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The $10M+ Bet on a Beanie That Reads Your Brain | Sabi & the Future of BCI | E2282

This Week in Startups

Release Date: 04/29/2026

The AI Securing Your Workforce Before a Mistake Ever Becomes a Breach | E2314 show art 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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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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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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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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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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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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This Week in Startups

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 Hladcz

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This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by:


CLA - www.claconnect.com/withyou

Northwest Registered Agent - www.northwes

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This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Plaud
https://Plaud.ai/twist

Shopify
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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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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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This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Render - https://Render.com/TWIST

Northwest Registered Agent - https://NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/TWIST

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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 day on making everyone the CEO of their domain, a deep dive into Sabi's thought-to-text beanie, a live demo of AI-powered podcast sidebars built by the TWiST audience, the announcement of a new $5K bounty for an annotation tool, and Jason's big five wellness framework.

Guests:

Sabi: Website, Wired article

Co-founder and CEO Rahul Chhabra: LinkedIn, X

Companies and people discussed:

Matt Coffin, founder of LowerMyBills.com

Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures

Neuralink, a leading BCI company

ElevenLabs, a leading voice AI startup

Calm, the popular meditation app


Timestamps:

0:00 Intro & tactical tip: Make everyone the CEO of their domain

1:49 Matt Coffin's "CEO of X" management philosophy

3:04 Community ownership: Deputizing Ricky, Lawn, Bianca, Maddie, Kabir

4:02 Building the Noti Gang: X group chats and community flywheels

5:08 Founder takeaways: Activate your top 1%, make someone the CEO of it

6:18 The streamer trick, parasocial dynamics, and creator ethics

7:59 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!

9:34 Guest intro: Rahul Chhabra of Sabi

10:01 What is Sabi? Noninvasive BCI in a beanie with 100,000 sensors

10:13 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/TWIST

11:02 How it works: From fMRI to EEG, from hospital to hat

13:46 The brain foundation model and thought-to-text decoding

15:55 Vetting the founders: BITS Pilani, Stanford, athlete fatigue AI

17:22 Vinod Khosla's investment thesis: BCI must be noninvasive

19:30 Jason's challenge: Say "Calacanis," or it doesn't count

20:11 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

21:30 Sabi.com: Reserve your device, release by end of 2026

22:26 Privacy concerns: Does the beanie read everything?

25:41 Bounty #1: AI live sidebar contest — demos from the TWiST audience

27:04 Oliver's breakdown: What's easy vs. hard about live AI commentary

28:40 Demo #1: Armchair (by Mark Colebrook) — fact-checker + troll personas, live

30:59 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.

35:30 Live political violence test: The sidebar in real time on the WHCD shooting

38:45 Demo #2: Pod Commentators / SideCast — browser-based, Gemini-powered

40:35 Jason's revised Bounty #1 spec: Fact-checker + cynic, public stream or Zoom

42:41 Timeline: check-ins May 1, May 8; final winner May 15

44:51 Demo #3: BMD Pat (by Patrick Hughes) — instant URL, all-snarky personas

46:52 Bounty #2 announced: Annotated.com — a fair-use multimedia annotation tool

49:31 Annotated: the delicious.com of media commentary

51:11 Contest rules: Jason owns the domain, winner gets $5K + potential ongoing work

53:13 Wrap-up: Bounty 1 = AI sidebar, Bounty 2 = Annotated

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis