VCs split over Elizabeth Holmes’s next startup

VC (8)

• Jason Calacanis says This Week in VC will publish one focused product: a weekly deep dive into a deal’s participants, mechanics, and due diligence, rather than breaking news. The team is hiring two full-time writers.
• Sam Lesson says betting adds little to his life because venture investing already means taking financial risks, and small wagers do not move him emotionally. The panel also discussed Oscar-market odds, including a documentary at 73% to win its category and 19% for best picture.
• Paige Doherty says investors should ask apparently basic questions repeatedly and watch how founders respond. Jason Calacanis describes requesting tax returns and bank statements to teach early founders diligence before later rounds.
• Sam Lesson says he knows of one fraudulent investment among 350 companies and admits he skipped extra reference checks because he believed in the founder; Jason Calacanis estimates a 2.5% fraud rate, compared with Sam’s roughly 1%. Jason names a background-check startup and the JP Morgan fake-customer case as examples.
• Jason Calacanis used Harmonic to compare funding histories for Theranos and FTX, arguing that later investors often relied on earlier investors’ diligence. Harmonic tracked $786 million for Theranos and $1.7 billion for FTX, whose rounds included Sequoia, SoftBank, and other major firms.
• The investors disagreed about Elizabeth Holmes’s prospects after prison: Sam Lesson doubts she could rebuild trust, while Jason Calacanis predicts she may pursue another biotech venture and Paige Doherty would take a meeting but questions her record. Paige also asks how Holmes could repay the $452 million owed to investors.
• Valor Atomic’s CEO Isaiah Taylor said the company sued early investor Day One Ventures over pro rata rights after an amendment removed springback rights before a new financing. Day One’s Masha Butcher said Valor had agreed the rights could not be removed without its consent.
• Sam Lesson says seed funds need enforceable pro rata rights because their returns depend on maintaining ownership in winners; Jason Calacanis says his firm treats those rights as non-negotiable. Both argue founders should understand the terms before signing and resist pressure from later investors to waive them.

Markets (1)

• Sam Lesson argues prediction markets can aggregate information because markets let people express what they believe will happen. Jason Calacanis sees a use for ski-trip insurance, while Sam imagines flights that take skiers to wherever conditions are best.

Models (2)

• The panel debated whether ElevenLabs’s Archer voice was copied from Chris Williamson or recorded from a different actor, and noted that the actor said the clone used about an hour of his audio. Jason Calacanis argues creators should be paid for commercial voice use; Jenny Fielding says courts have not settled how publicity rights apply to AI, while Paige Doherty points to changing name, image, and likeness rules in college sports.
• Jason Calacanis says Obliteration provides hosted, unconstrained AI models for cybersecurity teams that need to build their own rules and safeguards. He congratulated the company on joining Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Sponsor pitches covered DigitalOcean’s AI inference platform, which claims workload costs can fall by up to 50%; Odoo Discuss for messages and meeting transcripts; Rippling AI for sales and business metrics; and Plod, which offered a 10% discount with the code TWIST.

Startups (2)

• Paige Doherty says Knox Metals, a pre-seed and seed investment, reached $25 million in annualized revenue by making metal servicing easier for manufacturers that cannot order directly from mills. An investor ordered metal during a Detroit factory tour and received it about two hours later.
• Jenny Fielding says Electric Plants translates plants’ electrical signals into data that could support uses such as indoor landscaping and carbon accounting. She backed the founder’s earlier company and described the new venture as a high-conviction bet on the founder’s plant expertise.

Agents (1)

• Jason and Lon Harris said Plaud records meetings on a phone or pin and turns audio into formats such as meeting notes, lesson plans, and interview Q&A. Jason said the show now uses Plaud to produce more comprehensive show notes than its former three-hour manual process.

Startups (4)

• Anthropic proposed putting 5% of its stock into a fund for public-benefit projects, subject to shareholder approval; its board could add 2% for each 50% increase in company value above an undisclosed baseline. Jason argued direct share distributions would give ordinary Americans a stake in AI’s gains, while Lon Harris questioned letting Anthropic leaders decide how the fund is spent.
• Jason said founders seeking a premium domain should use a broker to conceal their identity and avoid bidding against their own public valuation. He cited GoDaddy’s $99.99 broker service and estimated clone.com could cost hundreds of thousands to millions; the hosts also joked that domain ownership disputes after an owner’s death could inspire a romantic comedy.
• The hosts promoted startup services including Northwest Registered Agent’s free identity tools, Vanta’s compliance software, Rippling AI’s cross-system business dashboards, and GoDaddy’s domain and security services. Vanta said it serves more than 16,000 companies; the sponsors offered a 10% Plaud discount and $1,000 off Vanta.
• Jason and Lon Harris said their Substack publishes tactical startup advice and uses Claude to develop infographic concepts, which Jason argued would be too slow and costly to produce with a human illustrator for every post. The team is hiring business writers across experience levels and plans to compare advice from people with opposing views.

Society (2)

• Jason argued that giving children company shares could build financial literacy and make people more supportive of AI by sharing its upside. He cited Michael and Susan Dell’s contribution to the Invest America effort, praised the Trump administration’s role, and urged the Trump family to donate half its net-worth increase during the term.
• In a brief Texas firearms discussion, Lon Harris cited bus ads warning people not to leave loaded guns in cars because thieves can steal them. Jason supported carrying a gun, saying the world was chaotic, while Lon said he was not armed.

Robotics (4)

• Clone Robotics CEO Rad Krishnan said the company uses hydraulic artificial muscles instead of the electric motors and tendon-pulley systems common in humanoid robots. Pressurized fluid contracts a rubber tube inside a braided sleeve, producing linear motion; Krishnan said this approach could cost a fraction of motor-actuated designs while preserving human-sized strength and movement.
• Krishnan said he began pursuing androids as a lifelong goal, built a one-megawatt plasma thruster at 13, and met his Polish co-founder on Facebook in 2020. He moved to Poland in 2021 to start Clone Robotics, after deciding that hydraulic muscle technology and newer deep-learning methods made the project viable.
• Krishnan said Clone plans to deploy human-level torsos in enterprise settings before complete androids, with assembly-line and manufacturing work as early uses. He expects complete home robots in two to three years, described 2027 as a possible first deployment year, and cited $25,000 as a potential affordable price while also envisioning luxury models.
• Krishnan said Clone is betting that open models and human-generated data will supply much of the robot’s intelligence, while the company focuses first on proprietary hardware. He expects models to turn over quickly and plans to adapt open-weight checkpoints with robot data, simulation, motion capture, and reinforcement learning.

Models (2)

• Odyssey showed a simulated fruit-fly brain flying through worlds generated by its Odyssey 3 model, prompting discussion of whether a sufficiently realistic simulation could be indistinguishable from reality to its inhabitants. The hosts connected the demo to simulation theory and games such as Grand Theft Auto and Free Guy.
• Jason said ElevenLabs’ Archer voice was based on podcaster Chris Williamson’s distinctive accent, despite ElevenLabs saying a different voice actor supplied it. The company removed Archer without admitting wrongdoing; Jason argued the resemblance could confuse listeners and urged ElevenLabs to compensate Williamson or license his voice.

Safety (1)

• Jason called the chance of losing control of AI minuscule, estimating it at one in a billion, and argued that software would remain controllable. Lon Harris said the show should hear multiple sides, while Jason replied that AI-safety advocates already receive extensive media coverage; the hosts also debated religion and the ethics of creating simulated minds.

Comedy (3)

• Nathan Fielder developed his distinct editing style and interest in reality television while producing segments for Canadian Idol and writing for comedy shows. He later translated those reality television mechanics into his 2013 series Nathan For You.
• Elizabeth Holmes invited Nathan Fielder into her home after watching a Nathan For You episode about a gas station offering $1.75 per gallon fuel. Fielder forced customers to hike a mountain to claim a $13 rebate, using deception to forge genuine emotional connections.
• In his 2022 series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder constructed full-scale architectural replicas to allow participants to practice stressful social encounters. Jason Zinneman argues that Fielder uses these extreme contrivances to directly confront the ethics and potential cruelty of his own work.

Media (3)

• Jason Zinneman argues that Elizabeth Holmes strategically uses her children and partner Billy Evans as emotional armor during filming. Fielder counters her attempt to humanize her public image by subjecting her to persistent, uncomfortable questioning.
• Alyssa Wilkinson connects Nathan Fielder's personal documentary style to Ross McElwee's 40-year-old film Sherman's March, which abandoned its historical subject to focus on director self-analysis. Fielder expands on McElwee's approach by reflecting real-world subjects back through his own personal anxieties.
• Jason Zinneman compares Nathan Fielder's documentary strategy to illusionists Penn and Teller exposing their own tricks to audiences. By showing viewers the precise machinery of cinematic manipulation, Fielder earns back authenticity from a naturally skeptical public.

Media (4)

• Caitlin Roper interviewed Holmes for Wired in 2013 and found no way to verify Theranos’s science: she could not inspect the lab or speak with its lead scientists. Roper’s own test results closely matched a conventional panel, but she later questioned where and how the sample was tested.
• John Carreyrou grew suspicious after reading Ken Auletta’s New Yorker profile, which described bold blood-testing claims without peer-reviewed studies and noted Theranos’s secrecy. A pathologist’s skepticism strengthened Carreyrou’s doubts, and Holmes repeatedly declined his requests for an interview.
• Aaron Griffith covered Holmes’s trial in San Jose and recalled reporters socializing with her family. Billy Evans’s father introduced himself to journalists as a criminal-justice observer, then appeared with the family when Holmes arrived at trial.
• The documentary’s intimate scenes do not settle whether Holmes believes her own story. Carreyrou calls her claims that she never lied and was pushed into the spotlight brazenly false; Roper says Holmes’s blame-shifting avoids responsibility even as the film invites sympathy for her separation from her children.

Psychology (3)

• Carreyrou describes Holmes as charming when she wants to be, but also feisty, combative, ruthless, and dishonest. He says the documentary mostly shows her pleasant side, with brief flashes of resistance when Fielder presses her about responsibility.
• Carreyrou argues Holmes’s story remains compelling because it combines the psychology of deceit with potential risks to patients. Roper adds that women who deceive attract a different kind of public condemnation than men, while Griffith says Holmes’s own choices keep her in the news.
• Carreyrou sees a repeating pattern in Holmes’s relationships with Sunny Balwani and Billy Evans: romantic partners also became business partners, and he describes both men as harmful influences. Roper points to Holmes’s grand, performative language about love; Griffith says the affection between Holmes and Evans still appears genuine.

Startups (4)

• Roper and Griffith see Holmes’s founder persona as shaped partly by Silicon Valley’s appetite for charismatic leaders and the tech press’s search for prominent women. Roper viewed Holmes’s dark outfits and controlled presentation as a way to project authority in male-dominated investor rooms.
• Griffith argues Holmes followed Silicon Valley’s “fake it till you make it” playbook until exaggeration became deception and fraud. He and Roper say the boundary can be difficult to identify, and Roper notes that observers could question why Holmes went to prison while Elon Musk did not.
• Carreyrou mocks the idea of Theranos 2.0 by pointing out that Holmes’s original account already presented the technology as fully functional. He questions why the company would need another prototype or lasers if the first version worked as Holmes described.
• Character.AI filed for bankruptcy and plans to sell some assets to Disney after its founders and a portion of its staff joined Google through a talent deal. The company had roughly 12 million active users, faced lawsuits over chatbot-related harms, and cited computing and talent costs.

Big Tech (2)

• The FBI arrested OpenAI employee Abdul Rahman Al-Fazan over an alleged recording device hidden in an office. OpenAI said its models helped identify the device and the employee; Casey Newton noted that investigators had not yet explained what information the device was meant to capture.
• Apple’s Home View is an always-on home screen for messages, calendars, Siri, and household tasks. Casey Newton questioned whether families need another screen, while Aaron Griffith said household technology can help families manage complicated schedules and reduce mental load.

Agents (1)

• Casey Newton wants a simple way to consolidate school and camp messages rather than add another device or rely on an AI agent. Griffith noted that Anthropic advertised for an assistant to handle tasks such as scheduling, duties that AI agents are also meant to perform.

Health (1)

• A Palantir CTO claimed some AI researchers have taken up smoking to signal confidence that AI will soon cure cancer. Casey Newton and Aaron Griffith treated the rationale as a strikingly literal form of optimism about future medical breakthroughs.