This Week in Startups

→ WHAT IT COVERS Chris Halonczyk, CEO of Hanover Park, explains how his AI-native fund administration startup replaced legacy "human duct tape" operations managing $100 trillion in global assets. The company grew from $1B to $20B AUM in 15 months by building an AI-powered ERP, general ledger, and agent layer for closed-end investment funds. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Fund Admin Data Hostage Problem:** Traditional fund administrators buy QuickBooks and Excel licenses, then deny fund CFOs direct access...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Aileen Lee (Cowboy VC), Mike Maples (Floodgate), and Ben Lair (Lair Hippo) examine Q2 2025 venture dynamics: oversized seed and Series A rounds reaching $100M+, pre-AI company pivots, open-weight Chinese model adoption, LP liquidity pressures from pending SpaceX distributions, and the widening gap between consensus hot deals and defensible long-term businesses.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Chamath Palihapitiya joins Jason Calacanis to discuss productizing personal passions into businesses, his AI enterprise software company 8090's $100M Series A, the Software Factory product that helps large companies replace $5T in legacy software spend, and why young people need adventure, agency, and risk to thrive. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Productizing Passion (Tom Sawyer Model):** Convert personal cost centers into revenue-generating businesses by building communities around them.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Lyall Davenport, founder of SKN Systems, presents a sensor-embedded tape technology that replaces wind tunnel aerodynamic testing at 95% lower cost, generating 420 million data points per hour across motorsport, defense, and industrial applications. The episode also covers OpenAI's government-delayed model release, Apple's 15–25% price hikes, Mark Cuban's data center critique, and Zuckerberg's points-based prediction market plans.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Brynn Putnam, CEO of Board, presents a $399 face-to-face gaming console — a 24-inch touchscreen that recognizes physical game pieces using proprietary capacitive pattern technology and embedded AI. The episode covers hardware development timelines, pricing strategy, IP licensing potential, and how Board creates a new entertainment category between board games and video games. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Hardware prototyping strategy:** Avoid over-engineering early prototypes.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Two separate segments: Louis Phillips demos Interval, a territory-claiming gamified running app with 1 million downloads built by a team of five, then Alice Zhang of Verge Labs explains how the company pivoted from developing ALS drugs to licensing AI-powered patient-matching tools to pharma giants like Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Gamification over speed:** Interval deliberately excludes speed metrics, allowing anyone — including walkers — to compete for...

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jason Calacanis, Turner Novak of Banana Capital, and Bling Capital's Ben Ling analyze SpaceX's $60B Cursor acquisition at a 15x revenue multiple, debate where AI value accumulates across hardware, frontier models, and app layers, examine OpenAI's leaked financials, and assess seed-stage graduation rates declining from 50% to 25% post-ZIRP.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Skyler Chan, founder of GRU Space, joins This Week in Startups to explain how his YC-backed startup plans to build the first lunar hotel using an on-site robotic factory that converts moon soil into construction bricks, eliminating the need to ship materials from Earth. The episode also covers the Anthropic government shutdown controversy and a live $5,000 podcast tool bounty competition.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jason Calacanis and Lon Harris cover the SpaceX IPO on its trading debut — June 12, 2026 — analyzing the $1.77 trillion valuation, the 30% opening pop, and what Wall Street misses about Elon Musk's multi-horizon business model. Guest Ben Cera of Pulsia shares three tactical frameworks for founder marketing and AI-powered fundraising. → KEY INSIGHTS - **SpaceX Valuation Framework:** Split SpaceX into three time horizons when evaluating its $1.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Thomas Tunguz (Theory Ventures), Michael Downing (Castalia Capital), and Paige Doherty (Behind Genius Ventures) analyze the 2026 IPO wave featuring SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic — collectively representing roughly $3.5 trillion in potential liquidity — while examining how AI is reshaping seed valuations, founder leverage, model routing economics, and startup growth benchmarks.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Sue Khim, CEO of Brilliant.org, presents the platform's new AI tutor named Koji, built on seven years of interactive lesson infrastructure. The episode covers Brilliant's evolution from student loan comparison tool to STEM learning platform, the Socratic tutoring methodology, consumer-vs-B2B pricing decisions, and why AI that makes users think is resonating with parents.

→ WHAT IT COVERS JCal and De'Lon Harris cover three major stories in June 2026: Anthropic's call to slow global AI development, Bernie Sanders' proposal to seize 50% of AI company stock for a sovereign wealth fund, and a demo with Yoland Yan, cofounder and CEO of ComfyUI, which raised $30M at a $500M valuation from Craft Ventures and powers production pipelines at Netflix and Coca-Cola. → KEY INSIGHTS - **ComfyUI vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS This Week in Startups features two segments: Tom Mueller, CEO of Impulse Space, explains how the company's Mira and Helios spacecraft create an in-space logistics network after closing a $500M Series D, and Tessa Lau, CEO of Dusty Robotics, describes how her floor-printing robot cuts construction layout time by 10-17x across 330M+ square feet.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Cortical Labs CEO Han presents the company's biological computing platform, which fuses human neurons with silicon chips. The CL1 device houses up to 2 million neurons, runs on 30 watts, and has been deployed at five major US research institutions. A biological data center with 120 units now operates in Melbourne, with a 1,000-unit Singapore facility planned. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Biological vs.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Jason Calacanis answers founder questions about seed fundraising mechanics in 2026, covering investor qualification, product differentiation against frontier AI labs, hardware startup timing, and the dramatic reduction in capital required to reach product-market fit from $3M in the 1990s to under $30K today. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Seed Fundraising Funnel:** Contact 150 seed funds to generate 50 first meetings, which yields roughly 15-20 second meetings, resulting in 2 term sheets.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Two drone company founders reveal contrasting applications of drone technology: Manna's Bobby Healy details how his Ireland-based delivery startup achieves 300,000+ deliveries with near-positive unit economics across Europe and expanding into the US, while Theseus founder Ian Laffey explains building GPS-independent navigation systems for combat drones operating in Ukraine's jammed battlefield environments.

→ WHAT IT COVERS This Week in Startups covers three distinct topics across 107 minutes: Lukas Czinger explains how Divergent Technologies uses AI-generated designs and 3D printing to manufacture cruise missile airframes at scale; cofounders of Outro Health detail the science of antidepressant tapering; and Jason and Lon analyze Meta's employee monitoring practices and a canceled Trump AI executive order.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Mercury Bank CEO Imad Ahmad discusses the company's $200M raise at a $5.2B valuation, its path toward a banking charter, and multi-product expansion into payroll and accounting. Kled founder Avi Patel details allegations that Y Combinator-backed Luell copied his human data marketplace pixel-for-pixel while General Catalyst funded the copycat after holding investment talks with Kled.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Gen Z graduates are booing AI at commencement addresses, with Eric Schmidt getting audibly jeered at University of Arizona. The episode examines why young people feel betrayed rather than scared, covers a data showing AI startup revenue concentrating in OpenAI and Anthropic, and discusses Flock Safety's license plate surveillance technology following Austin shootings. → KEY INSIGHTS - **Gen Z AI Resentment:** Recent graduates aren't afraid of AI — they feel betrayed by it.

→ WHAT IT COVERS Two self-driving startup CEOs — Wave's Alex Kendall and Wabi's Raquel Ratzen — detail how end-to-end AI and world models are moving autonomous vehicles from science projects to mass-market products. Wave targets 2.5 million Nissan vehicles annually by 2027, while Wabi pursues a minimum 25,000-robotaxi Uber partnership with Volvo as OEM partner.