**apologies: audio low in spots during first 10 min** News Roundtable! Today joining Jason is Nellie Bowles of Re/code and Dave Mathews of NewAer. All the happenings at Reddit this week, plus predictions!! (Amazingly, some are proved right and some wrong -- not 5 minutes after this show ended!) What's up with those tech outages at NYSE, United, and WSJ this week -- glitches, hackers, end of days? (Dave has a definitive answer.) The first non-accredited investor, equity crowdfunding deal since the Title IV of Jobs Act, in the form of a sweet, 3-wheeled, 2 passenger vehicle. (But would any our panelists drive it?) Meerkat integrates Facebook, luxury pot on demand is FINALLY here, colorful (related) stories involving Nelle's Greek grandma, 23andMe becoming a unicorn, hackers gone wild, sex scandals and advertising at Cannes Lions, Tinder, Grindr -- you name it and our panelists cover it this week!

LAUNCH Incubator 2: Pinterest product Jason Shellen (formerly Google, AOL & founder of Boxer, Hike Labs) talks to the class about decks done right and why effective storytelling about your product and company is critically important to getting the right attention and excitement from investors. (Hint: people love stories, not decks.) From his successes in raising money for his companies, Jason shares essential deck do’s and dont’s, candid advice from investors on what they want to see in presentations, using your struggles, pain, and adversity to make your story better, what to do in the face of inevitable conflicting VC advice, when to send a deck (don’t), and much more. FOR MORE INFO/RESOURCES: check out Jason Shellen’s blog post about speaking to the Incubator class: https://medium.com/@shellen/7ba0f87429f8

Joining Jason today is Steven Kotler, NYT bestselling author of "Tomorrowland" & "The Rise of Superman," co-author (w/Peter Diamandis) of "Bold" & "Abundance," and co-founder of the Flow Genome Project. Jason and Steven dive deep into entrepreneurs' unique opportunities now to change the world, the science fictions that have already become science fact (hello, bionics!), the gathering steam (and storm) of exponential technologies, which world issues are currently terrifying scientists & which attract needless worry, the triggers & (amazing) benefits of the flow state, what ONE thing drives most successful people, and much more -- all while trying to outdo each other in "Blade Runner" quotes. Join us!

Content businesses are incredibly hard, but that isn’t stopping today’s guest entrepreneur. Jason sits down with former Deadspin and Gawker Editor-In-Chief A.J. Daulerio, who has now launched Ratter.com, a network of a local tabloids & national news. Jason and A.J. discuss what it was like battling in the content business in the early 2000’s, how A.J. first got started at the failed gambling blog OddJack (and was eventually fired by Lockhart Steele), why A.J. and Nick Denton thought the local tabloid idea for Ratter would work even though the similar Patch.com had just failed, how A.J. plans to do stories that blow the doors off of everything else on the web (and how he plans to monetize it), why investigative journalism is so unique today with Twitter and live-video, why Twitter is more important than mainstream media (and why mainstream media should be paying people on Twitter), what made A.J.’s story covering Texas Rangers Josh Hamilton his first big hit, why Hulk Hogan is suing A.J. and Gawker for $100 million over a sex scandal story (which might bankrupt both of them), whether it is a good idea for journalists to pay for stories or not (hint: if it is absolutely crucial to a story and you do it infrequently -- yes), and so much more!

In this next installment of This Week in Startups/Inside Drones, we've got an exciting two-parter. First, Jason is on location at Skycatch, the first fully-autonomous, intelligent & scalable data retrieval/aerial robotics platform. Jason gets a chat and demo with CEO Christian Sanz and Senior Mechanical Engineer Fran Wang. Second, it's a product premiere!! In our studios is Bryan Elliot, CEO/Founder of PixiePath, who shows us his awesome new system of orchestrating drone fleets remotely. Bryan talks about his inspiration for developing this platform, his entrepreneurial journey, the latest in FAA regulations, and where we're headed! Join us!!

Today Jason sits down with Rowan Trollope, tech pioneer and SVP/GM of the Collaboration Technology Group at Cisco. Despite incredible tech innovations in every aspect of our lives, video conferencing continues to be clunky, with only 5% of conference rooms equipped with a setup that works. Rowan's new, beautiful, and affordable product, Cisco Spark, aims to solve this problem once and for all, and get us to 100% video connected. Rowan shows us Cisco Spark in action. It's simple (you don’t need IT) and affordable (less than $2K) with no numbers or codes to dial and no pairing needed. We learn how Cisco is using an open community of startups on top of this platform to usher those companies into the enterprise, how Rowan introduced startup innovation into a big company by acquiring three startups (which then made up the Innovation Team on Cisco Spark), why most acquisitions fail (and why that doesn’t matter), how the most requested Slack feature is integration with real-time video, why agility (not efficiency) is what matters in an exponential world -- and how collaboration is essential for agility, why innovation needs to spread beyond Silicon Valley, how the on-demand economy is completely changing society, and so much more!

Powerhouse News Roundtable! Joining Jason today for a roaring good time is Benedict Evans, Partner Andreessen Horowitz/top tech analyst & Molly Wood, Host/Senior Tech Correspondent, APM's Marketplace. You'll want to listen a couple times to keep up with this epic, jam-packed, crackling convo. Learn exactly what is going on in tech funding (what year are we in, anyway? hint: not 1999), what's behind Apple's latest attempts to get into the game (of news & music), Twitter's catch-22 and all its puzzles wrapped in an enigmatic business model, Microsoft's biggest opportunities, THE most burning virtual reality questions, among them: are investors ready?, what will reign supreme: games, education, or porn?, will Molly ever finish watching that first-person VR horror movie she was too scared to finish?, and will Benedict finally commit to a 1-10 rating for Mad Max? (I mean, how many times does Jason have to ask?) And MUCH MORE.

It's our second show for Drone Week & the launch of the "Inside Drones" podcast! Chris Anderson, former "Wired" Editor-in-Chief turned CEO/Founder of 3DRobotics (3DR) invites Jason to Berkeley, CA, to talk & fly the hottest drones. It's an amazing conversation where Chris explains his journey from "Wired" to becoming obsessed with drones after building one out of legos with his kids, to starting an open source drone community, to building 3DR -- the biggest drone maker in America. Jason and Chris dive into the history of how this incredible technology came to be, exactly how drones are bound (or not bound) by the laws of physics and/or government, and what we can expect (dream!) for the future. We see some of Chris's greatest hits, upcoming releases ... and watch Jason and Chris fly them on his roof deck! Join us!

It’s Drones Week and the official launch of This Week in Startups / Inside Drones podcast! Drones are becoming ready for primetime. They are safe, easy to fly, and are now able to do actual commerce in the world because regulations are becoming reasonable. Our first drones guest expert this week is Helen Greiner, Founder & CEO of CyPhyWorks (a drone robotics company), also Cofounder of iRobot and inventor of the Roomba vacuuming machine. Tune in as Jason and Helen have an exciting drone demo & discussion about what makes hexacopters far superior to quadcopters and helicopters, how CyPhyWorks was able to blow their Kickstarter campaign goal out of the water and raised more than $500,000 for their first hexacopter (which will retail for under $600!), how seeing R2-D2 in Star Wars for the first time is when Helen knew she wanted to build machines that were more than machines, why real-time social sharing is important with drone flying, how there has FINALLY been a proposed set of FAA commercial drone regulations that will make commerce possible, and how Helen wants her company to be the drones delivering packages to your home. Jason also gets a chance to live demo the CyPhyWorks LVL 1 drone! Join us!

At the LAUNCH Incubator 2, Jared Fleisler of Matrix Partners (previously Square, Slide) takes us through 3 important steps toward growth. First, how do you BUILD your product? Begin by identifying focus, market size, status quo, experience, and timing. Second, make sure you understand MESSAGING versus marketing. Craft your message - and test it! Gain your customers trust. And third, know your MARKET. And much more! Do NOT miss this jam-packed, inspiring, and highly tactical talk from one of the industry's greatest growth gurus.