This Week in Startups

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Wilson Sonsini: https://www.wsgr.com/en/
 
Today's show:
One of YouTube's three co-founders left for grad school and walked away with a fraction of what his partners made on the Google sale. Becki DeGraw of Wilson Sonsini joins Jason for Startup Legal Basics to explain the vesting schedule behind that gap, and why you want one even if you never take a dollar of venture money.
Learn how VCs actually respond when a founder says "I've already put in four years," and the exact language Jason gives founders to turn one term sheet into three. PLUS, why is an inactive advisor still vesting your equity, and who wrote those performance milestones?

Guests:
Becki DeGraw on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-degraw-639bbb62/
Wilson Sonsini: https://www.wsgr.com/en/

Relevant Links:
Becki DeGraw — partner in WSGR's San Francisco office — https://www.wsgr.com/en/people/becki-degraw.html
TechCrunch broke the YouTube story— https://techcrunch.com/2006/10/09/google-has-acquired-youtube/
Sequoia Capital — https://www.sequoiacap.com/
Roelof Botha — led Sequoia's YouTube investment and later ran the firm globally → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roelof_Botha
ESOP / employee stock option pool — https://thisweekinstartups.com/basics
Founder & advisor equity documents — https://www.wsgr.com/en/services/practice-areas/corporate/emerging-companies.html


Timestamps:


0:06 Becki DeGraw on why founder equity is "near and dear" to every founder
1:53 Founder vesting explained
3:49 Why you want vesting even if you never take VC money
6:05 "Why do I have to vest again?"
7:32 Leverage is a function of how many offers you have
10:36 The exact script for landing a second term sheet
14:37 Don't let an AI write your three-page vesting schedule
18:19 Character in Silicon Valley: it's a small world after all
19:49 Take the emotion out of it



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Check out a full transcript and summary of today's show, created by Plaud: https://web.plaud.ai/s/pub_c2b45bfe-abad-43ce-b7ef-41118f55f738::Vo2MH6PuXBzTCaxKRDjHH0zu8FbzgDpQL5OnfBfMzLP22CQRxciqE74Mq4YDD-LwYXGZCazgIeglPuwC














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, and Rebecca Lynn of Canvas Prime, who cannot decide whether it is the greatest PR strategy in history or some kind of mass psychosis.
Learn why Jason says founders should never hand a frontier lab their proprietary data, whether or not they're offered free credits. PLUS, who really solved Navier-Stokes, and what does the OpenAI–Buckmaster fight mean for anyone doing real work inside ChatGPT or Claude?
Guests:
Yohei Nakajima on X: https://x.com/yoheinakajima
Untapped Capital: https://untapped.vc/
Ben Lerer on X: https://x.com/BenjLerer
Lerer Hippeau: https://www.lererhippeau.com/
Rebecca Lynn on X: https://x.com/VCRebecca
Canvas Prime: https://www.canvas.vc/
Relevant Links:
Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic - "gambling with our lives" https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/09/gambling-with-our-lives-anthropic-researcher-quits-warns-against-self-improving-ai/
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic's Alignment Science lead, on X: >10% odds within a decade — https://x.com/EvanHub/status/2097497037956891126
Future of Life Institute — the 2015 Puerto Rico AI safety conference Jason asks Lon to pull up → https://futureoflife.org/
Meta debuts Muse (Axios) —https://www.axios.com/2026/09/08/meta-debuts-muse-personal-ai-agent
Harmonic — https://harmonic.ai/
China blocks Meta's Manus acquisition (CNBC) —https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/27/meta-manus-china-blocks-acquisition-ai-startup.html
OpenAI fought dirty— https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/08/openai-fought-dirty-on-career-making-math-problem-says-nyu-mathematician/
Savvy Wealth — https://www.wealthmanagement.com/ria-news/savvy-wealth-raises-100m-valuation-hits-600m
Augmodo — https://www.augmodo.com/
E2B — https://e2b.dev/
Daptic — https://www.daptic.com/
Timestamps:

0:00 Jacob Coxon quits Anthropic: "crunch time" and "endgame"
4:53 Evan Hubinger: >10% odds AI kills all humans in a decade
11:22 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
12:23 "You have succeeded in scaring the bejesus out of Americans"
14:59 Jobs, the wealth divide, and which industries get wiped out first
20:07 NetSuite - For the first time ever, you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/TWIST
21:09 Savvy Wealth's $100M round
26:52 The Kalanick story and why Jason built a syndicate backstop
29:04 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist
32:05 Meta ships Muse
32:56 Can Meta be trusted
35:29 Threads Metrics
49:27 Robinhood's free-share referral
51:16 NYU's Tristan Buckmaster accuses OpenAI of fighting dirty on Navier-Stokes
57:43 Jason: "It's a trap"
59:03 Harvey goes open-weight, Go.AI on-prem, Covenant Labs
1:12:22 High performing portfolio companies



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Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
 
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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: https://x.com/drmarkhyman
Function: https://www.functionhealth.com/


Relevant Links:
The Dr. Hyman Show — https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dr-hyman-show/id1382804627

Function pricing — https://www.functionhealth.com/pricing

Ezra — the full-body MRI company Function acquired https://ezra.com/

Galleri (GRAIL) — the multi-cancer early detection blood test — https://www.galleri.com/

Tufts / JACC study — the source of the "93% of Americans have metabolic dysfunction" — https://now.tufts.edu/2022/07/05/only-7-american-adults-have-good-cardiometabolic-health

American College of Cardiology — https://www.acc.org/

Dr. Jorge Plutzky — https://www.health.harvard.edu/authors/jorge-plutzky-md

OpenEvidence — https://www.openevidence.com/

Stanford Metabolic Psychiatry Clinic — https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/11/metabolic-psychiatry.html

Stanford Medicine on the ibogaine findings → https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2024/01/ibogaine-ptsd.html

Texas SB 2308 — the $50M state investment in ibogaine trials — https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/31/texas-ibogaine-research-clinical-trials-psychedelics/

Timestamps:
0:00 What Function actually is
6:43 Healthspan vs. sick care
10:16 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
11:32 A $300 vitamin D test vs. a $10 one
18:08 Should a 25-year-old get a whole-body MRI?
20:42 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
24:23 Why medicine is still running on paper
25:41 The study where the chatbot beat the doctors
27:02 micro1, doctors in the loop, and why AI still needs guardrails
28:50 Wearables, records, and the CD-ROM problem
30:07 Rippling - Thanks to our partners at Rippling! Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.
32:51 The wearable that caught Jason's Covid
34:31 Alcohol, sugar, and why almost nobody tests your insulin
40:00 GLP-1s: Jason's 213-to-168 story
42:22 Microdosing GLP-1s, muscle loss, and "skinny fat"
48:48 Overdiagnosing mental illness: SSRIs, Adderall, and a lost decade
50:17 The biology underneath depression and anxiety
54:32 Psychedelics: ketamine, ibogaine, and the second revolution in psychiatry
 


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VC experts on why Physical AI funding is heating up | E2333
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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 Pentagon's rollout of ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government. And Katelin gives us her insight into how VCs are investing in Europe and the regulations behind the scenes.
Guests:
Katelin Holloway on X: https://x.com/katelin_cruse
Seven Seven Six: https://sevensevensix.com/
Paige Doherty on X: https://x.com/paigefinnn
Behind Genius Ventures: https://www.behindgeniusventures.com/
Full Transcript and Summary, powered by Plaud
https://web.plaud.ai/s/pub_772dbc9f-cd78-4de7-911e-8d3ee2883fbb::AF3ncHtIZkSyKKL-K-XUZBAUBEdoQQBEGCQSsja3gXsll8Dm6-Xbrrlhk7g8U-xwIW9kHyYwaB0dBuoC
Related Links:
Department of War adds ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government: https://fortune.com/2026/09/01/pentagon-chatgpt-grok-government-military-ai-members-pete-hegseth-defense-department/
OpenAI for Government: https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-openai-for-government/
Starshield — SpaceX's government/defense arm: https://www.spacex.com/starshield/
UN work on LAWS (Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems): https://disarmament.unoda.org/the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons/background-on-laws-in-the-ccw/
European Commission designates ChatGPT a VLOSE: https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/news/commission-designates-chatgpt-reddit-roblox-under-digital-services-act
Commission press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_26_1772
Euronews on why a chatbot that searches the live web counts as a search engine: https://www.euronews.com/next/2026/08/31/eu-places-chatgpt-reddit-and-roblox-under-strictest-digital-safety-rules
Entrepreneur First: https://www.joinef.com/posts/introducing-the-bridge/
Henrick Johansson, the European VC persona: https://x.com/compliantvc
Starcloud — orbital data centers: https://www.starcloud.com/
Starcloud raises $250M at a $2.3B: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260821884035/en/Starcloud-Raises-$250-Million-at-$2.3-Billion-Valuation-to-Scale-AI-with-Orbital-Data-Centers
"From Sputnik to Starship: Estimating the experience curve of space launch technology" https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/5/7/pgag217/8732400
Cambridge Bennett Schoo: https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/blog/is-space-trade-the-next-global-transport-revolution/
Crunchbase News: physical AI startups raised $47.4B across 521 deals in H1 2026: https://news.crunchbase.com/venture/physical-ai-funding-startups-robotics-aerospace-h1-2026/
Crunchbase News on record defense-tech funding: https://news.crunchbase.com/defense-tech/startup-venture-funding-all-time-record-ai-anduril/
Jensen Huang's prediction: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/executive-insights/
Zipline: https://www.flyzipline.com/
Nox Metals: https://www.noxmetals.com/
CNBC: Anthropic changes its data retention policy: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/01/anthropic-data-retention.html
Bloomberg on the plan to let enterprises hold the 30-day window: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-20/anthropic-plans-to-change-data-retention-policy-for-advanced-ai
Plaud — sponsor; the wearable AI note-taker → **https://plaud.ai/twist** (code TWIST for 10% off)
Harmonic: https://harmonic.ai/
Timestamps:
0:00 Why making it to Fund IV is when it gets real
9:24 Pentagon rolls out ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government
10:49 Sentry - Your team should be focused on shipping features — not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST
11:53 Paige on defense tech and three years at Northrop Grumman
13:40 Katelin: The bottleneck used to be winning the contract, now it's surviving one
16:13 Autonomous weapons, robot dogs, and the Boston Dynamics conversation in Paris
19:07 Lightfield - Name one person who's ever enjoyed updating a CRM. Exactly. Lightfield's AI agent does it for you — it even prospects and books your meetings. Used by thousands of startups. Free at https://lightfield.app
22:03 EU designates ChatGPT a "very large online search engine" under the DSA
24:54 Katelin's contrarian take: Europe is undercapitalized
29:56 Odoo - The all-in-one business platform. Your first app is free! Get started today at https://Odoo.com/twist
31:07 Starcloud raises $250M at a $2.3B valuation
53:06 Competing with Elon: the single point of failure for the whole space economy
57:49 Physical AI raised ~$47B in the first half of 2026
1:03:42 Jason's Zipline regret and the death of "hardware is hard"
1:07:07 Is "unc" a compliment? A Gen X / millennial / Gen Z / Gen Alpha
1:09:39 Anthropic reverses its data retention policy after enterprise pushback
1:12:18 Katelin on data custody: "That's not a procurement question"
1:15:31 Back to on-prem: Go.AI, the Go1, and vertical LLMs



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This Week In Startups is made possible by:


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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 on just $5 of juice. PLUS, we've got John Yu of Bitsec explaining how his subnet project outperformed Fable 5 in website vulnerability checks.

Guests:


Anders Forslund on X: https://x.com/AndersForslund1?s=2
Heart Aerospace: https://www.heartaerospace.com/
John Yu on X: https://x.com/yubrew
Bitsec: https://sentios.io/ & https://sentios.io/

Relevant Links:

MicroDuck: https://pollen-robotics.com/microduck/
Dwarkesh Patel, "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface
Dwarkesh's launch thread on X: https://x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2093833419377815719
METR's independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident: https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-incident-investigation/
X1 first flight announcement — https://www.heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-completes-first-flight-of-world-s-largest-electric-aircraft
JSX (JetSuiteX) — https://www.jsx.com/
Pilatus PC-12 —https://www.pilatus-aircraft.com/en/fly/pc-12
Surf Air — https://www.surfair.com/
Zcash → https://z.cash/
Timestamps:
0:00 Is Hugging Face's Microduck the greatest side quest ever?
5:31 Jason puts Clem Delangue and Jensen Huang in charge of AI PR
11:20 Northwest Registered Agent - Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number, and more - with no purchase required! Learn more at https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain
18:55 Top story: Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"
19:22 Why agents act like people: they were trained on us
19:30 CLA - Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at https://www.claconnect.com/withyou
21:49 "I know good PR when I see it"
23:11 The prompt Jason says OpenAI should have written instead
26:44 The data center backlash and the politicians who will flip
30:07 Rippling - Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to https://Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.
33:19 Guest: Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace, and the X1's first flight
39:40 Turboprops vs. jets and the regional routes America lost
42:33 JSX, Santa Monica Airport, and 5,000 underused airports
44:54 Why Boeing won't build this: the innovator's dilemma
53:14 Guest: John Yu, Bitsec — Bittensor Subnet 60
55:01 How the subnet works: miners, validators, $10K a day
57:17 Bitsec vs. a frontier model: 160+ vulnerabilities to 60
59:37 Was the agent civilization story a pre-IPO PR play?
1:05:10 Sentios.io and continuous coverage



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Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/
 
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
 
Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis
 
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