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This Week in Startups

Sora app review, Perplexity’s Comet is FREE, and which AI tools reign supreme? | E2188

63 min episode · 2 min read

Episode

63 min

Read time

2 min

Topics

Career Growth, Productivity, Investing

AI-Generated Summary

Key Takeaways

  • Executive Training ROI: Implementing calendar blocking, start-of-day routines, and structured management meetings increased team productivity by 20% within one week, equivalent to gaining four free employees across a 21-person team. Most young professionals lack basic executive function skills requiring deliberate training programs.
  • Founder Equity Preservation: Founders historically own 10-20% at IPO, but AI-enabled efficiency could double this to 20-40%. Instead of raising $3 million at $10 million valuation (30% dilution), raise $1 million at $10 million, hit milestones over 18 months, then raise $2 million at $20 million for combined 20% dilution.
  • Revenue Per Employee Benchmarks: AI-native companies achieve $1-12 million revenue per employee versus traditional tech companies. Midjourney generates $12 million per employee with 40 staff and $500 million revenue. Excessive profitability may indicate insufficient ambition rather than success, suggesting reinvestment in product expansion.
  • AI Browser Backdoor Strategy: Browser-based AI tools create indirect access to training data from platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram that block traditional scraping. When millions of users browse with AI assistants, companies index content through customer proxies, circumventing robots.txt restrictions and platform lockdowns.
  • OpenAI Valuation Risk Assessment: The $500 billion private valuation represents irrational exuberance with limited upside compared to downside risk. Employees should sell 80-100% of shares for diversification, investing proceeds in index funds or competitor companies rather than maintaining concentrated positions in unproven private valuations.

What It Covers

Jason and Alex review AI browser wars between Perplexity's free Comet release and competitors, analyze OpenAI's $500 billion valuation tender offer dynamics, test Sora's creative video capabilities, and discuss founder equity preservation strategies.

Key Questions Answered

  • Executive Training ROI: Implementing calendar blocking, start-of-day routines, and structured management meetings increased team productivity by 20% within one week, equivalent to gaining four free employees across a 21-person team. Most young professionals lack basic executive function skills requiring deliberate training programs.
  • Founder Equity Preservation: Founders historically own 10-20% at IPO, but AI-enabled efficiency could double this to 20-40%. Instead of raising $3 million at $10 million valuation (30% dilution), raise $1 million at $10 million, hit milestones over 18 months, then raise $2 million at $20 million for combined 20% dilution.
  • Revenue Per Employee Benchmarks: AI-native companies achieve $1-12 million revenue per employee versus traditional tech companies. Midjourney generates $12 million per employee with 40 staff and $500 million revenue. Excessive profitability may indicate insufficient ambition rather than success, suggesting reinvestment in product expansion.
  • AI Browser Backdoor Strategy: Browser-based AI tools create indirect access to training data from platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram that block traditional scraping. When millions of users browse with AI assistants, companies index content through customer proxies, circumventing robots.txt restrictions and platform lockdowns.
  • OpenAI Valuation Risk Assessment: The $500 billion private valuation represents irrational exuberance with limited upside compared to downside risk. Employees should sell 80-100% of shares for diversification, investing proceeds in index funds or competitor companies rather than maintaining concentrated positions in unproven private valuations.

Notable Moment

Jason demonstrates creating an automated news aggregation system using AI browser shortcuts that simultaneously scrapes Hacker News, TechMeme, and Reddit, compiling trending stories with engagement scores into tables. This single action fires off potentially 50 concurrent threads across multiple GPUs, illustrating infrastructure cost concerns.

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Episode Transcript

We are in the irrational exuberance era right now with private companies like OpenAI. It's nothing personal to them or Sam. It's just the demand is too high for this these shares. If I was an employee, I would sell every share I have. This Week in Startups is brought to you by LinkedIn Ads. Start converting your b to b audience into high quality leads today. We'll even give you a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to linkedin.com/ this week in startups to claim your credit. AlphaSense, get deeper insights into your business with the power of AI search and market intelligence. Start with a free trial at alpha-sense.com/twist. And Monarch Money. Get control of your overall finances with Monarch Money. Visit monarchmoney.com/twist for half off on your first year. Alright, Alright, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It is Friday. It is 10/03/2025. Tons of tech news. We're gonna get into it. But Alex and I were just getting started in the preproduction. I was letting him know about a new innovation I created. It's a new innovation, which is I started an executive training program inside of our venture firm. What I found is, how do young people don't understand what it means to be an executive? Because, I don't know, it's just, like, work seems to have become far too casual. Far too casual. Okay. So as part of, like, coming back to an office, tracking your hours, doing calendar blocking where you're gonna get certain things done on your calendar, doing a start of day and end of day, keeping a to do list, follow-up communication, crisp communication, listening to questions that other team members ask you and answering them is, you know, like, it's like a a skill that's actually I I thought would be, you know, most people would have coming into the workforce. Nobody's got it. Nobody. Nobody's got executive function and let alone executive training. So, actually, I will say there's a varying I would say one in five people have executive function, which is, like, I can self direct myself to get tasks done. I'd say, like, the most of the people I meet these days coming into the workforce, it's all, like, lollygagging around, not as, like, you know, when I came into the workforce, they had training programs. You like, if you're a journalist, you would train. There was somebody to mentor you. They wouldn't let you publish. I guess there was more resources around. Things were more profitable. There was less competition. The businesses were more established. There were fewer businesses. You weren't at least in journalism or in banking, it wasn't like you couldn't have a training program. Right? You Yeah. People were just willing to invest in these things. So I was like, you know what? I'm just gonna start investing in these things and see what comes out the other side. In one week, night and day, people were, like, …

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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode

SignalCast may earn commission on purchases via these links.

Tools

  • by AlphaSense

    Sponsors section lists AlphaSense with url https://alpha-sense.com/twist
  • by Perplexity

    Jason and Alex review AI browser wars between Perplexity's free Comet release and competitors
  • by Anthropic

    Claude AI listed as sponsor with url https://claude.ai/twist
  • by Monarch Money

    Sponsors section lists Monarch Money with url https://monarchmoney.com/twist
  • by Midjourney

    Midjourney generates $12 million per employee with 40 staff and $500 million revenue
  • by OpenAI

    test Sora's creative video capabilities

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