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Top News

• The compute race isn’t over: Today on the podcast, Jason and I ran through just how much money the cloud hyperscalers intend to spend on their data center footprint. The answer is… more. Why are the Mag7 planning on ever-larger purchases of GPU, power, and water? Because they remain compute constrained, even with all the new data center capacity that was added this year. Companies selling gear and tools for data centers should continue to excel, while names like Nvidia have plenty of road ahead of them. For at least another quarter. Expect a similar level of investor interest in capex plans and current compute capacity constraints every quarter until, finally, there are enough GPUs to go around.

• Human Interest raises $100M: Now valued at $3 billion, Human Interest is further evidence that we’re in the midst of a bully year for financial technology startups. For Human Interest, the game is helping other companies provide 401(k) retirement plans to their staff. Other fintech winners this year include stablecoins (venture interest, acquisitions, and IPOs), crypto treasury companies, and recently public unicorns like Robinhood and Coinbase, which continue to show strong results. Human Interest told Axios that it may consider an IPO in a few years, once it’s worth $10 billion or more.

• Lettuce Financial raises $28M: Speaking of fintech, Lettuce Financial closed a new round and purchased another company, it announced today. Lettuce provides one-person companies with a suite of financial tools to handle payroll, accounting, and other critical financial tasks. And now, thanks to snapping up competitor Besolo, Lettuce will be able to offer its “subscribers access to more robust healthcare options and other benefits,” Forbes reports.

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Suno and Udio are two of the best-known consumer AI startups out there. Suno reportedly scaled to $150 million worth of ARR this year on the back of strong market interest in music-generating tools. Demand has been so hot that Suno and Udio wound up facing lawsuits from music rights holders over their alleged mistreatment of copyright-protected tunes. (We saw them coming, and were not surprised when they were filed!)

Udio this week secured the first of several needed deals with music labels to stay on the right side of courtroom drama. However, terms of its deal with UMG required it to block its customers from downloading their music. Reaction was swift, and negative, judging by the Udio subreddit which is awash in criticism and cancelled subscriptions.

But news is not all bad at the intersection of sweet tunes and cutting-edge AI models. Suno’s new Studio product is incredible. Today on the show, Producer Oliver swung by to give us a tour of the service, which frankly blew us away. We wound up making a song about JCal on the fly, and it was surprisingly palatable.

Still, a great product built atop an uncertain foundation is not the most stable way to build a business. Here’s hoping that future legal settlements between the startups and record companies leave enough room for products like Studio to stay alive. Hell, I want to play with the tool just to see if my planned one-man deathcore-Baroque mashup idea has legs. — Alex

A message from Crusoe Cloud

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This Week in Startups

E2201: Grammarly CEO Shishir Mehrotra joins us to explain why his company is swapping names, taking on the mantle of Superhuman, the email helper it recently acquired. It just goes to show that, sometimes, a brand upgrade is still called for, even after you have 40 million active daily users. PLUS find out why Jason is off to Tokyo and everyone’s thoughts on 1x’s tele-operated chore-bot, Neo.

E2200: On our milestone 2,200th episode, Jason and Alex chat with Zach Handshow of SpatialGen about the pressure of giving an Apple keynote and the intense amount of compute required to deliver 16K spatial video to VR headsets. PLUS Raiza Martin of Huxe tells Alex about making AI assistants more personality-driven and less robotic. AND our latest Gamma Pitch from ChessEver, a chess app aiming for serious, elite-level players.

E2199: The Australian government has accused Microsoft of employing a DARK PATTERN, and Jason says sneaky tactics like this just aren’t worth it. PLUS we’re digging into Sequoia’s two NEW funds, with an insider look at what they’re designed to accomplish. AND how Tesla is using synthetic data to train FSD, Mercor’s incredible revenue milestone, do Chinese LLMs have an advantage when it comes to picking stocks(?), and MORE!

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Founder U and LAUNCH Accelerator in Japan!

Jason’s coming to Tokyo on Nov 14 to launch a partnership with JETRO — bringing Founder University and Angel University to Japan, and connecting Japanese founders and investors with the global ecosystem. This event kicks off a ten-week program that we're starting in January, all culminating in an Immersion Week and Demo Day in SF. Register here: https://luma.com/cm0x90mk

We’re Hiring a Program Manager!

LAUNCH is seeking a program manager to help organize and manage the Japanese versions of Founder University and Angel University. Candidates must be fluent in both English and Japanese, and should plan on splitting their time between Tokyo and our home base in Austin, Texas. If you’re interested in this exciting opportunity, reach out to [email protected]!

SF Live-Work Space Now Available

Need a flexible living and working environment in San Francisco? This thoughtfully designed loft-style residence at 787 Bryant St., the heart of the vibrant SOMA district and the city’s creative hub, is now available for rent or purchase. Check the listing for more details.

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