Startup Blog

Recent Posts

• E865: Nextdoor CEO & Co-founder Nirav Tolia on getting to 90% of US neighborhoods & 100m users globally with organic growth & hard choices, shares thoughts on parody, possible IPO, & becoming the unique social network that protects, as well as connects, its members
• E864: Social Capital’s Chamath Palihapitiya on how he fell for the mythology & Ponzi scheme of Silicon Valley, is now getting back to solving problems that matter; urges founders to grow real, grow slow, & stay true to what they want to build in the world @ LAUNCH Scale
• E862: Optimism breaks barriers: Omaze CEO Matt Pohlson makes a difference through dream experiences with A-list stars, shares lessons in gratitude, family gambling, coming back from the dead (literally), Bono’s magic, & the smart business of crowdfunded charity
• E862: Andela CEO Jeremy Johnson & his team are training Africa’s top talent to become the world’s software engineers, bridging the gap between a high-growth population & the global need for technical expertise
• E861: #StartupTuneup Urban-X: Founders solving for cities pitch Jason on data-driven grades for apartments, urban outdoor spaces, connecting tolls to connected vehicles, bike-safety helmets riders will actually wear
• E860: Angel Investor Elad Gil (Airbnb, Coinbase, Square) & Operator (Color Genomics, Google) shares masterclass on fundraising timeline & process, landing & optimizing investors, notes & equity terms/trade-offs, common mistakes & more @ LAUNCH Incubator
• E859: Emergency Pod! Instagram founders flee Facebook, things Jason hates/loves, tips for founders, the startup Jason wish existed
• E858: #AllAskJason Call-In: Candid advice on founder mental health & the extreme pursuit of startups, syndicate investing best practices, setting up outside SV, the future of robot-enabled retail, & the dream social media platform to unseat Facebook
• E857: Solving downing: WAVE Co-founder & CEO Mark Caron demos his innovation detecting swimmers in distress, alerting lifeguards & parents; shares challenges & opportunities of changing human behavior, convincing VCs of the growing market for saving lives
• E856: #StartupTuneup Equity Crowdfunding: Republic Co-founder Ken Nguyen opens opportunity floodgates for startups & investors with diversity-focused crowdfunding, joins Jason to hear pitches on enterprise collaboration, smartphone numbers on demand, & next-gen tailoring
• E855: Blavity CEO & Co-founder Morgan DeBaun on how she built her media empire for black millennials based on trust in the era of fake news & Facebook fatigue, scaled to 5 brands (+counting) with 4m+ social, & landed Series A led by GV, smashing every SV barrier along the way
• E854: Kairos CEO & Co-founder Brian Brackeen on innovating in facial recognition, processing over a billion faces, raising $30m via token sale, the dream & dystopia of AI, the persistence of racial profiling, & why he won’t sell his technology to law enforcement
• E853: #StartupTuneup “Solving Oceans”: 5 founders share their visions for cleaning up oil spills, fishing sustainably, harnessing wave power, rapidly biodegradable products, & data to eliminate waste
• E852: News Roundtable! Clara Brenner, Urban Innovation Fund & Iain Thomson, The Register: Facebook & Twitter testify, Google misfires, free speech v. de-platforming, scooter war victors & victims, rise of IPOs & income inequality, security shenanigans
• E851: Ubiquity6 Co-founder & CEO Anjney Midha on creating multiplayer AR for the real world, raising $37.5m from top SV investors to play with parallel universes, become the browser of spaces & define the future of shared mixed reality