The AI Securing Your Workforce Before a Mistake Ever Becomes a Breach | E2314
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Vanta Superhuman YSecurity Today’s show: *Cybersecurity has long focused on cleaning up a system AFTER a breach but Ent founder Brandon Dixon says that’s backwards. He just raised a $100M seed round to put an AI agent on everyone’s company laptops that catches the risky clicks, leaked files, or rogue agents BEFORE they wreck havoc. PLUS Clawra creator David Im return swith his new project, Sume’s Avatar, a multi-model orchestration layer that generates 60-second UGC videos from a single prompt… and gets it right on the first try, rather...
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The dawn of surgery bots + buy a home for $250 (w/ Andromeda & Mogul) | E2313
This Week in Startups
The dawn of surgery bots + buy a home for $250 (w/ Andromeda & Mogul) | E2313 This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent CLA MongoDB Today’s show: *Andromeda Surgical is building the autonomy layer that could one day allow robots to perform surgery. Rather than building their own intricate, complex hardware, Andromeda uses off-the-shelf arms from a German manufacturer, and focuses on the software that will allow doctors to operate it from an iPad. Plus Mogul co-founder and CEO Alex Blackwood shows Jason how his platform lets anyone buy fractional shares...
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A Startup Is Trying to Buy PayPal… Craziest Deal of 2026! | E2312
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: MongoDB - Rippling - - Today’s show: Hustle Fund’s Eric Bahn and Chapter One’s Jeff Morris Jr. join our venture capital roundtable directly following the news breaking that Stripe wants to buy PayPal. The possible transaction highlights how little interest today’s leading startups have in going public any time soon. With host Alex Wilhelm, Bahn and Morris dug into when startups should burn the boats à la Fin, physical AI as the next frontier, the power of Silicon Valley groupthink, and how startups are approaching the first days of...
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Jason turned $11 and one tweet into 1.1M views | E2311
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quo PayPal Open Northwest Registered Agent Today’s show: *Jason spent $11 building out PodMeme, an AI tool that tracks down the best segments from top podcasts about a specific topic, then stitches them together into a single stream. His post laying out how he did it, featuring a simple screenshot of the product, got all the way to 1.1M views in just a few days. It’s a simple fact: builders love to see what other people are building, and growing your new project “in public,” sharing your journey on social media, is a great way to develop...
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Danny Bernstein left Big Tech to fund farm-bots | E2310
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: NetSuite Squarespace YSecurity 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 temperatures. So he built the world’s first on-farm robotics incubator on 40 acres of California farmland. Here’s why he argues that automating farms isn’t just a new opportunity, it’s a national security issue. PLUS Jason responded to Gal Shir’s viral “AI beat me at...
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Why Data Is the Next $1 Trillion Market
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Digital Ocean - - - . 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 it is today. Basu Trivedi joined Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim and TWiST’s Alex Wilhelm to go deep on secondary markets, the state of startup M&A, why the SaaSpocalypse may be temporary, and what could trigger a...
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$100T is managed by “human duct tape” | E2308
This Week in Startups
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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 Hladcz
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Why the VC Hype Cycle Always Gets It Wrong | VC Roundtable | E2307
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Chamath on why young people need more agency, risk, and adventure
This Week in Startups
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Today’s show:
*It’s another All Star Summer, as we wel
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Why F1 Teams are Replacing Wind Tunnels with Smart Tape | E2305
This Week in Startups
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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-embedde
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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 welcomed Theseus co-founder Ian Laffey, who called in from Kyiv to tell us about his company’s drone guidance system. It runs off a simple camera and Google Maps. The technology could rewrite the modern, GPS-jammed battlefield, and bring more firepower to smaller nations fending off larger foes.
Guest Links:
Manna https://www.manna.aero
Bobby Healy https://www.linkedin.com/in/bhealy/
Manna funding announcement https://www.manna.aero/blog/series-b
Theseus https://www.theseus.us/
Ian Laffey https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilaffey2/
Most recent Theseus funding announcement https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/17/defense-tech-theseus-landed-y-combinator-the-us-special-forces-and-4-3m-from-a-tweet/
The tweet that kickstarted Theseus: https://x.com/ilaffey2/status/1759353732075294766
Timestamps:
0:00 Bobby Healy of Manna joins TWiST
1:41 How a Manna base works: drones migrate around the city like Waymos
7:18 Battle-hardened in Irish weather: 97% uptime in wind and rain
8:52 Margin-positive economics & the path to $0.20 per delivery
9:25 Northwest Registered Agent: Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
12:32 $50M Series B vs competitors raising $600–800M
19:51 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more.
22:53 The peer-to-peer drone future and hyper-local commerce
25:46 Growing from 170 to 570 people and moving manufacturing to Oklahoma
28:43 Ian Laffey of Theseus joins TWIST
29:57 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.
30:58 Inside Ukraine's drone industry: front-line iteration and free-market speed
33:55 How GPS gets jammed across the spectrum
35:10 Theseus's approach: cameras + satellite maps + ML
37:04 The product: Raspberry Pi, SD card, camera — pretending to be GPS
49:02 Ukraine: 6–8M drones a year. The US: 300K over two years.
51:17 Are US drone primes actually reconstituting the supply chain?
58:22 Y Combinator as a defense tech accelerator
59:40 "Pick an issue and start working as hard as you can towards it"
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