This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by: NetSuite https://NetSuite.ai/TWIST Squarespace https://squarespace.com/twist YSecurity https://YSecurity.io/TWIST 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°F temper...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Digital Ocean - do.co/twist Agree.com - agree.com Every.io - every.io .   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" than...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Vanta https://www.vanta.com/twist Sentry https://sentry.io/twist 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 various legacy...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: CLA - www.claconnect.com/withyou Northwest Registered Agent - www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Agree.com - www.agree.com 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 on today's...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist Shopify https://shopify.com/twist LinkedIn Jobs https://LinkedIn.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 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 development platfor...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistSentry - https://sentry.io/twistNorthwest Registered Agent-https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twistDigitalOcean - https://do.co/twist 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 created a s...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel - deel.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist LinkedIn - linkedIn.com/twist 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 debate, and...

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...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel - deel.com/twist LinkedIn - linkedIn.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist 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 a warni...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every.io - visit every.io Sentry.io - sentry.io/twist Vanta - vanta.com/twist 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 get into t...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist Pilot https://pilot.com/twist Agree https://agree.com IM8 Health https://IM8health.com/twist 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 stocks...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: NetSuite - Netsuite.com/TWiST Deel - Deel.com/TWiST Squarespace - Squarespace.com/TWiST 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 Claude...

The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298 This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist LinkedIn Jobs https://LinkedIn.com/twist Shopify https://shopify.com/twist Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: *Schools teach kids to memorize formulas. AI helps them skip thinking entirely. Brilliant founder Sue Khim joins TWiS...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Grasshopper Bank https://grasshopper.bank/twist Vanta https://www.vanta.com/twist Render https://render.com/twist Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist 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 reconsidering uni...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - NorthwestRegistereAagent.com/TWIST Every - Every.io Sentry - Sentry.io/TWIST 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 stage of our...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Deel https://deel.com/twist Quo https://quo.com/TWiST LinkedIn Jobs https://LinkedIn.com/twist 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 Dr. Hon We...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Grasshopper Bank https://grasshopper.bank/twistLinkedIn Jobs https://LinkedIn.com/twistNorthwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist 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. PLUS J...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Render - render.com/twist Deel - deel.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Today's show: 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 while...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Every.io https://every.io Shopify https://shopify.com/twist Render https://render.com/twist Plaud https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: 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 stops by TWiS...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Grasshopper Bank - https://grasshopper.bank/twist LinkedIn - https://linkedIn.com/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist   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 rais...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Vanta - Vanta.com/TWIST Sentry - Sentry.io/TWIST Deel - Deel.com/TWIST Today's show: 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 potential imp...

This Week In Startups is made possible by: IM8 Health: IM8health.com/TWIST Squarespace: Squarespace.com/TWIST Render - Render.com/TWIST 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 Urtasun....

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...

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 Phil...

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 enterprise...