This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
8 episodes
Did the Midterms Destroy All Hope for Data Centers? | E2360
6 Nov · 1 h 8 min
- Democrats won both chambers after candidates ran on slowing AI and data center construction.
- Microsoft cancels a roughly $3bn Nscale deal tied to a UK data center as OpenAI weighs resetting next year's capacity expectations.
Why a Do-Nothing Congress could be great for markets | E2359
5 Nov · 1 h 25 min
- Democrats win the House, Senate and Texas, but markets rise as D.A. Wallach credits divided government.
- An NBC exit poll finds 56% of voters call AI and data centers a major factor, and Jason Calacanis warns of an anti-self-driving wave.
Odyssey CEO Oliver Cameron is 90% sure we live in a simulation | E2358
3 Nov · 1 h 24 min
- Oliver Cameron, Odyssey CEO, is 90% certain we live in a simulation, while Jason Calacanis is 50-50.
- Odyssey raised $370m from Amazon, AMD, NVIDIA and GV to build world models for robots and cars.
Binance Hacked $6.3B Stolen, DoorDash Buys Instacart For $17B, Jake Newfield from Hermetiq, + More!
30 Oct · 1 h 11 min
- Binance says it will cover all losses from company funds after a hack Lon Harris says affected an estimated $6.3bn.
- DoorDash agreed to buy Instacart for about $17bn at $65 a share, a 25% premium, and an anti-monopoly group wants regulators to block it.
Is AI the new cigarettes? Our VC panel digs into Anthropic’s S-1 | E2356
29 Oct · 1 h 12 min
- Anthropic's public S-1 shows first-half revenue of $16.3bn, up about fourteen times year over year, and a second-quarter operating profit of $974m.
- Dave McClure says the filing looks operating-profitable for two quarters but flags over $500bn in capital spending and more than $100bn in locked-in Google and Amazon commitments.
Pregame Your Launch Before Your App Exists (w/ Amanda Bradford) | E2355
26 Oct · 57 min
- Amanda Bradford says founders should start launch prep long before the app exists, using small events, door-to-door recruiting and a fake upgrade button to test demand for The League.
- Bradford advises founders to avoid launching in 155 cities and says she would have capped her rollout at 20, expanding only after showing traction.
TWiST 500 interviews with Cortical Labs, Turing, AND Mercor | E2159
1 Aug 2025 · 1 h 23 min
- Hon Weng Chong's Cortical Labs sells CL1 devices that keep living human and mouse neurons alive, with over 3,000 cloud sign-ups for a service that serves only 20 or 30 people at once.
- Turing CEO Jonathan Siddarth argues that private evaluations tailored to a lab's own query distribution matter more than public benchmarks, which he says are academic, synthetic and increasingly saturated.
The Wing shuts down, avoiding pitfalls of success + Tesseract Energy's Alan Chang | E1587
16 Oct 2022 · 48 min
- Jason Calacanis says The Wing seemed to serve the founder's ego rather than customers, despite a 35,000-person waiting list and a $365m valuation.
- Molly Wood says every founder should weigh worst-case scenarios and side effects, and Jason Calacanis says VCs should press founders on how competitors, the press or disgruntled employees would attack the business.