Upstarts Year One: The Ones Worth Keeping_

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Meet The AI Ring Startup Taking On OpenAI And Meta In Wearables

The thing that gets me excited is the promise of technology as an augmentation of the individual, that places the human in control, makes the human more capable, more free. And I really don't see any other product making that the center of all of their design choices.

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Flexport's Ryan Petersen On Tariff Refunds, AI Agents And How To Win Back Customers

“You have to remember that no one cares about your startup. I’m blessed that you’re asking me questions about my startup, and you seem to be interested in it, but in general, nobody cares about your startup. They care about things that are happening that are relevant in their world, and they’re only going to care about you to the extent that you are either providing perspective on that other thing, or are a good example of the thing.

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Flexport's Ryan Petersen On Tariff Refunds, AI Agents And How To Win Back Customers

It used to be a one-year strategic plan. You would lay out, 'Okay, we're going to do this, we're going to do that.' Now you're like, 'All right, let's go see if you can make this work, two days later. And it works.'

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Handshake's CEO Declares 'Re-Founding' Of His $3.5B Startup All Around AI

“Winners and losers are being defined right now. If we don’t go all-in, we are going to get lapped, because someone else will.”

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Canva’s Melanie Perkins on scaling startup vision and values for global impact

“If you stop dreaming, then you stop growing and you become an old company.”

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Snowflake's CEO on AI: 'Constraints Make You Think Harder'

“My hot take is that constraints make you think harder, constraints make you work harder at producing great outcomes, and that innovation with constraints is the ultimate art.”

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AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

“Apps are the expression of intelligence, whereas core intelligence itself is derived from the models. Look at any apps or agents that exist in the market, and how few lines of code they are. They don’t need to be what we thought of previously as software, because they’re effectively just wrapping up this new thing, this alien intelligence that we now have.”

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Startup FLORA Raises $6.5 Million To Build The AI Canvas For Creatives

“Current AI tools are built by non-creatives, for other non-creatives to feel creative."

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AI Startup Gamma Reaches $50 Million in ARR, Profitability

“Small teams can do amazing things.”

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Loyal's Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

“Nobody has an investment memo for dog longevity. I’m the first dog longevity company I’ve ever talked to. I’m most people’s first bio investment, or first dog investment, or first longevity investment. There’s not a lot of reference when it comes to Loyal. Also, the phrase ‘dog longevity almost sounds like it should be on a show about Silicon Valley.”

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Exclusive Interview: Motive's CEO On AI, Pre-IPO Plans And His Biggest Startup Mistake

“There’s a fundamental lesson here, which is: don’t name your company after a Grateful Dead song.”

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Exclusive: Column CEO William Hockey On Brex, Bootstrapping, China

"A natural introvert, Hockey prefers to spend his time at conferences answering engineers’ pull requests; at parties with more than four strangers, you’ll find him in the bathroom, coding on his Android phone."

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Startup Vivun Raised $131M And Nearly Died. A Hard Pivot To AI Has It Coming Back.

“I’m still here talking at this table. So we’re lucky.”

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Gamma's Launching A Fund With Its VCs. Will Other Startups Follow?

“Seeing how people at the earliest stages are thinking about how they build, I’m just personally energized by it. And I’m a sucker for trying something bold and new.”

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Nothing CEO Carl Pei Shares Plans For Selling Smartphones In The U.S.

“In the beginning, you take everything personally. Now, it’s whatever – we know where we’re going.”

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Designer VCs At Character Capital Raise $52 Million Fund

"There’s nothing more “agonizing” than laboring on a product nobody wants. It’s a tool for isolating and crystallizing your intuition about your business. It’s elementary stuff, but time and again since we started doing this, it’s proven remarkably useful, even for very sophisticated founders.”

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More Bangers, More Fun: 6 Upstarts Media Resolutions For 2026

But whether you’re sized more like a small business or an AI unicorn, the emotional rollercoaster of being a founder is probably the same. At Upstarts, I vacillate daily between the exuberance of empire-building, and questioning what it means to really exist.

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Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez Says New Agents Product Expands Enterprise Adoption Of AI

“Privacy is the most important and most underrated, under-appreciated bottleneck to adoption.”

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Why Lyft's CEO Is Embracing Waymo And 'Falcon Mode' For Its Turnaround

“What stopped us growing at the rate we should be growing was too much competitive focus, and not enough true customer innovation.”

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AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

"Your data moat is asymmetry of information. You’re on this call with us, getting asymmetric info. When you get a revenue number, only you have it. A journalistic scoop is something where human contact is critical, because as humans, we’re willing to share those things.”

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Utah Legal Startup Filevine Raises $400 Million At $3 Billion Valuation

“He’s not in it to sell it, he’s in it to win it.”

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OneChronos And Auctionomics Launch First Auction Market For GPU Compute

“GPUs are about to be the largest unhedged corporate asset class on the planet. These other markets are hedged down to the penny. And then you have GPUs, which everyone is treating like power and oil, but which fundamentally still is not.”

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Loyal's Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

“I just thought this was super unacceptable When you’re a kid you’re like, ‘Oh, adults can always fix everything. And the realization that that wasn’t the case, and we all have these ticking time bombs inside of us, and that one day you could just get this diagnosis and that’s it? I kind of had an existential breakdown, honestly.

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Esri Founder Jack Dangermond's 'Secrets' To Building A Legendary Business

“To be a decent businessman, just be a decent person.”

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Exclusive Interview: Wiz's Co-Founder On AI, Security And Google

“We invested a lot in making a very nice UI with a graph, a very nice graph. And maybe it’s not important anymore,” he tells Upstarts. “It’s great, but I’m trying to forget it… you either reinvent yourself, or you will be replaced.”

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Why Lyft's CEO Is Embracing Waymo And 'Falcon Mode' For Its Turnaround

In the tech world, if you stop innovating, you might as well just go to the graveyard and bury yourself. You’re done.”

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AI Lab poolside's Founders Talk The Model Race, Meta, And Bad Advice From VCs

“Venture capitalists are no longer in the foundation model race, because they can’t be at this scale, so the narrative quickly becomes that the application layer is going to win,” says Kant. “If your incentive structure is oriented towards the application layer, that’s what you have to say,” adds Warner.

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IPO Interview: Klarna's CEO Talks IKEA, Vibe Coding With Cursor, Stablecoins

“People ask me about the IPO and ringing the bell. I’m sure all of that’s going to be really cool and a fantastic experience. But for me personally, emotionally, after being this kid from this small city north of Stockholm, to actually stand in Bentonville at Sam Walton’s grave — and to realize that I will now have the opportunity to work with the biggest retailer in the world, that I’ve always been the biggest fan of — that to me is emotional on a different level.”

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Loyal's Celine Halioua: From Defying Doubters To Pioneering Dog Longevity

“I didn’t pattern match very well. Silicon Valley tends to look backwards at the previous generation of founders that made their funds a lot of money, and then that becomes the pattern match for the current generation of what’s hot or not.”

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Startup Vivun Raised $131M And Nearly Died. A Hard Pivot To AI Has It Coming Back.

“We were on a tear, running across the chasm. Then, everything basically stopped, like we were frozen in time.”

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Exclusive: Column CEO William Hockey On Brex, Bootstrapping, China

“I’m petrified of being bored.”

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Handshake's CEO Declares 'Re-Founding' Of His $3.5B Startup All Around AI

“I felt it with all my intuition. I told my wife, Jessica, who was pregnant: ‘This year is going to be a lot’. There are times in your life when you’re like, ‘Oh gosh we could not be more well-positioned.’ And if we passed this up, it would be the biggest mistake of my entire life.”

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Drone Startup Sunflower Labs Raises $16M Series B Led By Sequoia

“All of us agreed to keep going until there was no other chance, until we were dead. Maybe even a little bit after that.”

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6 Winning GTM Strategies From Startups Linear, Decagon And Browserbase

“It’s quite boring if you don’t engage in public debate,” a leading startup CEO is telling the crowd. “I think you have to be a little fearless, and especially shameless.”