Something has changed in the way we build companies in the past decade, and that major change was data-driven product design. Storage and bandwidth became essentially free and unlimited, changing the way companies stored data. “Should we store this data?” was the big issue back in the day. What really matters now is how you study that data and what strategies you deploy based on that data. Venture capitalist, blogger and author Tomasz Tunguz joins Jason to discuss the data wave and how his experiences inspired his brand new book, “Winning with Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future.” We learn about Tomasz’s path from his early days with the Google AdSense team, his three investment outlook predictions, and his advice for startups to leverage and execute data.

Pixar-Disney Co-founder & President, Ed Catmull, and author of “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration,” is one of the greatest startup founders in the history of Silicon Valley. In this Part 2 episode, his conversation with Jason on This Week in Startups continues as he talks about his existential crisis after Toy Story’s explosive success, the unique struggles for each Pixar film, and building a creative culture at Pixar and Disney. His story is one of dogged resilience, filled with risks, mistakes and lessons learned, and it will inspire entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs alike.

Pixar-Disney Co-founder & President Ed Catmull, and author of “Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration,” is one of the greatest startup founders in the history of Silicon Valley. Today he joins Jason on This Week in Startups to share his own personal story, perhaps the best that has come out of Pixar. We learn about Ed’s journey from his early days as a pioneer of computer animation, being hired by George Lucas to run the computer division at Lucasfilm, working with Steve Jobs to form Pixar (ultimately Pixar-Disney) and leading it to meteoric success and, over time, developing creative & sustainable management philosophies to share with the world. This is only the first of two parts, so stay tuned for much more!

Ari Levy of CNBC and Rolfe Winkler of The Wall Street Journal joined Jason for a must-see News Roundtable on This Week in Startups. An amazing discussion that kicked off with big deal of the week, Walmart snapping up Jet.com for $3b, that crackled on to Google, the government, anti-trust, the entire U.S. debt problem, the Chinese Market, the very future of energy (featuring, naturally, Elon), and the latest in startup CEOs behaving badly. And more.

There are few people in the industry who really do the work, and take the work seriously. Many investors don’t take the work as seriously as the founders take their work. Being an investor is a great privilege, especially if you started off as a founder first. There are very few examples of investors working harder or as hard as the founders that they invest in, but SaaStr founder, Jason Lemkin, is one of those rare exceptions of the people who take the investing seriously. In this episode, Jason gives an update to the presentation he gave at the Angel Summit.

Jason “jams out” a number of growth tips and e-commerce tips with founders in this special “Jam Session” episode of This Week in Startups. Melody McCloskey of StyleSeat talks about leveraging data to drive growth and engagement, while Edgar Blazona of BenchMade Modern shares tips on optimizing paid acquisition via segmentation and landing pages. Then, David Temple of Hello Scout explains how to use offline acquisition to create trust. At the end, Jason asks one of the most candid questions a founder can ask, “Tell me about a near death experience, the worst moment in running your business.”

George Hotz is known for unlocking the iPhone and PlayStation, but most recently, as being the founder of Comma.ai, an autonomous driving startup. He and his team built a driver assistant system that will get increasingly more sophisticated, also known as Level 3. George deconstructs the core components of his technology, and explains how it can compensate for human error in driving. And paired with the up-and-coming phone app called Chffr, soon, they will have technology where you can compare data and optimize your commute. His success has much to do with his philosophy of staying open--to build prototypes, to get it out there, and to move the world forward.

The world of startups is a dog-eat-dog world, and Antonio Garcia Martinez shares all in his brutally candid book “Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley." Antonio shares his journey starting as a Wall Street Goldman Sachs Strat and witnessing the market crash, pursuing and enduring the trials and tribulations of startup life (complete with hefty legal and fundraising battles), negotiating a tricky twin Twitter acquisition deal that alienated his co-founders, landing as an esteemed Product Manager at Facebook during its heady crazy pre-IPO days, seeing his hard work in Ads come to a crushing, brutal end … only to be hired at Twitter. Trade secrets of tech giants, back-door deals, SV culture, personal hijinx -- all this and, believe it or not, much more.

Spanning 135 cities across the globe, and producing around 2000 companies per year, the Founder Institute has become one of the biggest, most impactful programs for early stage companies in the world. In this episode, Jason sits down with the Adeo Ressi, Founder and CEO of the Founder Institute, to find out what makes Adeo’s entrepreneurship program different from the host of other incubators and accelerators out there. Adeo gives some background and lessons learned as a founding member of TheFunded.com, and shares his process of detecting successful founders as well as predicting which entrepreneurs will fail. As the owner of the LAUNCH Incubator, Jason is in his element comparing and contrasting the structure and practice of the Founder Institute with his guest.

Today Jason is at San Quentin State Prison talking to prisoners participating in The Last Mile (TLM), a tech accelerator & training program to help prepare incarcerated individuals for successful reentry. Jason gives candid feedback on the products they’ve developed in their studies here. We see demos of Jason Jones’ GPA (Getting Parents Attention) that monitors and incentivizes good grades for student athletes, “Big Az” Ford’s f8, a connected fire prevention system, and Chris Schuhmacher’s Fitness Monkey, a platform to help users recover from addiction through health and fitness. Jason also answers tough questions about entrepreneurship, and the importance of making mistakes, overcoming obstacles, and staying true to oneself and one’s goals.