This Week in Startups

"I bought another $50,000 in Tao today. I'm 750K into this which is a small bet for me. I placed a 750K bet on Tao."

"What do I drive every day? I drive a Model Y. Cost 50K. I think you can get it used for 30K with 20,000 miles on it. I use the FSD."

"I am very excited to be a shareholder in a fan of and partners with Poly Market. What will the median home value in Austin, Texas metro area be on April 30th?"

"The last version is 50 bucks off. Sony WF1000XM5. And I actually prefer my my my XM5s better. They fit better."

"I just want to take a moment to applaud Claude. I just hit it. I got the haptic. I'm now recording the conversation and all my action items are on here."

"So, what I need is I need a Chrome browser extension. I'm on a YouTube video"

"I am a fan of Sony earbuds. Now, everybody goes for the Apple ones. The Sony ones are so much better. And these are expensive, folks. These are $300. Um and I've I've bought two different versions of these. The Sony WF1000XM6."

"if you remember fisking, f i s k i n g, pull up fisking from the Wikipedia."

"So I put into my agent, give me a business plan, an open-source Bittensor business plan based on content CMS's and I got back the most brilliant business plan."

"one of the pens that she liked was the Zebra G750 that I literally bought it. Now, I didn't happen to buy it from Staples, but I did follow her."

"I was on TikTok and I stumbled upon the Staples baddy."

"Uber has a courier service. The courier service is like 10 bucks, but you have to coordinate. So, what do we do? My Athena assistant looks at their menu at 7 a.m., finds out what's new on the menu because they change it every week"

"that was some of my cursor research when I found"

"I'm even buying these kids Plaud devices now because they're so good"

"But the truth is, what are we still using to do our work? And it's Opus 4.6."

"I'm trying to Ogilvy on advertising. This was like an old book on advertising."

"I'm gonna take out YouTube. I'm gonna take out ChatGPT. I'm gonna learn how to be a carpenter"

"I asked Claude or Grok or Gemini, what are the seminal works in advertising, in typography, in design?"

"I just bought a new MacBook Pro because I had like a four-year-old Air. When you put 48 gigs of RAM on these things and this new M5 processor, it is like scary how much faster."

"My life in advertising and scientific advertising by these are two works by Claude Hopkins."

"I asked Claude or Grok or Gemini, what are the seminal works in advertising, in typography, in design?"

"I own TAO directly myself through Coinbase. It's not on Robin Hood yet."

"All I do to load these new models, Gemma 4 came out, I go to Open Claw, I say, 'Hey, I think Gemma 4 just came out. Figure it out.' It goes, it installs it for you."

"I just cut and pasted my API key to my open call replicant"

"He lives in an EC2 instance and so he's not on top."

"This is the Wolf Tactical weighted training vest. This is called Rucking. I've been doing this for a while now, folks. A year and a half or whatever."

"Brought to you by Whoop. Whoop is also got a new looks max."

"for me, it was buying like a Corvette and a one-touch espresso machine when I sold Blogs, Inc. in 2005"

"$20 I think I paid for this thing. This Eye Glow thing, USB single foot pedal. Go ahead and buy it. I guarantee you it's going to be life-changing for you. You plug it into the back. It's janky. It's cheap."

"When I'm using it in Superhuman, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, I use it everywhere."

"I have to read down Whisper Flow. I tested it and then I stopped using it and then I realized I need it again and I need it with this pedal"

"When I'm using it in Superhuman, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, I use it everywhere."

"When I'm using it in Superhuman, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, I use it everywhere."

"I did this with Open Door. I bought some open door when these lunatics were like, 'Oh, we're going to bring everybody back.' I was like, 'Great. Buy a bunch.' I knew what would happen. This is my trading strategy."

"You guys effectively resurrected my interest in looking at outbound marketing again, which I try, we pay for it, too. We pay about $2,000 for a trial"

"So for Molta Launch or any of these other marketplaces, I would be willing to have my Open Claw go and do jobs for free to get those ratings"

"Every day I tell my open claw that it's got to go out there and earn its keep in its Mac mini"

"I went to the Aman Hotel in Tokyo and when I use that shampoo, I just smell the countryside of Japan and it makes me happy"

"my Dropcam starts going off. That was Nest Cam before I got sold to Google"

"I've taken a couple rides in Zoox in both in San Francisco and in Vegas and it's a fantastic experience. Taking a Zoox through the hills of San Francisco... It was magical, completely surreal experience."

"I love Coke Zero. So I get Coke Zero and I get caffeine free."

"I order this in bulk. And I will make a little cherry soda for my girls where I will take a little sparkling water, some crushed ice. And I put some of the syrup in from this and the cherries."

"my OpenClaw downloads the video, puts it into a Google Drive for me, then puts it on a notion page for me"

"I had my OpenClaw install on the Mac Studio"

"my OpenClaw downloads the video, puts it into a Google Drive for me, then puts it on a notion page for me"

"I've been wearing the Plaud pin. I turned it on at the beginning of the day and I just let it record me all day. Now I have on my calendar every other day, review your plaud."

"There is a company called Shokz... These are bone conducting headphones... You put this over your kids' ears... now when somebody's on the swing listening to some music... and I say, 'Hey, it's dinner time'... they can hear me."

"I started using my replicant to executive coach my team. So I tell it do a CIR for Marcus"

"I bought this new pen, this Zebra G-750. You know, it's an $8 pen, but it's really quite nice"

"I created a QuickBooks account, created like an API skill for that. I have all these transactions. I have QuickBooks set up."

"I gave it access to my Mercury account, just read access."

"I usually have it on like my WhatsApp or on my Slack like chatting with my OpenClaw agent."

"This dude created the communicator from Star Trek, a device he made for OpenClaw on a Raspberry Pi."

"I wanted to run Qwen 2.5 locally and we have that and my replicant is using it right now."

"This cost 120 bucks. When I'm on a flight, I just have it with me. I just zip it out. Boom."

"We're using like Slackbot 2% of the time."

"Do you use Overcast?"

"some of the tools that we're using ElevenLabs we're using fall.ai"

"some of the tools that we're using ElevenLabs we're using fall.ai"

"I'm incredibly frustrated with this Bank of America. The worst bank ever."

"We have our OpenClaw agents running in an AWS EC2 instance and I feel like it's holding me back."

"I buy these two or three at a time. And then when I'm with a friend, I hand it to them and I gift it to them. This is a giant 25,000 milliamp and it's got two built-in cables and it has pass through charging. It's fantastic game changer."

"Shout out Perplexity Computer. Love the whole category."

"And then Anker sells a two headed USBC cable. This thing's a godsend. You put these two things together, they don't take up any space. You got your phone and your laptop charging."

"I saw Anker my favorite brand and they made a beautiful charger. This is the Anker Nano 45W Max charger. This is like a fast one. So, it's really good. Um, but it's so tiny. And what's really unique about this one is you can rotate the plug."

"Jason, my gift to you, read it. It'll blow your mind. It's crazy. You've never read anything like it. It's fantastic."

"it has some of the best world building and characterization I've ever read. I'm absolutely hooked. It's the type of book where I don't want to go to bed because I want more of it."

"I can recommend to you the Shokz open ear headphones when you're walking with the baby, you need to hear if the baby wakes up"

"Nigel Holmes is the godfather of design. You could pull up this book, Designer's Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams."

"This is why I talk about the Checklist Manifesto all the time. Make checklists, have your team do it, force them to print them out."

"It's not like anything else I have seen on TV recently. It's very strange and I think if you're either a fan of like family relationship drama or creepy horror, I think there's something to enjoy in this show for everybody. So, I I really recommend it."

"The internet has been the best thing ever for self-publishing."

"She has this album called West End Girl about her breakup with the guy David Harbor. People are going crazy for this album. It's a great album. This is a great thing for artists to do."

"There's a really interesting indie film. It's on Hulu right now. It's called American Sweat Shop. I actually just threw it on out of curiosity. I was pretty caught up in it. I think they do a really good job."

"He also did a 2023 movie called The Last Stop in Yuma County. That is great. Oh, if you get a chance to watch that one. That's the one to check out."

"I saw that this new show Paradise was in season two and everybody was talking about it. I watched the first season of Paradise and it was great. So go watch the series. It's great."

"There's a Tedeschi Trucks band. They're kind of like the Allman Brothers. They got a little bit of Mark Knopfler in there. I found this band. I like this band."

"It's a vibe coding platform. It competes with Claude and Cursor. It's comparable or better than Claude. The price that they're launching at is $29 a month. It's five to seven times cheaper than Claude Code and Codex."

"I like a certain bakery in the Austin area. It's called Abby Jane. They make incredible bread. They use the whole grains, like artisanal grains. So it's just this is literally the best bakery in Texas and one of the 10 best in the country"

"This is my favorite biography of the last year or so. Who Knew? and he talks about his personal life, his marriage to Diane von Furstenberg... one of the real legendary executives."

"I'm really enjoying this. It's a little cheesy. It's a Civil War scripted miniseries on Prime Video called The Grey House. Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman, both executive producers on it."

"There's a very famous Penn and Baker documentary. Don't Look Back. That's table stakes."

"This is on Disney Plus right now... It's a National Geographic docuseries. Incas: The Rise and Fall. I went to Peru many years ago, visited some of the sites. I've been really enjoying it."

"But then there's two by Scorsese who as a great auteur appreciated Dylan. No Direction Home 2005 incredible documentary."

"And that Scorsese bookend documentary 2019... It's sort of a documentary. It's a fictionalized... It's very Dylan. It's like a fake documentary."

"On Sunday on Disney Plus, another National Geographic documentary is arriving. It's called Ghost Elephants. But here's the interesting thing about it. Directed and narrated by Werner Herzog."

"This is getting incredibly sophisticated. 180 flexible for your ideal view."

"For 23 bucks, the delight I get from this thing every day is extraordinary."

"Big Camera in Tokyo. Amazing. Incredible. Many floors."

"What you want to pair with this is this $20 plug, which is a six-foot USB cable."

"AMC has a new Silicon Valley show. It's got Billy Magnus. It's got Zack Galifanakis. It's called The Audacity. The first two are on AMC now."

"but if there's a story in the New York Times and you want to fisk it"

"With Bittensor, you're just sending that out to everybody who's got a GPU to spare. So, what's happened here?"

"Yeah. So like Wayback Machine plus Delicious if you remember that bookmarking service."

"If you pay all this money to go to Coachella, do the artist owe you a Sabrina Carpenter level spectacle"

"It's in the Google Play Store. It's in the iOS store."

"It's in the Google Play Store. It's in the iOS store."

"showing up at 5:30 a.m. at a Starbucks and having to work an 8-hour shift and not knowing what shifts you were working"

"Apple stores were faced with this and so were Starbucks and coffee bean and everybody else when Uber and DoorDash came out. It turned out working for one or two hours picking your own schedule and making $21 an hour was better"

"despite the release of their new model which integrates with C Dance 2.0"

"I just happen to be a big fan of these sort of products and services, but I just happen to be independently wealthy and don't need any cash flow from any of these brands."

"You look at Codex, they are one of the best. Their DevRel team is killer."

"Anthropic have a $200 million contract with the defense department. The defense department loves this product."

"When I met the CEO of Zoom, it was at a dinner at a venture capitalist house"

"her works here are not nearly popular enough for HBO to pay attention"

"Why not get another billion people in the emerging world to use Apple computers as opposed to Windows or Chromebooks?"

"Wirecutter, which I tried to acquire, but the New York Times bought it. They have reviews of these bone conducting ones"

"I really think it would have been better as like a one season Game of Thrones length series."

"You do need to not have your AirPods on. If you're on the New York City subway"

"One of them is a co-working or a co-pilot for doing coding like Codex or Claude Code."

"this is a step up from HP and a step down from your MacBook Air, MacBook Pro"

"I own TAO directly myself through Coinbase. It's not on Robin Hood yet."

"There are desktop pieces of software like Topaz that I think people will use for this type of product or service."

"600 bucks is the right price. That's the price of the Mac Mini."

"It's going to get them onto iCloud. It's going to get them to buy additional storage."

"You can get a copy for 54 bucks on Amazon if you want."

"It's going to help the app store."

"It's going to get them to buy Apple Music."

"Look at it as a Moleskine and just get in there."

"this is a step up from HP and a step down from your MacBook Air, MacBook Pro"

"Gemma 4 came out, I go to Open Claw, I say, 'Hey, I think Gemma 4 just came out. Figure it out.'"

"Their new model is not hot garbage. I'm not trying to say this is the best model since sliced bread"

"He's great at like copying other people's idea, Snapchat, LinkedIn, whatever."

"Anthropic released a promo video and a thread that their new model is so powerful that they cannot release it."

"More like the Ray-Ban bands that Zuckerberg's making."

"Marik watched Y Combinator's demo day and rebuilt every startup with his own agents"

"In the late 1990s, I got laid off from AOL. So, I came into a bunch of money cuz I had a bunch of options."

"if you're driving with FSD at 100 miles an hour in the left hand lane and you don't have junkers and like vans from 1974 in there, it would be completely safe"

"Remember Solyndra, Tesla, and Fisker and one of the companies paid it back. We got paid back with interest from that Obama era incentive, but we didn't get options or warrants in Tesla."

"I remember the Concorde because I live, you know, I lived in Brooklyn and it was it would leave out of JFK and like you would hear it sometimes and you would, you know, people you knew people who took it in New York and you could get to London in three fucking hours."

"Like the Falcon is the one that goes up every two or three days now. What is the number of Falcon?"

"Boom is like now Boom's on a side quest. Not a pivot. I incorrectly called it a pivot, but they're on a side quest to make, you know, energy at data centers."

"We raised 6 million led by General Catalyst for our seed round."

"You went to YC and how is this all going?"

"Captures were the best way to start building VLMs because you using human beings to tell you if there's a bicycle within the image."

"How do you train up a good quality VLM? You use human annotators."

"We have a few assets developed using AI in late clinical trials right now."

"I think the LLMs will control and make your product better over time"

"It's like a branded doormat for their offices or prospective clients."

"They were sending donuts to people to get them on a exploratory call for their product."

"Hey, we're going to be coming over from Pfizer. We wanted to buy the nurse's lunch."

"I was thinking about some combination of auto researcher from Andre Carpathy, my local OpenClaw setup and then somehow doing useful work for Tao subnets."

"You know, kind of like on Upwork or Fiverr or any of those, it's a little bit chicken and egg"

"I believe that could become as big as Solana, let's say, or Ethereum"

"I've always said there would be a better Bitcoin and that there would be a better opportunity. I think the game of Bitcoin has ended"

"I believe that could become as big as Solana, let's say, or Ethereum"

"Kraken, they're pretty deep in the ecosystem. Could definitely see them listing them, you know, when the liquidity is there"

"But now you have USDC and other stores of value that are not volatile that you can get into"

"You know, kind of like on Upwork or Fiverr or any of those, it's a little bit chicken and egg"

"GitHub, Digital Ocean, AWS, whatever you're going to use"

"GitHub, Digital Ocean, AWS, whatever you're going to use"

"It's a little micro needle, a couple millimeters, but you feel nothing. And it lasts about 14 days."

"The biggest issue GLPs have is that when people get off GLPs, they regain all the weight."

"The ones who don't have driver's licenses and are on their mom's Netflix accounts."

"A cat got hit by Waymo in San Francisco and San Francisco tried to ban Waymos over that."

"Like a serial killer probably has a laptop. They don't call them the Apple MacBook killer"

"Uber had done it first and I think Dropbox did it before them"

"a lot of people's first impressions of Airbnb were the inevitability that somebody would rent somebody's apartment and trash it"

"Not eBay, Craigslist. And they called it the Craigslist killer"

"Guy named Tim O'Reilly who had a company called O'Reilly Publishing. Anybody read those books still? Any know about him?"

"I was hanging out one night at Antonio's Nutouse, which was a bar, really the most disgusting dive bar you've ever seen in Palo Alto."

"when you wanted to store your photos online, Flickr charged for that. They gave you a little bit for free"

"And then Google Photos or Instagram even when it was an independent company made that a free thing"

"if people are willing to cover it and you're willing to go on CNBC"

"somebody coming to Launch Accelerator or Y Combinator or Tech Stars or Speedrun"

"I remember eBay. They literally were like, 'eBay serial killer.'"

"But Amazon Prime changing the price or you know changing the delivery schedule from 3 days to two"

"The biggest single aisles take about 45 minutes to board when full. For this plane, it's actually six aisles. Four in the back, two in the front. The full boarding time for this plane is going to be 10 to 15 minutes."

"Your aunt who worked at Microsoft or Amazon and was in a senior position was making six figures just got automated."

"These are not maraschino cherries. These are like cocktail uh cherries, right? And they're very expensive. Uh, Luxardo makes them."

"the major product now is a drop in replacement for S3. Sorry Amazon, we're coming after you."

"It's on HBO Max now. That one's on HBO Max."

"ICE, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, a very controversial agency of the government, has a 38% return of people saying very or somewhat positive sentiments about it."

"AI in the US is somehow less popular than ICE. 5% of people are very positive in the US about AI."

"And now he's investing in these ETFs and raising new ETFs to finance it."

"To acquire as much Bitcoin as possible is a very smart strategy. I don't know all the nuances of like how the financialization of MicroStrategy itself works, but the thesis is valid."

"do you love Discord, X Communities, Slack, and all these different platforms"

"So, you've created with the Unreal Engine essentially a first-person shooter of your office."

"Here's his Zoom meetings and his Google calendar"

"it went to the top of GitHub today even beating React which was another one of those cultlike phenomenons in the open source community"

"I'm gonna have this Ultron CEO, a replicant, be able to look at everybody's work product and then coach them."

"You ever have like you want to grab a video off YouTube or you want to grab a Instagram video or a TikTok video but you can't download it"

"if we use Mattermost instead of Slack, we can set it up this weekend, you can export everything from Slack."

"do you think there's something else that's really really special about how you can do the Telegram and the iMessage and kind of have context across everything?"

"My bedtime stories at night were Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons. I was a fan from a very early age."

"Not a fan of UBI cuz it takes away purpose. But I am for taking a look at the disparity in wealth."

"They're slogging it out with these AR glasses that weigh 12 lbs that nobody uses and then puts on a shelf."

"They shut down their self-driving car. They would be neck and neck right behind Tesla."

"What do we get instead? We get Apple Play in our cars."

"Siri would work. It's garbage. It doesn't know how to spell my last name. It doesn't know how to play music."

"Oh, they're just giving Intel 10 billion dollars because Intel's a disaster and they can't make a real business."

"Remember Solyndra, Tesla, and Fisker and one of the companies paid it back."

"Remember Solyndra, Tesla, and Fisker and one of the companies paid it back."

"I've tried MyFitnessPal in the past and I'm not going to log my food. I just have learned that about myself. The answer is I won't do it"

"this started as an IPFS network and we basically pushed IPFS to its limits especially in terms of what developers needed in terms of absolute latency immediate availability"

"So there's the YouTube downloader and that gets shut down all the time and then you have to deal with like all these like popups or whatever."

"I just hit my applaud. I'm recording. I've got all of my notes taken care of. You want to get a Plaud NotePin S."

"I've started drinking IM8's daily ultimate essentials and it is delicious. I'm starting to notice a real shift. I drink it every morning and I just feel less tired."

"I work with my Athena assistant on this. I call it super distribution. Okay. There's a ton of platforms out there. When you have a great piece of content for your company, for yourself, what people do is they're like, 'Oh, I had a great piece of content.' What you need to do is take that piece of content and then go super distributed"

"We've got a brand new partner here at Twist. And as fate would have it, we love and use their product... Also, I happened to be a shareholder in the company."

"We're looking for a new producer for the pod. Where we found our next great hire, LinkedIn."

"We use it. We love it. My team loves it. Everything in HR settled down when we went to Gusto. No more drama. People want a perfect HR platform and Gusto is that platform"

"I'm going to turn on my Plaud pin. I press the button and now everything I say I'm recording. This thing's got like 1,700 microphones."

"PaperOS has made the onboarding process so seamless for limited partners. They have saved me and my team hundreds, actually now it's probably thousands of hours."

"I use Quo. Why do I use Quo? Well, we use it for our syndicate where we have thousands of members calling us. And these are VIPs. We want to make sure somebody picks up the phone for them"

"Circle is the best place on the internet to start growing your online community... we couldn't find one. After we started digging and digging, we found the perfect solution. Circle.So."

"I've lost 40 pounds. I didn't do it alone. Ro.co. Get yourself a GLP if you're so inclined. I used to be 166, I gained 2 lbs a year, I woke up one day I was 213. Now I'm 172 again."

"Calera's eye serum makes your skin more resilient and leaves me looking well rested even when my sleep number dips a bit"

"This is the greatest device ever. I press that button and now I'm recording. I've been using it for months. I'm obsessed."

"Then I lost 43 pounds thanks to ro.co and the magic of GLPs... they'll check for you right now if your insurance covers it."

"I have the Plaud pen. I've got the Plaud Pro on the back of my phone. I don't miss a beat, folks."

"Grasshopper is a real federally chartered digital bank that's not trying to win you over with a rewards program. Instead, they're building deep integrations, treasury products that are going to actually help you expand your runway."

"If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware C Corp. That's where Northwest Registered agent comes in. Just a few clicks, they're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise."

"Render is the all-in-one cloud platform for developers that allows you to deploy, scale, and secure your apps and agents with zero ops."

"Every wants to do this detailed work for you. They're going to handle your Delaware CC Corp, your EIN, getting yourself a registered agent, all with no legal fees, all without delays."

"The best partner you can have is LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Why? There's a billion people using LinkedIn. All the great talent are there. If you're proud of your work, you build a LinkedIn page and you update it."

"Sentry's AI powered debugging agent isn't just guessing about what might have gone wrong with your system. Join the millions of devs and companies like Claude and Disney Plus who use Sentry to move faster."

"Pilot is the largest accounting firm that was built just with startups in mind. You're not just getting your taxes done. No, you're getting CFO level guidance for your startup."

"You want to use Squarespace. That's the easiest and fastest way to turn your idea into a real business because the team at Squarespace cares deeply about design and functionality."

"That's why Founder University and I recommend startups work with Vanta. They're the leading security compliance solution."

"Shopify is the e-commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. They're powering 10% of all e-commerce in the United States."

"It's changed my life. It's privacy first. It's not just recording, but it understands the context."

"Eru endpoint management is going to automate your device management end to end. Without Eru system, my team would be wasting hours policing everybody's hard drives."

"Luma is going to 10x your creativity, not try and replace it. Text to image was just a demo, but reasoning to image, that's the real product in the future."

"When you're launching a brand new company and designing your first product, you don't want to hire just any developer. You want the best, the best of the best, the crème de la crème. And that's why you got to turn to our friends at Lemon.io."

"Take the guesswork out and trust our friends at Iru Endpoint Management. Iru is going to automate your device management end to end"

"Why don't you get a partner like Every and they'll take care of all these administrative tasks for you in one convenient spot. That means incorporating banking, credit cards, payroll, HR, bookkeeping, and of course, filing your taxes."

"With NetSuite by Oracle, you can start putting AI to work for you today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP and it's trusted by over 43,000 businesses."

"Grasshopper is a real federally chartered digital bank, not some fintech rapper sitting at top some mystery institution."

"But I've got a free resource from our friends at HubSpot. It's called advanced ChatGPT prompt engineering."