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Episode 2335 · This Week in Startups

Did OpenAI Steal the Navier-Stokes Solution? | E2335

9 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 21 min

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This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain NetSuite - https://www.netsuite.ai/twist Vanta - http://www.vanta.com/twist Check out a full transcript and summary of today's show, created by Plaud: Today's show: An Anthropic researcher quit this week, saying both leading labs are gambling with everyone's lives. His coworker chimed in and predicts there is a greater than 10% chance that AI will end humanity IN THE NEXT 10 YEARS. Jason and Lon take it to Yohei Nakajima of Untapped Capital, Ben Lerer of Lerer Hippeau,…

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This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis · Business · English

Jason Calacanis covers startups, tech, markets, media, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. He also interviews the world's greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators.

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  1. 18 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 34 min

    Hugging Face Co-Founder on Open-Source, Microduck, and NVIDIA | E2339

    This Week In Startups is made possible by: Superhuman:⁠ http://superhuman.com/⁠ Paypal:⁠ http://paypal.launch.co⁠ Odoo:⁠ http://Odoo.com/twist⁠ Plaud:⁠ http://Plaud.ai/twist⁠ Harmonic:⁠ http://harmonic.ai/⁠ Today’s show: Hugging Face built a $399 open-source robot duck as a side quest, and sold 16,000 units off a single tweet. Co-founder Thomas Wolf joins Jason and Lon to explain Microduck happened, why storage is the company's real business, and what it felt like to get hacked by OpenAI's agents. Jason takes apart Gavin Newsom's new AI "kill switch" executive order: if these models are so…

  2. 15 Sep 2026 · 19 min

    90% of AI prototypes never reach production (w/ Temporal's Samar Abbas) | AI Basics

    The TWiST AI Basics series is made possible by Google for Startups! 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: https://goo.gle/technical_guide Today's show: The demo works, the vibes are immaculate, but then the app falls apart the second real users touch it. On today's AI Basics, Temporal co-founder and CEO Samar Abbas says the problem isn't with the model at all. You're missing a harness, the layer that keeps an AI agent's work durable, secure, and recoverable…

  3. E2337 · 14 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 11 min

    Ask Jason: AI Extinction, Grok's Rogue Meme Coin & Weed Farms as Data Centers | E2337

    This Week In Startups is made possible by: Quo: http://quo.com/TWiST The Conservation Fund: https://conservationfund.org CLA: https://app.notion.com/p/withyou-help-eb83a84d32cf43f59af13cb11e2f56c3?source=copy_link Today's show: A 27-year-old Anthropic researcher quit last week warning that AI could cause human extinction, and by Friday, a caller's 76-year-old mother was texting her in a panic. Jason's answer: the labs are already shipping the safeguards Doomers say don't exist. On an all live calls episode of TWiST, learn about the AI implications Jason is actually scared of, and why it…

  4. E2336 · 11 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 13 min

    The Pentagon Wants Equity in AI Startups | E2336

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  5. 10 Sep 2026 · 23 min

    Becki DeGraw on founder vesting, advisor equity & the 4-term-sheet play

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  6. E2334 · 4 Sep 2026 · 58 min

    Dr. Mark Hyman on Function Health & GLP-1 microdosing | E2334

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  7. 3 Sep 2026 · 18 min

    Becki DeGraw on spinouts, IP licensing & clean exits | Wilson Sonsini Startup Legal Basics

    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 investor…

  8. E2333 · 2 Sep 2026 · 1 hr 20 min

    VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333

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  9. E2332 · 31 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 7 min

    Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332

    This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain CLA https://claconnect.com/withyou Rippling https://Rippling.ai/twist 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…

  10. E2331 · 28 Aug 2026 · 1 hr 48 min

    Breaking down Nvidia's Hugging Face and Poolside bets | E2331

    This Week In Startups is made possible by: DigitalOcean https://do.co/twist Every.io https://every.io PayPal https://paypal.launch.co 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…

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