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Top News

iRobot collapses: The company behind the friendly Roomba robot vacuums has filed for bankruptcy, announcing intentions to transfer its assets to a Chinese manufacturing partner and creditor. The demise of iRobot comes just under two years after a deal to sell the company to Amazon fell apart due to regulatory concerns from both the EU and the United States. On the show today, Jason argued that blocking small-ball M&A is bad for tech companies, investors, and consumers alike.
The USG wants you: Uncle Sam wants to recruit “an elite corps of engineers to build the next generation of government technology.” Aiming to hire around 1,000 workers from major tech companies for a two-year stint, the project — dubbed Tech Force — is an effort to bring private-market smarts to the federal government so that the behemoth employer can more quickly adopt AI technologies. Offering salaries between $150,000 and $200,000 will only soften the blow for technologists departing their current gigs for government work, but at least the sums in question aren’t laughable. Are you going to sign up?
Nvidia launches new AI models: While often overlooked, major tech companies are building their own AI models. Amazon built and released its own ‘Nova’ line of AI models, while Microsoft has the ‘Phi’ family of models, and today Nvidia released its own ‘Nemotron 3’ collection. Arriving in three sizes — 30, 100, and 500 billion parameters, respectively — the open models are designed to be performant in terms of price, meaning that developers who choose them over other options may enjoy reduced compute costs. Thus far, apart from Google, it seems that the startups are running the AI model game, not the incumbents.

TWiST 500

TWiST500 startups Starfish Space and Impulse Space recently worked together on what they called the ‘Remora’ mission, bringing together their technologies to prove that in-orbit objects can be successfully brought into close proximity, using only a single camera as a sensor.

TWiST sat down with Starfish Space on E2099, which you can listen to here.

Impulse Space provided two of its Mira satellites, while Starfish Space put up the necessary software for the autonomous ‘rendezvous and proximity operations’ (RPO) operation. The two satellites were brought within 1.2 kilometers of one another using limited data. (Traditional RPO efforts require more specialized hardware.)

Starfish and Impulse are two of our favorite startups in the world: they’re building for a future in which humans are not stuck at their spawn point (Earth) and can explore other environs (the universe), ensuring species-level redundancy.

Not that the two young companies are taking on the world of deep-space colonization themselves. Instead, they’re busy working on in-space mobility (Impulse) and satellite life extension and de-orbiting (Starfish). Both need to get close to other assets to function, which is what makes the Remora mission so important and exciting.

Starfish and Impulse are not the only space startups on the TWIST500 making waves. Starcloud’s first orbital GPU is up and running and racking up both headlines and processed tokens in seemingly equal measure. Ad astra! — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2223: Disney signed a landmark new deal with OpenAI, investing $1 billion in the ChatGPT maker and licensing over 200 of their most famous characters for use in the Sora app. Jason naturally saw all this coming, and predicted as much on the “All-In Podcast” over the summer. Hear him unpack why this was so important for the future of BOTH companies, plus lots more of the week’s biggest stories for founders.

E2222: It’s a VC Roundtable, featuring special guests Bryan Kim of a16z and David Clark of Ven Cap. On the docket: Boom Supersonic’s innovative new turbine-based revenue stream, Bill Gurley’s iconic “Miss By a Mile” post about calculating TAM, why it’s so important for founders for remain relentless, the discourse surrounding the “AI Bubble,” and much more.

E2221: It’s a tasty TWiST parfait, with three different founder-focused layers. First, Lon and Alex look back at a 2016 chat between Jason and Zapier mastermind Wade Foster, about running an entirely remote team, raising seed money back in ‘12, and why MS Office was, at the time, their Holy Grail of integrations. PLUS Alex chats with Alembic’s Tomas Puig about the next generation of marketing analytics AND a brand new entry in our Gamma Pitch Deck competition.

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