Well, Wondery no more

Top News

• Amazon takes hatchet to podcast biz: Wondery, an Amazon business, is being split. The group’s narrative-form podcasts are heading under Audible’s aegis, while creator-led shows will remain under their current brand. The shakeup will lead to more than 100 staffers losing their gigs. Still, the fact that Wondery is not being shuttered, full-stop, will be a relief to some. Especially podcast fans who value the audio version of shows (there are dozens of us!).

• Perplexity, Cloudflare fight over AI crawling: In an explosive post, Internet infra giant Cloudflare accused AI search startup Perplexity of abusing website rules that limit AI access to hosted content. In emails with TWiST, Perplexity pushed back and said, in effect, that Cloudflare has it all wrong and looks silly. What is clear at this juncture is that the push-pull between those who own online information and those who want to lever it to feed their customers, is far from over.

• Figma comes back to Earth: What goes up, must come (partially) down. That’s the lesson from Figma’s IPO, which saw the company price at $33 per share and soar to $142.92 in its second day of trading. Today, Figma gave back more ground, closing out the day worth $88.60. That’s still a result that most companies would kill for regarding their own post-debut performance, but it’s also less.

TWiST500

In startup circles, you hear a lot of chat about product-market fit. The term is a way to describe how well-suited a particular product or service is to its potential customer base. The closer the product is to what people want — how well it fits their needs or wants — the more likely the company will grow quickly and make lots of money.

Intuitively, this makes sense. If you have terrible product-market fit… well, who would be willing to buy your service or product that doesn’t fit their needs? The concept is simple enough, but it’s tricky to implement in practice. So, we’ve seen people come up with working definitions for product-market fit over the years, like saying that you have it when customers are yanking what you are selling out of your hands.

That’s where OpenAI is today. The company is rolling out reminders to users to pause and take a break when they’ve been chatting for a long time. Sure, you could say that the effort is simply OpenAI looking to curtail some of its infra costs. But I think reports of more and more people losing their grip on hard reality by spending too much time with AI personalities indicate that some users are simply too plugged in.

So, does OpenAI have too much product-market fit? Maybe, but it’s not unique in the problem. One of the finest video games of all time, Anno 1800, has regular pings to the player at set intervals to remind them to look up, and perhaps hit pause.

Still, from the startup perspective, that OpenAI is working this hard to limit consumer usage of its product is impressive, if also slightly worrisome. — Alex

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This Week in Startups

E2159: Alex is back with three more interviews with some of our favorite TWiST 500 founders. Dr. Hon Weng Chong of Cortical Labs walks us through the basics of biological computing. Then, Turing founder Jonathan Siddarth teaches us about LLM benchmarking and why these tests need to get much more difficult FAST. Finally, Brendan Foody of Mercor tells us how they’re using AI to rethink the hiring process.

E2158: It’s another all-star TWiST Investor Panel, featuring special guests Sophia Amoruso of TrustFund VC and Ryan Hoover of Weekend Fund (not to mention the best place to launch your new website, Product Hunt)! They’re going DEEP on the current landscape for startup investment, including discussions of durable vs. brittle revenue, various approaches to follow-on investments and recycling, and the crucial importance of hosting co-working events and jam sessions for founders. Don’t miss this one!

E2157: We’re breaking down some media stories, so Lon’s joining Jason and Alex to talk about Astronomer’s viral response to the Coldplay Canoodling meme (starring Gwyneth Paltrow!) and Sydney Sweeney’s extremely divisive American Eagle ad. (It’s not EXACTLY tech but there are some founder lessons here for sure!) Plus, Figma’s big IPO, everything that went wrong with the Tea app, and why Jason thinks app stores should ban “anonymous” forums.

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Founder U is coming to the MENA region!

Our 12-week pre-accelerator—designed to help early-stage founders build and grow—kicks off this fall in Saudi Arabia. The first cohort launches in Riyadh on November 3rd, followed by in-person and virtual sessions throughout the program. Founders in MENA: this is your chance to turn your idea into a business and get world-class insights on building a successful startup. Apply today: https://mena.founder.university/

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