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Blue Origin rocket detonates on Florida launchpad: The private space company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has been prepping their 322-foot New Glenn rocket to carry 48 satellites into their low-orbit internet constellation, Leo. (That’s of course Amazon’s competitor to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service.) Tragically, New Glenn exploded on the platform during a pre-launch test (with no satellites on board) at around 9 pm on Thursday evening. Blue Origin reports that “all personnel have been accounted for,” so it’s just property that was lost. Nonetheless, it will likely take months or more to repair the damage, according to the New York Times. Blue Origin and Musk’s SpaceX remain the only two private companies that NASA has enlisted to start ferrying astronauts from orbit to the lunar surface. Still, the New Glenn will need to prove itself over a number of safe launches before it can make that dream a reality. For his part, Musk was gracious and sympathetic, tweeting “sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly” to Bezos as the explosion footage circulated the internet.
Is this the end of tokenmaxxing? The Wall Street Journal reports that large enterprises have started to reign in employee AI use, as management teams observe that costly experiments with unbridled Claude Code expensing has not resulted in a host of exciting, launch-ready apps and features. WSJ cites Uber, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce, and DoorDash as big name brands that are pushing back on excessive AI use as their compute bills skyrocket. The Information also reported on Uber’s belt-tightening when it comes to AI expenses, suggesting the rideshare giant burned through its entire 2026 compute budget in just four months with little to show for it. On the “Rapid Response” podcast last week, Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald explained that “implicitly…there’s more getting shipped,” but it’s impossible to establish a direct connection between the rise of vibecoding at the company and the introduction of “more useful consumer features.”
Robots want to watch you do chores: Earlier this week, we discussed the rumors — shared, then deleted, by journalist Jeremy Loffredo — that New Yorkers were being compensated by OpenAI to set up 360-degree video cameras in their homes, to record their chores and housework for domestic robot training. We also discussed Human Archive, a startup partnering with food delivery services in India, recording their teams at work for similar data-gathering purposes. Today we’ve got yet another entrant into this growing field. Shift is offering free house cleaning services with a catch: you must allow the company to record the cleaners as they straighten out and organize your living space. Rather than cumbersome camera set-ups, Shift embeds their cameras within a “magic hat” that records housework from the cleaner’s point of view. The company, of course, claims that any of your private information gets scrubbed and anonymized prior to the footage’s use for AI training. The robots want to watch cleaning activity, we’re told, not your house.
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In crypto investing, a perpetual future (or “perp” for short) is a type of contract allowing you to wager on the price of a crypto asset without ever actually owning it, and with no set expiration date. This means exchanges use a periodic “funding rate” — typically reset every 8 hours — that anchor contracts to the asset’s real-world “spot” price. If the perp is trading above the spot price, longs pay shorts. Otherwise, shorts pay longs.
Typically, these kinds of trades require leverage, which is what can make them particularly risky. If your position shifts quickly and dramatically, you could be liquidated before having a chance to react. They remain popular financial products because of their unique advantages, allowing traders to speculate on the direction a token’s price will take without actually owning that token, and opening up more opportunities to short particular coins and thereby hedge an existing position.
Globally, perps are the most traded crypto instruments by volume, but they’ve been largely out of reach for US investors operating within regulated markets. Until now.
The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced a fresh set of conditions on Friday that will theoretically allow US platforms to offer crypto perpetuals. We include the word “theoretically” here with purpose. This is more of a roadmap laying out how US exchanges could one day offer perps, as opposed to an outright declaration that they’re now widely available.
As CFTC Chairman Mike Selig phrased it in his X announcement, the agency is now “charting a path for one of the most liquid segments of the crypto asset markets to exist within the US regulatory framework.”
The CFTC also approved prediction market Kalshi to list BTCPERP Contract, a perpetual contract referencing the spot price of Bitcoin. So this shift is already moving out of the theoretical space, and signaling that perps are likely headed to US exchanges sooner rather than later. Multicoin Capital co-founder (and friend of the pod) Kyle Samani suggests that widespread trading of perps in the US will likely still hinge on the passage of the CLARITY Act by Congress. – Lon
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This Week in Startups
E2294: It’s an all Ask Jason TWiST special, in which JCal responds to the best user queries submitted in our new X super-fan group chats. (Want to join? Follow us on X and let us know why you belong in there in the DMs.) Discussions include how you should approach your seed round funnel, why investors are more open to hardware concepts than ever before, how to differentiate your startup when you’re competing with frontier labs, and the possibilities for “Founder Community College.” PLUS highlights from Lon’s extended trip to Italy and Greece!
E2293: The "Ryanair of drone delivery" just raised $50 million and plans to bring its technology from Europe to the United States. Manna founder Bobby Healy explains to TWiST how his Dublin-based company completed 300,000 deliveries while some rivals are still publishing blog posts, and why low-cost airline economics will decide who wins the autonomous skies. Sticking to the drone theme, TWiST welcomed Theseus co-founder Ian Laffey, who called in from Kyiv to tell us about his company’s drone guidance system. It runs off a simple camera and Google Maps. The technology could rewrite the modern, GPS-jammed battlefield, and bring more firepower to smaller nations fending off larger foes.
E2292: Jason and Lon start off the episode with Divergent Technologies’ co-founder and CEO Lukas Czinger. He tells us about their proprietary 3D printing component platform, which interconnects AI-powered design and in-house 3D printers with computer vision-enabled robotic assembly systems. The company has shifted from a focus on luxury vehicle components to parts for the defense and aerospace industries. Then, Brendan Goode and Dr. Mark Horowitz of Outro Health join the show. They’re helping patients wean themselves off of anti-depressants using a “hyperbolic tapering” method.
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