This Week in Startups
This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo - Northwest Registered Agent - Rippling - Today’s show: Your doctor almost certainly isn't testing your insulin. Dr. Mark Hyman sits down with Jason to explain the broken system that Function is fixing, and what 100 million biomarkers say about how sick America actually is. Learn why insulin beats blood sugar as an early warning for TKTKTK. Why might "normal" lab ranges be unreliable? PLUS, how does an expert like Dr. Hyman feel about GLP-1s and psychedelics? Guests: Dr. Mark Hyman on X: Function: Relevant Links: The Dr. Hyman Show...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Wilson Sonsini Today’s show: Spinouts are everywhere right now, and most founders get the cap table wrong. Jason sits down with Becki DeGraw, partner at Wilson Sonsini, to break down how to do it right, starting with his 80/20 rule for splitting the new cap table and why letting the old company keep too much of it kills your ability to raise. Becki also covers the legal side: who owns the IP, non-competes between the two companies, and the trap founders fall into when they're still on the old board. PLUS, the one question every Series A...
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VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333 This Week In Startups is made possible by: partner 1 - link partner 2 - link partner 3 - link Today’s show: Are we one step closer to data centers in space? Katelin Holloway of Seven Seven Six and Paige Doherty of Behind Genius Ventures break it down what it would take. Plus investor interest is surging in Physical AI companies. Paige explains why she backs applications of physical AI over general-purpose robotics, and how her thesis on multimodal AI led to the largest check she's ever written. We then dive into the...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent CLA Rippling Today’s show: Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it. Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean Every.io PayPal Today’s show: *Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, just days after quietly licensing Poolside’s coding model for $6 billion+. On TWiST, Jason lays out why this is actually the biggest AI story of the year. Nvidia plans to offer enterprises unmetered, unlimited on-prem compute, pulling them away from reliance on Anthropic and OpenAI’s frontier models and products. PLUS we’re chatting with Halter founder & CEO Craig Piggott about how his company helps farmers optimize their land use via...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Lightfield Northwest Registered Agent Rippling Today’s show: *Bill Gates dropped a 6,000 word warning: AI will be “the greatest equalizer ever invented, or the worst sort of injustice.” The Microsoft icon has an AI agenda for the US: new national institutions, AI use taxes, and jobs legally reserved for humans only. Our VC roundtable guests — Sheel Mohnot (Better Tomorrow Ventures), Dave McClure (Practical Venture Capital), and Hussein Kanji — push back hard. Is taxing profits a better fix for AI taking jobs than taxing the tokens...
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Today’s show: Can a founder actually fire a board member? Short answer: almost never. And the reason why may surprise a lot of founders. On this edition of Legal Basics, Wilson Sonsini partner Becki DeGraw joins Jason for a deep dive into who really controls your board, when investors start earning seats, and the differences between a board member and a board observer. Check out an episode that might just save your cab table someday. PLUS they walk through the full lifecycle of your startup’s board, exploring what it actually controls, when founders should start adding their own board...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Odoo Quo Conservation Fund how old a movie has to be for me to be able to show a part of it on youtube Generally 10 seconds or less of a film clip can fall under fair use for commentary or criticism — which is how most podcasts and talk shows use clips without issue. But there's no hard legal rule based on age. What actually matters more than age is fair use, which considers: Purpose — commentary, criticism, education = stronger fair use case Amount used — shorter = safer; a 5-10 second clip for reaction/discussion is generally fine ...
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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman Sentry Lightfield Today’s show: Jason’s been saying it for years now (and we’ve got an All In clip from 2023 to prove it). Open source will win the AI race. This week gives us a major evidence point, as $11B legal AI company Harvey released its own in-house model, trained on an open-weight Kimi K3 base. Harvey made a proprietary specialized solution without having to risk sharing its precious expert-compiled data with the major frontier labs. PLUS we’re checking out the FREE AI dictation app Willow with co-founder Allan Guo,...
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The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google Cloud! Build context-aware AI workflows using DeepMind models and orchestration tools with Google for Startups’ new Startup technical guide on generative media. Get the guide here: Astrocade is building super-intelligence for the interactive world. Build the future of fun: Today’s show: *Making a video game once required a studio, an engine, and a team of five or more people working for six months. But with Astrocade, users just describe the game they’d like to play and share, and an AI assembles it from minutes, ready to publish to...
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Today’s show:
The FCC’s decision to ban Chinese humanoid robots over security concerns is a boon to American startups, which now face a narrower competitive market. But where should we draw the line on security over competition? Menlo Ventures’ Deedy Das, Weisburd Pierce’s David Weisburd, Plexo Capital’s Lo Toney, and LAUNCH’s Jason Calcanis broke down how they differentiate between legitimate security concerns and purported regulatory capture. Today’s venture capital roundtable also dug into OpenRouter’s possible sale to Stripe, changing tokenomics, the Indian market for startups, and even DoorDash’s drone-delivery business taking flight.
Guest Links:
Deedy Das https://x.com/deedydas
Menloe Ventures https://menlovc.com/
Lo Toney https://x.com/lo_toney
Plexo Capital https://www.plexocap.com/
David Weisburd https://x.com/DWeisburd
Weisburd Pierce https://www.weisburdpierce.com/
Jason Calcanis https://x.com/Jason
LAUNCH https://launch.co/
Show Links:
The FCC’s decision regarding Chinese robots https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-adds-foreign-produced-power-inverters-and-robots-covered-list-0
Pacing the Frontier letter https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/
Cursor Start https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-start-india
Stripe may buy OpenRouter https://www.axios.com/2026/07/24/stripe-openrouter-merger-ai-currency
OpenRouter financials https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openrouter-financials-suggest-steep-price-possible-acquirer-stripe?rc=g3wfdp
Kimi K3 license https://huggingface.co/moonshotai/Kimi-K3/blob/main/LICENSE
Pangram https://www.pangram.com/
Tau Robotics https://www.tau-robotics.com/
Zipline https://www.zipline.com/
Manna https://www.manna.aero/
Kindred Ventures https://kindredventures.com/
Autolane https://goautolane.com/
Salmon Labs https://salmonrun.ai/
Timestamps:
0:00 The FCC bans Chinese humanoid robots
2:18 Waymo, Uber, Robotaxi, and the global BYD threat
10:30 MongoDB - AI-assisted and agentic coding is helping you build faster than ever. Start building at https://MongoDB.com/ai
15:45 The "Pacing The Frontier" letter (1,100+ AI staffers warn on RSI)
19:51 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Get started for free at https://Odoo.com/twist
21:07 Regulatory capture vs. genuine concern
30:09 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
37:57 Have we reached AGI?
38:35 Stripe eyes OpenRouter at $10B
39:19 Does OpenRouter have a moat?
47:13 Kimi K3's license and neocloud margins
49:34 Claude Tag and the future of AI-mediated workplaces
53:26 Cursor Start, ChatGPT Go, and the India market
1:02:03 Have we solved AI detection?
1:11:20 Tau Robotics $30/hour robotic housecleaning
1:12:49 Job loss, and the social safety net
1:18:25 DoorDash Air takes on Zipline, Manna
1:21:00 Portfolio shout-outs
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