wonder told Fortune's Allie Garfinkle it might go public early next year. Listen to Term Sheet to find out more. 4:06 —...

Mentalist Max Major has spent decades hypnotizing people. Now, he says he's training a ChatGPT voice model to do it too. As people turn to AI for advice, therapy, companionship, and everyday decisions, a bigger question is emerging: Could AI become persuasive enough to shape human behavior? If AI can reliably influence our decisions, the implications stretch far beyond chatbots, affecting advertis...

Live shopping in China is a massive, multi-billion-dollar market, but for years, American platforms have struggled to crack the format. But in 2019, Grant LaFontaine and Logan Head started a live shopping marketplace for Funko Pops that not many investors believed in. Fast forward to today, Whatnot has transformed into a $11.5B valuation company, hitting 1 billion orders this year, overseeing tran...

Over 3,000 venture capital firms are operating in the U.S. today. Lux Capital's co-founder Josh Wolfe thinks more than half of them won't survive the decade. He has spent 25 years making calls nobody else would make, backing Anduril before defense tech was a category and surgical robotics before it had a market. Now, fresh off a $1.5 billion fundraise, he's warning that the AI boom is headed for a...

A hidden market for shares of the world's hottest private companies has quietly grown to an estimated $112 billion, and most of it happens off the books. As SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic edge toward going public, the investors who poured billions into pre-IPO shares may not actually know what they own. Larry Aschebrook founded G Squared in 2011, when trading secondaries made you a "bottom feeder"...

Gabe Stengel studied computer science at Princeton and started his career as an investment banking analyst at Lazard. Then he did something a lot of bankers think about but never do: he quit at 23 to build the AI that would automate his old job. After 30 VC passes and two grueling years, his company Rogo just raised $160 million at a $2 billion valuation, and 35,000 bankers at firms like JPMorgan,...

Claire Zau spent six years in venture capital and became the youngest investor to make partner at GSV. Then she did something very few other VCs were doing: she started posting social media videos about AI to inform the general public. A year, 337,000 followers and 1.6 million likes later, Lightspeed Venture Partners hired her in a role that's never existed in venture before: New Media and Investo...

Approximately nine out of every ten net new jobs in America come from small businesses, yet they shoulder over $81 billion a year in federal paperwork. As more Americans launch their own businesses, the back office is buckling under the weight. In this episode, Josh Reeves, cofounder and CEO of Gusto, a payroll, benefits, and HR platform for small businesses, breaks down the contrarian bet that bu...

What is the secret to raising world-class leaders? In this episode, Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle sits down with Esther Wojcicki, the legendary educator and "Godmother of Silicon Valley." As the mother of three high-achieving daughters—including the former CEO of YouTube and the founder of 23andMe—Esther shares her leadership and parenting philosophy that works as well in the boardroom as it does in t...

American agriculture is the backbone of the U.S. economy, yet the average farmer earns only 5 cents of every dollar spent on food. With an almost 50% spike in bankruptcies of U.S. farms and margins thinner than ever due to falling revenues and rising production costs, the agricultural economy is facing an inflection point. In this episode, Mackenzie Burnett, CEO & Co-Founder of Ambrook–a modern fi...

Harvey co-founder and CEO Winston Weinberg has a method for leading his legal AI company, now valued at $11 billion after just three and a half years: psychological discipline. On this episode of Term Sheet, Weinberg tells Fortune’s Allie Garfinkle how he tracks his daily to-do list against his goals six months out, what he looks for in new hires, and how he avoids the pitfalls of being trapped by...

“Give everything you have to the people around you.” That’s Redpoint partner Meera Clark’s advice for aspiring venture capitalists looking to break into the increasingly competitive industry. In this episode of Term Sheet, Clark defines what “greatness” looks like in founders and explains why revenue is an outdated metric. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chemistry cofounder Kristina Shen says the market may be nearing a “reckoning” point. So why is she still optimistic going into 2026?In this episode of Term Sheet, Shen discusses why she decided to co-found her own VC firm, her excitement around health care, and why her team is focused on bringing the human element into venture capital. Allie also talks about the recent SpaceX and xAI merger and h...

As resource-hungry data centers continue to sprout around the country, many are wondering whether our current utility network has the capability to handle such large-scale demands. Exelon CEO Calvin Butler says yes. Exelon is one of the nation’s largest public utility companies. It serves around 11 million customers, ranging from individual apartment owners to massive corporations. Butler joins Te...

The artificial intelligence PhD to VC pipeline may seem relatively obvious now but Jenny Xiao, cofounder of Leonis Capital, forged this path well before the AI boom ever started. She left a PhD program at Columbia to join OpenAI as a researcher and, one week after the debut of ChatGPT, she left to cofound Leonis Capital, a “research-driven” VC firm. Having seen the world of artificial intelligence...

On day 36 of the U.S. government shutdown – fueled in part by clashes over the Affordable Care Act and the country’s healthcare system – Allie talks to someone working to disrupt and fix that system: Cityblock Health cofounder and CEO Dr. Toyin Ajayi. A former physician for at-risk patients, Ajayi saw how the system can sometimes work against patients, driving burnout and increasing costs. She cof...

On this week’s Term Sheet, Allie talks with Steven Eidelman, founder and CEO of Modern Animal, a tech-forward veterinary clinic with 28 locations across Texas and California. Last month Modern Animal raised $46 million in Series D funding after making 85% year-over-year growth in 2024. Eidelman founded Modern Animal after selling his first start-up, Whistle, for $119 million in 2016.  Allie and St...

Oura has been making headlines for months, most recently with its massive $900 million funding round, valuing the wearables giant at $11 billion. And before that, for expanding its partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense, causing social media controversy. In September, while at Brainstorm Tech, Allie sat down with Oura CEO Tom Hale to talk about the company’s growth, data privacy, the bigg...

OpenAI has had a huge week. Fresh off launching the AI video generation and social app Sora 2, they closed a multibillion dollar partnership with AMD that sent the company’s stock soaring. This was quickly followed by the release of new features, like agent-building and ChatGPT app integration, meant to supercharge OpenAI’s hold on the culture.  Allie sat down with OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap at the...

Hans Tung first became a VC in his 20s and has gone on to invest in some of the most successful companies of our time––household names like Airbnb, Slack, Coinbase, and Peloton, among others. He was an early backer of Musical.ly, the app that became TikTok. Hans cofounded the firm GGV Capital, which then split into the Singapore-based operation, Granite Asia, and the U.S.-based Notable Capital, wh...

Paul Copplestone is the CEO and Co-founder of Supabase, the open source Postgres development platform designed for web and mobile apps to scale quickly. The company knows a thing or two about growing fast – only 5 years old, this April they raised $200 million in Series D funding round and were valued at $2 billion. Paul stopped by Term Sheet to talk about how he builds a remote and egoless compan...

Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni met as roommates at Stanford. Now, they’re the cofounders of Phia, an AI-powered shopping agent that just raised an $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins and has participation from household names like Hailey Bieber,  Kris Jenner, and Sheryl Sandberg. For this episode of Term Sheet, Allie spoke with Phoebe, Sophia, and Annie Case, a partner at Kleiner Perkins,...