This Week in Startups

Today's show: On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are asking why there are SO MANY note-taking AI apps? Plus another death has been linked to ChatGPT… is it too easy to get past chatbot guardrails? Why Donald Trump Jr. is joining Polymarket…. How the US Navy could catch up with its international rivals… AND should Apple just buy a big AI company to help them catch up? All that PLUS a visit from C...

Today's show: On an upbeat and optimistic new TWiST, Jason and Alex are debating why any new innovation or technology gets hit with a wave of bitter cynicism. PLUS Jason defends the government taking shares of Intel, explains the importance of interoperability, and predicts how AirBnB's Joe Gebbia will upgrade the US government's website design. All that PLUS thoughts on the Netskope IPO, Perplexi...

Today's show: Terra's collapse, Powell's pivot, and OpenAI's explosive growth all collide in this TWiST deep dive. Do Kwon has pled guilty after Terra/Luna's $60B implosion, Fed Chair Powell hints at a September rate cut, and OpenAI has officially crossed $1B in monthly revenue (on a $12B run rate). Jason and Alex unpack what this means for founders, LPs, and the next wave of AI + crypto. They als...

Today's show: In this TWiST 500 double feature, Alex sits down with two breakout founders: Chalk's Marc Freed-Finnegan & Tollbit's Toshit Panigrahi! First, Chalk's CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan is tackling one of AI's biggest bottlenecks—data freshness. Instead of relying on stale batch jobs, Chalk delivers real-time pipelines for inference compute, automatically transpiling Python into C++/Rust so it c...

In this AI Basics episode, Jason sits down with Matt Rouif, Co-founder & CEO of Photoroom — the AI photo editing app with 300M+ downloads and 5B images processed annually. They break down: Why Photoroom built its own specialized AI models How they grew from a scrappy startup to $50M+ in revenue Lessons in product-led growth (from eBay sellers to DoorDash & Amazon) Red-teaming, brand safety, and bu...

Today's show: We're back with two insightful new TWiST founder interviews. First up: Dean Leitersdorf of Decart tells us about squeezing maximum productivity out of your GPUs. But it's not all talk: he also shows us the incredible open world model that can magically transform live footage. THEN! Jason and Alex chat with Syncere AI founder Aaron Tan about Lume, his robotic lamp device that went vir...

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...