Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.
This tension between h ... Show More
Jun 12
It’s hot IPO summer, and the MANGOS are ripe
The IPO market is back, and it's not the same companies leading the charge. FAANG had a good run, but a new acronym is taking over: MANGOS — Meta (or Microsoft, depending on who you ask), Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX. Half of that bunch is heading to public marke ... Show More
33m 30s
Jun 10
Andrew Yang on Noble Mobile, UBI, and why he's done waiting for policy to catch up
Andrew Yang’s 2020 presidential campaign was based on a warning that automation and AI would hollow out the labor market and concentrate wealth in the hands of a few. At the time, ideas like Universal Basic Income felt fringe. Now Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Bernie Sanders are ... Show More
29m 25s
Aug 2024
Venture returns, recovering startups, and VC conflicts | E1995
<p>This Week in Startups is brought to you by…</p>
<p>Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your valuable data in one place. Go to <a href="https://www.Coda.io/twist">https://www.Coda ... Show More
1h 27m
Sep 2025
$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder)
Ben Horowitz is the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Silicon Valley’s largest and most influential venture capital firm, with over $46B in committed capital across multiple funds. He took Loudcloud public with just $2 million in revenue (dubbed “the IPO from hell”), sold it for ... Show More
1h 37m
Aug 2025
The state of VC within software and AI startups – with Peter Walker
Brought to You By:• WorkOS — The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS.• Statsig — The unified platform for flags, analytics, experiments, and more.• Sonar — Code quality and code security for ALL code.—In this episode of The Pragmatic Engineer, I sit down with Peter Walker ... Show More
1h 19m
Sep 2024
24 Steps to Launch a Start-Up
Many people aspire to entrepreneurship. But Bill Aulet, who has advised founders for decades, warns that it remains a high-risk endeavor. In this episode, he outlines concrete steps anyone can take to get a new venture off the ground — including intrapreneurs within large organiz ... Show More
28m 46s
Sep 2025
What We Can Learn from Failure with Ami Colé Founder, Diarrha N’Diaye
What does it really take to build a brand from scratch — and what happens when you have to close the doors? In this candid conversation, Emma sits down with Diarrha N’Diaye, founder of the beloved beauty brand Ami Colé, to talk about the highs of launching a cult-favorite company ... Show More
1h 43m
Feb 2025
20VC: Affirm Max Levchin on Why Grading Talent by Letter (A or B) is Total BS | How to Create a Culture of Post Mortems and Writing | Why You Should Only Study Failure Not Success & The Biggest Surprises Scaling to $18.7BN Market Cap
<p dir="ltr">Max Levchin is one of the great founders and technologists of our time. As the Founder and CEO of Affirm, he has built am $18.7BN monster in the buy no pay later space. Prior to Affirm he was one of the original co-founders of PayPal. Max is also the co-founder and C ... Show More
1h 2m