Can an AI Agent Legally Own a Company? Christian van der Henst's Wild Experiment| E2283
Release Date: 05/01/2026
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
This Week in Startups
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Northwest Registered Agent - www.northwes
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Chamath on why young people need more agency, risk, and adventure
This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
Shopify
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LinkedIn Jobs
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Northwest Registered Agent
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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
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 sensor-embedde
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Pilot - https://pilot.com/twist
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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, potentially opening up new startup opportunities.
Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm cover a stacked docket: Christian van der Henst demos the Valerie AI vending machine powered by OpenClaw; Robert Myers, CEO of Manifold Labs, breaks down Targon, a confidential GPU compute marketplace running on Bittensor Subnet 4; Jason calls Bitcoin "played out;" Alex is impressed by Anthropic's stunning $900 billion upcoming valuation; and the guys discuss Big Tech's accelerating CapEx spend, Chinese AI models in Congress crosshairs, and the NBA Playoffs.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro & sponsor reads (Pilot, Shopify, Grasshopper Bank)
1:06 Christian van der Henst: Valerie the AI vending machine demo
4:28 Legal structure: Giving an AI agent business ownership via trust
7:23 Where agents can and can't operate today
10:10 Grasshopper Bank: Time is money. Don't waste either. Go to https://grasshopper.bank/twist and get an exclusive $500 cash bonus just for opening an account.
11:48 AI café in Stockholm running on agents
18:21 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!
19:05 Robert Myers, Manifold Labs: Targon & Bittensor Subnet 4 interview
20:21 What is Bittensor? An "incubator with 128 subnets"
21:08 Shopify: Turn those What If's into sales with the ecommerce platform powering millions of businesses. Sign up for your $1-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/twist
25:21 Pricing, utilization caps, and why GPUs are sold out
26:38 Who's using Targon? Customers, use cases, and the mom-and-pop data center argument
30:06 Pilot: Focus on your product, let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to https://pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year.
35:07 Jason explains the annotated.com vision — 15 years in the making
39:11 Polymarket: Will Anthropic flip Bitcoin by Dec 31?
40:29 Jason's Bitcoin bear case: "It's played out. No incremental buyers."
46:05 MicroStrategy / Strategy updates
52:37 AI compute demand vs. the fiber overbuild analogy
55:55 Congress pressuring startups over Chinese AI models (DeepSeek, Moonshot)
57:11 A16z on the geopolitical risk of Chinese AI models
1:00:08 Reflection AI — America's open source AI champion (or lack thereof)
1:01:26 Off Duty: Knicks blow out Atlanta Hawks 140–89, Jason goes road-tripping
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