Today’s show: Jason sits down with Wilson Sonsini partner Chris Paniewski for part two of our Startup Legal Basics series on AI law — this time tackling the question every founder is asking: who owns the output of AI systems? Chris has advised on some of the biggest AI deals in history, and in this episode he helps break down how intellectual property law is colliding with generative AI. Jason and Chris cover: What kinds of IP rights might apply to AI-generated output ( copyrights, patents, trad...
Sep 18, 2025•18 min
Today’s show: Hear why Eric Jackson thinks Opendoor is the new Carvana, and how he’s planning to bring Drake on board as an investor (plus Jason’s Bestie Chamath). On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are chatting with Jackson of EMJ Capital about his hunt for elusive 100 baggers (stocks that return 100-to-1). PLUS we’re chatting with Weave Robotics’ Kaan Doğrusöz about designing practical domestic robots RIGHT NOW, rather than prototypes for 2030. Hear about how they got Isaac to fold laundry l...
Sep 17, 2025•1 hr 12 min
Today’s show: On a special edition of TWiST, Alex presents a trio of TWiST 500 interviews. First up, Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine on the company’s new Really Simple Licensing (or RSL) initiative, and how it’s helping to compensate writers for their content. THEN, Human Native CEO Dr. James Smith joins for an even deeper dive on AI licensing, why a writer’s content isn’t just DATA to them, and why the company is pivoting away from its old marketplace model. FINALLY, Jason Marks of TELO Trucks stop...
Sep 16, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Today’s show: There are new LAUNCH Accelerator and Founder U cohorts this week, and Jason’s running down some of his favorite new startups. PLUS Alphabet is the latest member of the $3T club, why Eric Schmidt was SO RIGHT about remote work, Robinhood is opening up private companies to more investors, Polymarket adds earnings reports, how Jason wagered on The Emmys this year, and MORE! Timestamps: (0:00) It’s kickoff day for LAUNCH Accelerator 35 AND Founder University! (02:32) Let’s talk about s...
Sep 15, 2025•1 hr
Today’s show: On Friday’s TWiST, Jason, Alex, and Lon look back at some highlights from this week’s big All-In Summit in Los Angeles, including a fiery, no holds barred presentation from Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Elon Musk delving into the key challenges facing Optimus, and Tucker Carlson debating Mark Cuban on Ukraine. PLUS… why schools may start blocking social media apps, the FTC’s new investigation into social chatbots, AND omnidirectional Zoox robotaxis are headed to Las Vegas. Timestamps: We...
Sep 13, 2025•1 hr 29 min•Ep. 2177
Jason sits down with Wilson Sonsini partner Chris Paniewski for a special Startup Legal Basics on one of the thorniest questions in tech right now: how copyright law applies to AI training data. Chris has worked on some of the biggest AI deals ever — including Scale AI’s $14B+ partnership with Meta and OpenAI’s $6.5B acquisition of Jony Ive’s design studio — and brings practical, on-the-ground insights from advising leading AI companies. In this episode, Jason and Chris cover: Why AI copyright l...
Sep 11, 2025•18 min
Today’s show: In this founder-focused episode of This Week in Startups, we sit down with Republic’s Kendrick Nguyen to learn more about the company’s efforts to make the private markets accessible to the common investor. Best known for its work in equity crowdfunding, the Valor-backed startup now offers access to secondary shares, tokenized assets, and much more. Following, TWiST spoke with Positron CEO Mitesh Agrawal to learn more about his company’s inference-focused AI compute hardware. Relat...
Sep 10, 2025•57 min•Season 2176Ep. 2176
Today’s show: In this TWiST founder triple-shot, Alex digs into the real-world rollout of AI agents: Paid.ai ’s Manny Medina explains agent economics and value-based pricing, iTruckr’s Camilo Ramirez shows agents booking loads and coordinating drivers, and Tenax’s Elise Myrans demos computer vision + drones that score a single home’s wildfire/flood risk for smarter underwriting—plus live office-hours on winning enterprise pilots without getting stuck in PoC purgatory. Timestamps: (00:00) Brainst...
Sep 09, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Today’s show: Jason heard Lina Khan on The Bulwark and got a little fired up. Plus Google doesn’t have to invest in Chrome… or basically do much of anything… Atlassian picked up not just any browser company but THE Browser Company… Follow-up thoughts on that MIT “companies aren’t using AI” study… AND Jason’s “two stock markets” theory. It’s a can’t-miss Friday TWiST. Timestamps: (00:00) Sony responds to Kpop Demon Hunters success… but Jason’s not buying it! (10:44) Sentry - New users get 3 month...
Sep 05, 2025•1 hr 19 min
Today’s show:Wilson Sonsini Partner Becki DeGraw returns to Startup Legal Basics with Jason. This time, they dive into the “have” companies — the breakout startups with multiple term sheets, competitive valuations, and unusual deal terms. From founder voting proxies to mandatory follow-on investment clauses, Becki breaks down the creative “off-menu” structures showing up in today’s financings, and what founders and investors need to watch for. Whether you’re a founder navigating investor FOMO or...
Sep 04, 2025•23 min
Today’s show: Jason and Alex are joined by Nuro’s Dave Ferguson to unpack the Lucid–Uber–Nuro deal aiming to launch fully driverless Gravity SUVs on Uber by 2026. They dig into why off-the-shelf sensors and Nvidia’s Thor chip drive costs down, how mapping 150 cities improves safety, and why lidar still matters for night and edge cases. Plus: lessons from Cruise’s collapse, how regulators think about safety multiples, and why autonomy could finally make rides cheaper than owning a car. Timestamps...
Sep 03, 2025•1 hr 15 min
Today’s show: Find out why it’s important to “get curious,” and more deep founder insights on a new TWiST. Jason and Alex are back with a look at Robot vs. Human violence spilling out into the streets, Elon Musk’s vision for humanoid robots, and a reconsideration of Apple’s open-source AI models. Is the hardware giant not getting enough credit for its smaller-scale innovations? Plus Grok has another hit model, AND a chat with Scale Social founder Runbin Dong about the importance of knowing your ...
Sep 03, 2025•1 hr 11 min
Today’s show: *“KPop Demon Hunters” is one of the year’s biggest smashes… AFTER Sony sold it off to Netflix for cheap! Hear about what went wrong with one of the year’s worst deals… PLUS Grok is counting on SPEED to help it outpace rivals… How Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) ran into trouble on the podcast circuit… Nvidia’s big earnings report, and why everyone is watching that company in particular SO closely… PLUS a new Polymarket predicting the future of OpenAI! Timestamps: (0:00) How Sony missed ...
Aug 29, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Today’s show:Wilson Sonsini Partner Becki DeGraw returns to Startup Legal Basics with Jason to break down what’s happening in today’s startup market. From excess dry powder on the VC side to companies struggling to “grow into” their valuations, Becki shares what founders need to know about deal terms, pay-to-play provisions, and the shift from the 2021 heyday to today’s more structured environment. Why down rounds and structured deals are becoming more common How “pay-to-play” works (and why it’...
Aug 28, 2025•26 min
Today’s show: On a brand-new TWiST, Jason and Alex are asking why there are SO MANY note-taking AI apps? Plus another death has been linked to ChatGPT… is it too easy to get past chatbot guardrails? Why Donald Trump Jr. is joining Polymarket…. How the US Navy could catch up with its international rivals… AND should Apple just buy a big AI company to help them catch up? All that PLUS a visit from Colin Russ, whose viral H1B Visa thread might just inspire Jason to reach out to his good friend, Vic...
Aug 27, 2025•1 hr 30 min
Today’s show: On an upbeat and optimistic new TWiST, Jason and Alex are debating why any new innovation or technology gets hit with a wave of bitter cynicism. PLUS Jason defends the government taking shares of Intel, explains the importance of interoperability, and predicts how AirBnB’s Joe Gebbia will upgrade the US government’s website design. All that PLUS thoughts on the Netskope IPO, Perplexity offering publishers actual revenue share, a deep dive on the new AI-based PAC, thoughts on open-s...
Aug 26, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Today’s show: Terra’s collapse, Powell’s pivot, and OpenAI’s explosive growth all collide in this TWiST deep dive. Do Kwon has pled guilty after Terra/Luna’s $60B implosion, Fed Chair Powell hints at a September rate cut, and OpenAI has officially crossed $1B in monthly revenue (on a $12B run rate). Jason and Alex unpack what this means for founders, LPs, and the next wave of AI + crypto. They also cover Canva’s $42B comeback, Anthropic’s doubled $10B fundraise, and the brewing battle between Fi...
Aug 22, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Today’s show: In this TWiST 500 double feature, Alex sits down with two breakout founders: Chalk’s Marc Freed-Finnegan & Tollbit’s Toshit Panigrahi! First, Chalk’s CEO Marc Freed-Finnegan is tackling one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks—data freshness. Instead of relying on stale batch jobs, Chalk delivers real-time pipelines for inference compute, automatically transpiling Python into C++/Rust so it can run blazing fast in production. Investors are calling it the ‘next Databricks’—and after hear...
Aug 20, 2025•59 min
In this AI Basics episode, Jason sits down with Matt Rouif, Co-founder & CEO of Photoroom — the AI photo editing app with 300M+ downloads and 5B images processed annually. They break down: Why Photoroom built its own specialized AI models How they grew from a scrappy startup to $50M+ in revenue Lessons in product-led growth (from eBay sellers to DoorDash & Amazon) Red-teaming, brand safety, and building trust in AI imagery The future of personalized ads, content, and design This one is a...
Aug 19, 2025•31 min
Today’s show: We’re back with two insightful new TWiST founder interviews. First up: Dean Leitersdorf of Decart tells us about squeezing maximum productivity out of your GPUs. But it’s not all talk: he also shows us the incredible open world model that can magically transform live footage. THEN! Jason and Alex chat with Syncere AI founder Aaron Tan about Lume, his robotic lamp device that went viral for folding laundry. Hear why Aaron thinks the future of robotics is not necessarily humanoid, an...
Aug 18, 2025•38 min
It’s a Friday TWiST and Jason and Alex are FIRED UP about this internal Meta doc laying out appropriate vs. inappropriate AI behavior… You won’t BELIEVE with what Zuck approves for 8-year-old users. PLUS… AI job displacement is HERE, at least in the Big Apple… Jason’s getting kind of paranoid about the surveillance state… AI remains frothier than ever through new Cohere and Cognition rounds… and why we’re dubious that Sam Altman REALLY plans to spend $1 trillion on OpenAI data centers. It’s all ...
Aug 15, 2025•57 min
Today’s show: We’re back with another all-star VC roundtable discussion. Joining Jason are Dave McClure of Practical VC, NVNG’s Grady Buchanan, and Tomasz Tunguz of Theory VC. Together, they’re having a deep insider discussion of the state of venture, secondary markets, running funds of funds, the legacy of Lina Khan, the difficulty of recruiting, and why the pendulum has potentially swung in founders’ favor. Timestamps (0:00) INTRO, The origins of Practical VC and how secondary funds work. (05:...
Aug 14, 2025•1 hr 21 min
Today’s show: On an all-new Monday TWiST, Lon joins Jason and Alex to talk about a whole bunch of stories at the intersection of tech, business, and pop culture. First up, is GPT Psychosis real? And if so, what are the warning signs that your loved ones have been ONESHOTTED. Then, why did Jason get so upset at the NY Times piece about Mark Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto compound? PLUS we’re discussing Trump’s export fees on AMD and Nvidia, Jason’s pitch for why the president should work more closely wit...
Aug 12, 2025•1 hr 16 min
Today’s show: Jason and Lon recorded a Thursday night special edition, so no Alex this time, but still lots to talk about. First up, Jason thinks it’s time for Tim Apple to exit the stage in lieu of a product obsessive innovator. Speaking of new products, GPT-5 is here and the hosts are… not exactly blown away. Are we in the midst of the AI trough of despair? PLUS we’re talking Ripple’s acquisition of Rail, Donald Trump’s new AI chatbot, Bumble’s new direction, Airbnb’s potential paths forward a...
Aug 08, 2025•1 hr 19 min
Today’s show: It’s a brand-new PACKED episode of TWiST. Jason and Alex welcome guest Zach Dive of Adam.new, to tell us why he made a deepfake AI ad starring Jason and the All-In besties. PLUS a rundown of the biggest tech and startup news of the day, including Disney’s decision to sunset Hulu, OpenAI’s new open-weight models, the Cloudflare vs. Perplexity feud, Uber’s newly-announced stock buyback, China’s Luckin Coffee coming to Manhattan, and much much more! Timestamps: (0:00) Luckin Coffee hi...
Aug 07, 2025•1 hr 13 min
Today’s show: Jason and Alex are running down the biggest tech, startup, and business stories of the day on a brand-new Monday TWIST.Which countries are leading the AI race, based on academic papers? Why Jason thinks covert agencies are spying on Meta’s superintelligence team. Lina Khan’s taking a victory lap on the Figma IPO but what did she REALLY accomplish during her Biden administration tenure? PLUS, why we’re bringing Founder University to the MENA region. All that and MORE on a packed epi...
Aug 05, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Today’s show: Alex is back with three more awesome interviews with founders on the bleeding edge of innovative tech. Dr. Hon Weng Chong walks us through the basics of biological computing and Cortical Labs’ first-ever commercial computer running on living human cells. Turing founder Jonathan Siddarth unpacks the secrets of LLM benchmarking, and explains why even our most advanced tests need to get much much harder right away. Finally, Mercor founder Brendan Foody on how AI is about to reinvent t...
Aug 01, 2025•1 hr 23 min
Today’s show: It’s another All Star Investor Panel! Jason and Alex welcome TrustFund VC founder Sophia Amoruso AND WeekendFund investor/Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover.Together they’re going DEEP on the current environment for startups, founders, and investors. How do tell durable from brittle revenue… Everyone’s different approaches to follow-on investments and recycling… Strategies on when to trim a position… The benefits of hosting co-working events and jam sessions… And LOTS LOTS more! It’s...
Jul 30, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Today’s show: SYDNEY SWEENEY’S AMERICAN EAGLE AD DIVIDES OUR PANEL!PLUS WHAT STARTUPS CAN LEARN FROM THE VIRAL ASTRONOMER RESPONSEJason, Alex, and Lon are looking at some of the biggest media stories of the day before returning to their favorite topic, tech. Tune in for deep dives on IMAX’s new AI film festival, Figma’s big IPO and much more! * Timestamps: (0:00) Jason and Alex kick off the show! (3:45) Lon’s joining Alex and Lon to discuss the controversial Sydney Sweeney genes/jeans ad (7:20) ...
Jul 29, 2025•1 hr 14 min
Today’s show: Jason’s back and filling us in on his experiences in Washington DC, at the All-In AI Summit, including getting a Trump shoutout from stage, debating immigration with VP Vance, and calling out Sec. Wright for dismissing solar power.THEN Jason and Alex talk about the immense promise of open-source robotics and check out Hugging Face’s Reachy…PLUS picking apart the White House’s new AI-related executive orders, why Jason is afraid of China repeating its Huawei success, a free exchange...
Jul 25, 2025•1 hr 4 min
