This Week in Startups

News Roundtable! Today's guests are Ryan Hoover, Founder of Product Hunt, and Carmel DeAmicis, Reporter at Re/code, with a highly spirited take on tech's latest. Ryan and Carmel talk ad-block mania, iPhone fever, Twitter polls, expanding Uber, Slack's morphing into social, SV work culture -- and they take Jason's Definitive Millennial Quiz.

Today’s episode is an incredible two-parter from STHLM TECH FEST. First, a fascinating discussion on the “Future of Transportation” with three companies leading the charge. Jason and Tyler Crowley talk with Uber European General Manager Jo Bertram, Tesla Chief Product Officer Peter Carlsson, and Delivery Hero CEO and Co-founder Niklas Ostberg (online food-ordering service in 34 countries), and Kees Koolen, Founding Partner at EQT Ventures. Among many gems, we learn how leading up to Model S release Tesla was burning $100m per quarter, how the car industry thought they would only sell 3,000 vehicles over their lifecycle (and they now sell 1,200 per week...and are thinking about the future of autonomous cars….); how Uber has legalized ride-sharing in most US cities and is one of the safest transportation options in every city they operate in, but still has a fight ahead in Europe; how Delivery Hero has raised $1b and what their path to profitability looks like (scale!) and why they might start making and delivering its own food. Next up we get a visit from the Prince of Sweden Daniel Westling and hear two pitches in the transportation space from Shipwallet (no-click shipping) and Fidesmo (a connected card).

Daniel Ek started Spotify in 2006 with a vision to revitalize the music industry, by giving consumers unprecedented access to tracks and creating a novel, sustainable business model. Now music-streaming is the norm, every player is in the game — and pioneer Spotify is sitting on top of the world with 20m+ paid subscribers. On stage with Jason at the STHLM TECH FEST, Daniel shares his journey, from starting his first company at 14, to bootstrapping Spotify with his own money, to dealing with competitors, to what’s next for the industry leader. It’s a fascinating discussion on music (and the joy and pain of innovating in this most challenging space), Spotify’s early dark days and hard lessons, startup transparency, thoughts on the Google Apple YouTube Tidal Taylor Swift potpourri, Daniel’s strategy for handling competition (hint: making Spotify better), Europe’s awesome and crazy cheap bandwidth (get with the program, America), breaking the music biz stranglehold, the future of streaming -- and much more.

When Founder Bryan Johnson sold Braintree to eBay in 2013, he decided to build something extraordinary to make the world a better place. So he founded OS Fund to invest in early-stage science companies working on solutions to our planet's biggest problems, in the fields of synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, space tools, transportation. What's more, Bryan just created an open-source playbook for others to do the same -- one that demystifies investing in science so that more needed dollars can find these important companies. Bryan and Jason have an amazing conversation that spans science discoveries, religion, ideology, investment challenges and opportunities, our greatest societal threats, the latest in life extension, what's really going on in A.I., paying it forward, striving for peaceful co-existence, nuclear weapons, and (naturally) a sushi bet involving manned drones. Don't miss this!

Today's special guest is Tim O'Reilly, media pioneer, publisher extraordinaire, a hero of Jason and inspiration for many. The Founder of O'Reilly Media stops by the studio to talk about WTF Economy (that's ... What's the Future?) -- specifically, how technology is transforming the workplace, the challenges and opportunities we face as a result, and our best ways to move forward.

Today's guest is Bryn Mooser, Co-Founder of RYOT.org. RYOT is a breaking news site with embedded calls-to-action -- and it's now transforming journalism by using VR to tell the most powerful stories from around the world. Bryn stops by the studio with RYOT's VR gear & camera, and Jason dons the goggles (w/an audience look-see as well) to virtually experience the bombed-out city of Aleppo Syria, post-earthquake Nepal, the Sierras and more. It's an exciting conversation about the latest innovations in VR and why it works to create empathy, filming in war zones and areas in crisis, the importance of media calls to action, celebrity philanthropy, viewer engagement, what countries are most at-risk in the world, and much more.

Today, it’s a special #AskJason: mobile, wearables & Internet of Things (IoT) edition! Jason lends insights to fans’ pressing questions on m/w/IoT, including mobile-first strategies for new startups, the security of IoT (everything is connected: where is too much?!), is mobile taking over design and content?, opportunities in the massive smartphone penetration in emerging markets, and the challenges of growing mobile hardware using lean startup methods. This is the first in a series of special #AskJasons presented by Pivotal Labs. LAUNCH & Pivotal are teaming up to host Mobile, Wearables & IoT at Fort Mason in San Francisco, October 15-16. More info at: launchmw.com. Join us!

After figuring out your product-market fit, there is nothing else your startup should be doing other than making sure you are getting that hockey stick growth. Matt Epstein, VP Marketing at Zenefits, dropped by the LAUNCH Incubator to tell us exactly how it's done. Matt was the first employee hired at Zenefits and has been leading the charge on their monumental growth over the last 3 years (from 3 to 1,200 employees and $0 to $21 million in annual recurring revenue!). Matt opens up the “Zenefits playbook” for how they achieved this massive growth, which consists of: finding product / market fit, scaling with machines, scaling with people, and then doing everything else you can to get growth. Matt teaches why finding your “secret sauce” is so important because it gives you data on what the best way to sell your product is, how to scale with machines in search of repeatable SaaS metrics, what to look for in scaling with people (and what types of people you need to hire right away), what three essential questions you need to ask when hiring your first VP Marketing, VP Marketing Operations, and Sales Development Reps, what the five biggest screw ups they had at Zenefits were and how you can avoid them (i.e. 10x your goals!). Don't miss this!

Joining Jason today is Greg Sommers, CEO & Founder of Sandstone Diagnostics, Inc., a consumer wellness company that creates gadgets and develops resources to help people monitor health. Greg's latest is dontcookyourballs.com, dedicated to male fertility testing and education -- specifically, bringing it to the privacy and convenience of your home. It's a fascinating discussion about the future of healthcare and home diagnostics, how Greg developed the project, working with the FDA, the cost of innovating in this space, how the consumer is taking control of his/her health and all that implies, Jason's day at a fertility clinic -- and much more.

Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first VC fund to invest exclusively in software companies. Today Jason sits down Ann Winblad, technology investing legend and the firm’s Co-founder and Managing Director. Jason and Ann discuss Ann’s journey as an entrepreneur and a wide range of riveting topics: how Ann started her first company Open Systems in 1976 and sold it for $16m in cash in 1983 (an enormous sum then!), how there was only $350m invested in software in 1990 versus $23b in 2014, their unicorn-filled first fund w/ 8 of 16 investments going public, companies Ann wished they invested in, qualities she looks for in entrepreneurs, why companies go under, why A-round investing is so much fun but so few do it, why enterprise software is not in a bubble, why Bill Gates was the most impressive entrepreneur in the 1980’s (and what it was like dating him), her experiences as a woman in venture capital, being optimistic about the world’s future while concerned about America’s, and much more!