Jason Calacanis
Host of This Week in Startups, where he interviews founders and discusses startups, technology, and venture capital. He is also an entrepreneur and investor.
Frontier Hardware Startups Face Infrastructure Constraints Beyond the Demo
Cortical Labs and Pyka show how frontier hardware companies move from demonstration to deployable infrastructure. On This Week in Startups, Cortical founder Hon Weng Chong presents the CL1 as a programmable biological computer that packages lab-grown neurons, silicon hardware, life support and cloud tools, and says unpublished work shows neurons can be 5,000 times more sample-efficient than GPU-based reinforcement learning systems. Pyka chief executive Michael Norcia argues that autonomous aircraft face a different bottleneck: not whether they can fly, but whether regulation, uptime, maintenance and field deployment allow them to improve in real use.
AI Governance Fight Shifts to Centralization, Open Models, and Worker Agency
On All-In, Bill Gurley joined Jason Calacanis, David Sacks and Chamath Palihapitiya for a debate framed less around whether AI is powerful than around who will control it. The panel read Pope Leo XIV’s AI encyclical as a warning about concentrated power, but split over the remedy: Sacks argued government regulation could become the centralizing threat, while Gurley and others scrutinized Anthropic’s safety posture as either regulatory strategy or something closer to a belief in building a superior intelligence. Their practical conclusion was that open models, swappable systems and worker fluency are the main checks against AI power consolidating in a few labs or agencies.
Seed Founders Need 150 Qualified Investor Targets in 2026
Jason Calacanis uses a This Week in Startups “Ask Jason” segment to argue that raising a seed round in 2026 requires founders to treat fundraising as a qualified sales process, not a test of investor warmth. His benchmark is a large, researched funnel — about 150 seed funds contacted, 50 first meetings, 15 to 20 second meetings, and two term sheets — backed by more product and customer proof than early-stage companies once needed. He also argues that AI startups must build around workflow and distribution rather than generic model output, while hardware has become harder but more investable when it creates real lock-in.
Manna Bets Low-Cost Airline Economics Will Win Drone Delivery
Manna founder Bobby Healy tells This Week in Startups that drone delivery is becoming a low-cost operations business, not a novelty market, and argues his Dublin-based company can win by applying airline-style discipline to delivery networks. Healy says Manna’s 300,000 completed deliveries, claimed 97% Irish-weather availability and new $50 million Series B position it to expand in the U.S. as regulation opens up. Theseus co-founder Ian Laffey adds a defense-side version of the same argument from Kyiv: drone scale depends less on exotic aircraft than on cheap, reliable systems that can keep working when GPS and supply chains fail.
Software-Defined Factories Are Moving From Hypercars to Cruise Missiles
Lukas Czinger, chief executive of Divergent Technologies, argues on This Week in Startups that U.S. defense manufacturing can move faster and at lower cost if factories are treated as software-defined infrastructure rather than product-specific plants. The article also follows Brandon Goode and Mark Horowitz’s case for Outro Health: that antidepressant prescribing has scaled without an equally developed system for helping patients stop safely. Across the defense, healthcare and AI segments, the source frames the central problem as incentives — what existing systems pay companies to build, maintain or automate, and what they leave underbuilt.
AI Infrastructure Demand Is Becoming Revenue, Contracts, and Market Stress
Gavin Baker joined the All-In panel to argue that AI’s economics are becoming tangible: Anthropic’s reported profitability, surging LLM revenue, Nvidia’s results, and SpaceX’s compute contracts all point to infrastructure demand that is no longer speculative. The group framed SpaceX’s potential $2 trillion valuation as a bet on Starlink, launch, and AI compute rather than current earnings, while Baker defended Nvidia against share-loss and GPU-useful-life bear cases. The counterweight was political and macro risk: public backlash to AI, labor displacement, regulation, higher inflation, rising yields, and U.S.-China tension.
Divergent Says Software-Defined Factories Can Build Drones in 71 Days
Lukas Czinger, co-founder of Divergent Technologies, argues that the bottleneck in defense hardware is not design but the tooling and fixed production lines that make iteration slow once a product leaves prototype. In a livestream interview, he said Divergent’s software-defined factory can move autonomous aircraft and other complex systems from digital design into production without rebuilding the supply chain around each change, citing a 71-day clean-sheet build of a flyable small uncrewed aircraft as proof of the model.
Kled Founder Alleges Luel Copied Its Human Data Marketplace
This Week in Startups put two founder arguments side by side: Mercury chief executive Immad Akhund said the fintech’s new $200mn round is meant to create strategic flexibility for a profitable company seeking a bank charter, while Kled founder Avi Patel argued that an alleged copycat in the human-data marketplace category threatens trust in a business built on consent and compliance. Jason Calacanis treated Patel’s dispute with Luel, Y Combinator and General Catalyst less as an intellectual-property case than as an ethics and diligence signal for investors.
Seed Investors Now Expect Product Velocity, Not Just a Pitch Deck
Jason Calacanis argues that early-stage founders now need customer evidence before they can credibly raise or scale. In a live response to founder questions, he says the 2024 seed bar has moved from a strong deck to real product velocity — including, for SaaS companies, roughly $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue — and that founders should keep sales founder-led until about $1 million in ARR rather than hiring a VP of Sales to learn the market for them.
Mercury’s OCC Charter Moves It From Fintech Toward Direct Banking
Mercury CEO Immad Akhund argues the company’s OCC charter approval moves it from a fintech dependent on partner banks toward a bank that can hold deposits and build lending products directly. His case is not just that Mercury has won new authority, but that startup banking requires a different risk model: venture-backed customers can move cash in and out together with the funding cycle. Kled founder Avi Patel separately describes his company’s data marketplace and says a competitor copied its frontend so directly that Kled’s API keys remained in the source code.
AI Backlash Reaches Commencement as Graduates Face a Reshaped Job Market
Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm argue that the boos greeting pro-AI commencement speeches are a visible sign of AI’s legitimacy problem with new graduates entering the workforce. On This Week in Startups, they frame the reaction less as technophobia than as distrust: students have already seen AI weaken academic norms, threaten entry-level work, concentrate wealth around frontier labs, and expand systems of surveillance and data capture. Their discussion returns to a central question: whether workers, founders, consumers, and citizens have any meaningful control over the AI systems now reshaping their choices.
Economic Entanglement, Not Decoupling, Defines the New China Bargain
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff joined the All-In hosts for a discussion that framed U.S.-China relations, enterprise AI, and the software selloff around the same question: when dependence is a stabilizer and when it becomes leverage. Benioff argued that more trade with China can lower conflict risk and that large software platforms remain valuable because AI still needs trusted customer data, cash-flowing distribution, and enterprise deployment. David Friedberg, Chamath Palihapitiya, and Jason Calacanis extended the argument across Taiwan, chips, AI assistants, El Niño-driven food risk, and private-market SPVs, where interconnection can either absorb shocks or transmit them.
Self-Driving Startups Shift From Science Risk to OEM Deployment
Wayve chief executive Alex Kendall and Waabi chief executive Raquel Urtasun argue that self-driving has moved from a basic research problem to an execution problem built around end-to-end AI, world models, OEM partnerships and deployment economics. In this This Week in Startups discussion, Kendall makes the case for licensing Wayve’s “intelligence layer” across consumer vehicles and robotaxis, while Urtasun says Waabi’s L4-native Driver-as-a-Service model can scale first through trucking and then robotaxis. Both reject the idea that autonomy is simply solved, but they present the remaining challenge as integration, validation, regulation and commercialization rather than a missing scientific breakthrough.
AI Is Forcing Startups to Return Capital or Rebuild Around Agents
AI is forcing founders and investors to make decisions faster than venture’s last cycle assumed they would have to, Jason Calacanis, Alex Wilhelm, Jenny Fielding, Dave McClure and Sam Lessin argue on This Week in Startups. Fielding’s example is a legal-tech founder who raised a $15mn Series A and, six months later, planned to return the money because he believed Claude and other models could erode the company’s long-term value. The same pressure is showing up in private markets, where demand for exposure to OpenAI and Anthropic is straining company controls over secondary sales, SPVs and liquidity.
Cerebras’s Higher IPO Range Tests AI Infrastructure Demand
Alex Wilhelm and Jason Calacanis treat Cerebras’s raised IPO range as a test of how much public investors will pay for future AI inference demand and the quality of contracts with customers such as OpenAI. Ori Goshen makes a parallel case that enterprise AI’s hard problem is no longer choosing one model, but routing work across models, tools and inference strategies for cost, latency and accuracy. Across OpenAI’s deployment spinout, AI21’s orchestration pitch, Magrathea Metals’ brine-based magnesium plan and OpenClaw’s fading momentum, the article frames deployment as a question of incentives, constraints and where the bottleneck actually sits.
Los Angeles Must Restore Law Enforcement Before It Can Rebuild
Spencer Pratt frames his Los Angeles mayoral run as a response to basic government failure, beginning with the Palisades fire that destroyed his home. He argues that Los Angeles stopped doing core public work — enforcing laws, preparing for fires, tracking public money and approving building — and says recovery depends first on public-safety enforcement, audits of institutions spending taxpayer funds and replacing bureaucratic discretion with accountable management.
SpaceX-Anthropic Deal Highlights Compute as AI’s Revenue Bottleneck
The All-In panel used SpaceX’s compute deal with Anthropic to argue that frontier AI is now being constrained less by demand than by access to power, GPUs and data-center capacity. David Sacks warned that Anthropic’s reported revenue trajectory could make it a historic monopoly if sustained, while Brad Gerstner pushed back that the market is still too early and competitive for pre-emptive regulation. The discussion turned on whether AI safety concerns justify coordination with government or risk becoming an “FDA for AI,” and whether the AI boom will ultimately show up as measurable productivity and profit for customers buying tokens.