This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis covers startups, tech, markets, media, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. He also interviews the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators.
$100T is managed by “human duct tape” | E2308
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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 tools (QuickBooks, Excel) that are holding funds’ own data hostage. Can all of this be replaced with AI? Find out how their startup...
Why the VC Hype Cycle Always Gets It Wrong | VC Roundtable | E2307
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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 problems that may not become companies tomorrow. During a lively VC roundtable, Cowboy’s Aileen Lee, Floodgate’s Mike Maples, and Lere...
Chamath on why young people need more agency, risk, and adventure
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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 platform 8090 just raised $135 million, and he’s using it to go after a $4 trillion market: the software...
Why F1 Teams are Replacing Wind Tunnels with Smart Tape | E2305
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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 sensor-embedded tape that sticks directly to race cars as they drive around the real world, generating 420M data points per hour. And it comes in at...
Why the Future of Video Games is Moving Back to the Dinner Table
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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 how Board is approaching building or buying IP for its family-friendly games. Next, Alex got Here...
The hottest running app has nothing to do with speed | E2303
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 paid ads, just making videos from his home office.PLUS Alex sits down with Alice Zhang, CEO of Verge Labs, which pivoted from making drugs to building the AI infrastructure that he...
Why SpaceX Buying Cursor Changes Everything
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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 warning sign for every startup building on top of a frontier model. Jason is joined by Bling Capital’s Ben...
The Startup Building the First Hotel on the Moon…
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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 the science, the business mo...
SpaceX IPO Day: What Wall St. and the media missed | E2300
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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 are bets on expensive visions for the future, and why SpaceX why likely pay off across multiple time...
Why the most expensive Seed deals are the cheapest | E2299
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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 Fable 5 is a true step function.
Tomasz Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Michael Downing (Castalia Capital), and Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures...
The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298
The AI Tutor That Makes Kids Actually Think | E2298
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Today’s show:
*Schools teach kids to memorize formulas. AI helps them skip thinking entirely. Brilliant founder Sue Khim joins TWiST to tell us ho...
Anthropic wants to slow AI down and Bernie wants 50%: JCal Reacts | E2297
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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 universal basic (or even high!) income policies, and why he thinks the 2028 pres...
The Startup Turning Space Into a Logistics Network
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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 orbital economy. With its Mira and Helios spacecraft, we’ll soon be able...
This Startup Fused Human Brain Cells with Silicon Chips | E2295
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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 Weng Chong walks us through how the system works and why neurons are more efficient than GPUs at rein...
How to Raise a Seed Round in 2026: Ask Jason | E2294
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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 Jason responds to viewer questions about why hardware is no longer a dirty word for investors, how to differentiate your startup from frontier-model companies like OpenAI, even when they’re in your n...
The Drone Company Quietly Taking Over Delivery
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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 some rivals are still publishing blog posts, and why low-cost airline economics will decide who wins the autonomous skies.
Sticking to the drone theme, TWiST we...
From hypercars to cruise missiles: Lukas Czinger on the future of US defense
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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 TWiST to share the company’s vertically integrated, AI-driven manufacturing platform and how he transitioned from hype...
Avi Patel on the startup that copied Kled and why he called out General Catalyst by name | E2291
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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 raised another massive round for his upstart, technology-friendly bank. TWiST then welcomed Kled founder Avi Patel to discuss the startup he considers a clear ripoff of his own company. Jason gavel...
Why is Gen Z hates AI?
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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 impacts of artificial intelligence on society is clearly not missing the mark.
Jason and Alex then discussed The Information’s reporting that Anthropi...
The Self-Driving Startup Nobody Saw Coming | E2289
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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. Between them: ~$2B raised in the last six months, Uber as a partner, Nissan and Volvo as OEMs, and a shared bet...
How Many Startups Will Survive OpenAI? | E2288
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 Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical VC), and Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures) to unpack what the AI lab’s move to limit secondary trades means for SPV operators, brokers, and the founders trying to keep control of their cap tables...
How the 1% Will Own Compute (and What It Means for You)
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 Philip Johnston (CEO of StarCloud, building megawatt data centers in space).
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<...Cerebras's IPO goes vertical, and the death of OpenClaw? | E2287
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 AI.
The crew also covered the decline of OpenClaw, TikTok's new £3.99 ad-free tier, more entries in the live-show sidebar bounty, and had time for a little Off Duty before signing off.
...
5,000+ Tech Workers Laid Off This Week. It's Just The Beginning. | E2286
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Banks don’t want to hand over their data to AI labs. So David Moscatelli built a $250,000 box that runs AI on-prem. He already has 1,600 pre-orders. On today’s episode of TWiST, Jason and Alex sit down with the Go Abacus founder and Yanez's Jose Caldera to unpack how regulated industries are getting AI without the cloud, why Bittensor subn...
The end of Venture Capital? (VC Roundtable) | E2285
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The top 5 U.S. venture firms captured 73% of all LP commits in Q1, and three veteran VCs say the math may have officially broken. Aleph's Michael Eisenberg argues we may be witnessing the end of a 60-year run for venture capital as a craft business. Maniv's Mike Granoff and Oxcart's Larry Covert push back, arguing it's merely...
Naval's GP, Ankur Nagpal, Breaks Down The Viral “USVC” Fund | E2284
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Have you wanted to invest in venture capital alongside your 401k contributions, but struggled to find a way to place a bet? Search no more, for the AngelList team has created USVC, a new fund that will accept investments of as little as $500 from folks who lack accreditation. USVC’s Ankur Napgal swung by the show to chat about investment st...
Can an AI Agent Legally Own a Company? Christian van der Henst's Wild Experiment| E2283
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Today’s show:
An AI agent named Valerie is running a real vending machine in San Francisco — setting prices, ordering inventory, managing a bank account, and posting to Instagram. And it's not just a stunt. We’re getting an early look at the future of one-agent companies. There’s still work to do to help agents ease into the economy...
Mastering AI Video Marketing w/ Magnific CEO Joaquín Cuenca Abela | AI Basics
The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud!Check out Google Cloud’s new report, “Future of AI: Perspectives on generative media for startups,” Featuring thoughts from today’s guest, Joaquín Cuenca AbelaVisit: goo.gle/futureofgenmedia to check it out!Today’s show:In today’s edition of TWiST AI Basics, J-Cal is joined by Joaquin Cuenca Abela, co-founder and CEO of Magnific (formerly known as Freepik). We’re discussing how generative AI is transforming the creative landscape for startups.In watching today’s show you’ll have-consider your expectations of what AI video can actually do for you...
The $10M+ Bet on a Beanie That Reads Your Brain | Sabi & the Future of BCI | E2282
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Today’s show:
A beanie that reads your thoughts and turns them into text — no surgery required? Jason grills the Sabi co-founders on their noninvasive brain-computer interface, backed by Vinod Khosla, and calls a cap on the whole thing (until he doesn't).
This episode of This Week in Startups covers a lot of ground: Jason's tactical tip of the...
To the left of this of thumbnail i want to add a chinese flag to the left destroying the meta logo. because the title is China Kills Meta / Manus Deal (Story Of The Year) | E2281
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What’s the technology story of the year? No, it’s not Anthropic’s Mythos model, nor any other AI model. Upcoming IPOs? Wrong again. Jason thinks it’s China’s government’s decision to block Meta's acquisition of Manus. The multi-billion-dollar deal was heralded as evidence that AI companies founded in China could sidestep onerous gove...
Naval’s $500 VC fund, the Maduro Polymarket scandal, and NYT defends theft and murder | E2280
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Today’s show:
It’s a News and Off-Duty weekend roundup!
AngelList’s USVC fund is open to anyone with $500, but it’s getting pushback on social media. Do the critics have a point?
A Special Forces soldier made $409K betting on the military’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Is the world just a big casino now?
And a NYT podcast de...
The Defense Tech Startup YC Kicked Out of a Meeting is Now Arming America | E2280
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Today’s show:
The US military is running low on missiles, but now, Firehawk Aerospace is using 3D-printed solid rocket propellant to cut production costs in half and 5x U.S. output.
Plus: PhD researcher Maruchi Kim just bu...
SpaceX and Cursor team up to topple Claude Code | E2279
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Today’s show:
This week, SpaceX announced that it was partnering with AI coding startup Cursor on new AI models. xAI’s parent company is bringing compute, while Cursor brings developer market share and recent successes, training its own coding models.
The deal, while interesting, comes with a steep price tag. SpaceX will pay Cursor $10 billion for their shared work, with an opti...
Why Your Company Should Own Its AI Model | E2278
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Today’s show:
*Eragon CEO Josh Sirota believes that you should “own your intelligence.” He demos a live enterprise AI operating system connecting email, Slack, calendar, and financial data into a single agentic layer that’s pre-trained to understand any business inside and out.
PLUS we’...
3D-Printed Homes for $99K: ICON’s Jason Ballard on the future of housing | E2277
This Week In Startups is made possible by:IM8 Health - https://IM8health.com/twist Grasshopper Bank - https://grasshopper.bank/twist Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistToday’s show:Is 3D printing the key to not just solving the housing crisis but bringing us all into a more beautiful and utopian future? ICON founder Jason Ballard thinks so. His company is already building homes for the unhoused and delivering barracks to Fort Bliss at half the cost and a fraction of the time. On TWiST, he tells us space co...
This 22-Year-Old Built TikTok for Mobile Games, and It’s Growing Fast | E2276
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Today’s show:
*Imagine scrolling through mobile games the way your flip through your TikTok feed. What if you could build your own game in 90 seconds and share it with the world? That’s what over 100,000 users are enjoying right now on Nanogram.
On TWiST, we meet the co-founders: 22-year-old CEO Albert Brotherton and 24-year-old CTO Boris Radilov. They demo the app for us on the air, and...
Bittensor’s (alleged) $10M rug pull (feat. Mark Jeffrey) | E2275
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Today’s show:
*TAO just had its worst week since launch. One of Bittensor’s most prominent subnet operators allegedly dumped $10 million in tokens and walked away. We’re digging into what we know, how this could change the Bittensor community… and why dedicated builders still believe in this ecosystem.
Jason and Lon are...
Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274
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Today’s show:
TAO, the token associated with the Bittensor network, fell sharply last night after a major project declared it was taking its business elsewhere. Covenant AI had used Bittensor subnets 3, 39, and 89 before its abrupt and controversial decision to depart for other digital shores.
Gare...
Anthropic’s Mythos is a cyber-weapon, so you can’t have it | E2273
Anthropic just built a model so dangerous, they’re not even going to release it (for now). On TWiST, Jason, Alex, and Neurometric CEO Rob May discuss whether or not this is just another frontier model or a potential weapon of mass internet destruction.
Claude Mythos Preview is already in the hands of over 40 Anthropic partners — including Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — as part of its “Project Glasswing” security council.
Together, they’ll test how quickly and easily the model can thwart today’s most elite cybersecurity protocols, and try to develop fresh protocols to keep our mo...
3 AI Agents That Actually Replaced Human Jobs | E2272
Anthropic just pulled the plug on Claude subscriptions for OpenClaw and every third party agentic tool. So Jason and Lon welcome back three of our top TWiST OpenClaw experts to break down what it means, how much it’s going to cost now, and whether this is truly the end of the subsidized AI era.
And they all brought demos! We’re checking out ClawChief from Ryan Carson, Alex Finn’s agent Henry, and Yazin Alirhayim’s Sidecast protocol, inspired by a special request from JCal!
Hosts
Jason Calacanis: http://x.com/jason
Lon...
