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 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 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 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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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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Today’s show:
*It’s another All Star Summer, as we wel
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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:
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 retrenchment of the AI trade. It’s Wednesday, so it’s time for our venture capital roundtable to go deep on how VCs are investing today, and where on the horizon they have their eyes fixed!
Guest links:
Nikhil Basu Trivedi https://x.com/nbt
Footwork https://www.footwork.vc/
Michael Kim https://x.com/MKRocks
Cendana Capital https://www.cendanacapital.com/
Show links:
The USVC-Anduril blowup https://x.com/ankurnagpal/status/2072701195714531398
Kline Hill Cendana Partners https://www.secondariesinvestor.com/kline-hill-and-cendana-raise-400m-for-second-vc-secondaries-fund/
GPTZero’s exit https://gptzero.me/news/preserving-whats-human/
Salesforce buys Fin https://www.salesforce.com/news/press-releases/2026/06/15/salesforce-signs-definitive-agreement-to-acquire-fin/
Vercel buys Better Auth https://vercel.com/blog/vercel-acquires-better-auth
Figma buys Bud https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/07/figma-acquires-team-behind-a-vibe-coding-app/
Protoge https://withprotege.ai/
Windborne https://windbornesystems.com/
Etched https://www.etched.com/
Lovable’s reported raise https://sifted.eu/articles/lovable-300m-13-2bn-valuation
Josh Browder https://x.com/Joshuabrowder
Timestamps:
0:00 Introduction: Nikhil Basu Trivedi (Footwork) & Michael Kim (Cendana Capital)
1:59 The Anduril vs. USVC secondary market blowup
4:08 Why Silicon Valley is 'power-law-pilled'
8:23 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!
9:37 Information asymmetry in the secondary markets
9:45 Every.io — For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io
15:02 Is SPV fraud smoke or fire?
16:32 Superhuman acquires GPTZero
19:54 Agree.com - Stop chasing invoices and automate your entire contract-to-cash stack. Go to https://agree.com and tell them Jason sent you to get 50% off for life!
21:10 The M&A wave
27:19 The SaaSpocalypse debate
29:59 DigitalOcean - Head to https://do.co/twist to start building on DigitalOcean's AI-Native Cloud today — and cut your AI workload costs by up to 50%.
30:44 Data's moment in the energy → compute → data loop
35:01 Where will AI value accrue?
40:04 What could cause an AI correction?
42:17 Why some companies are "too big to miss"
46:23 China's possible open-weight model ban
53:28 Young founders: Etched, Thiel Fellows, Z Fellows, Neo
55:33 Portfolio spotlight: WindBorne's weather balloons and data moat
58:47 Michael's favorite fund manager: Josh Browder
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