Top News | Intel CEO out: Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger is out as of yesterday, a major shakeup at the American chip giant that has stumbled in recent years. Previously, Gelsinger left Intel to head VMware before returning to the semiconductor company. However, coming back to Intel was not enough to turn its fortunes around. The company’s stock is off 50% year-to-date, Google Finance reports. Whomever next takes the Intel CEO role on has one heck of a job ahead of them. OpenAI considers ads: While it doesn’t have near-term plans, OpenAI products might feature advertisements in the future. Given that OpenAI is famously unprofitable, it may need to hunt up fresh revenue in the future. And ads are big business. Instacart and Amazon are well-known examples of companies that built large advertising businesses despite not having them in their original remit. And with other AI companies like Perplexity tinkering with ads, OpenAI would not be alone in the effort. Tenstorrent raises $693M more: Samsung Securities and AFW Partners — along with a host of other investors, including Jeff Bezos’ own capital — have pushed a small mountain of cash into Tenstorrent, a TWiST500 company. Tenstorrent’s own ‘Tensix’ processors, which it packages into PCIe boards, desktop setups, and a cloud offering. Along with Etched and Cerebras (Alex’s S-1 notes here), Tenstorrent is one of the current market bets to take a bite out of Nvidia.
| TWiST500 | Given that there’s big TWiST500 news from Tenstorrent above, we’d normally spend our time digging in a bit more. Not today. There’s more to do. | First, I’ve updated the TWiST500 to include Vatn Systems — a company that came up again on the show today — and The Browser Company. You might know it’s Arc browser. I’ve played with it but remain on Chrome due to sheer corporate-internal inertia. Regardless, it’s a neat company and one that has raised $68 million to date, according to Crunchbase. | News from the company underscores that The Browser Company doesn’t merely want to build a better browser in the current sense. Instead, it announced a new project called ‘Dia’ that fuses AI into browsers by adding memory (recollection of your personal digital context) and the ability for the blinking cursor we all know and love to do a lot more than it is currently able to. Mix in something akin to Anthropic’s Computer Use effort, and the result is something that looks incredibly fresh. | Dia doesn’t appear to be near to release, but the sheer jump it may offer us, the regular, Internet-using population, could be enormous. Call me an optimist, but I dig it. Onto the list with The Browser Company! — Alex | | A message from DigitalOcean | Whether you are just getting started with AI, or seeing your project take off, DigitalOcean is the cloud platform that lets you focus on what matters: building killer apps. Right now get up to $100K in free credits at https://www.do.co/twist. Terms and conditions apply. | This Week in Startups | E2052: Jason and Alex tackle the latest headlines, starting with Hunter Biden's pardon and its broader implications for presidential power. They discuss crypto regulation shifts, Michael Saylor's Bitcoin strategy, and Sequoia's global investment search. Plus, they explore nearshoring trends, credit card delinquencies, and Bernie Sanders' populist stance on defense spending. They wrap up with Bitcoin predictions and a deep dive into Dogecoin's leaderboard. | E2051: Jason and Alex sit down with a fantastic guest—Alex Kendall, founder and CEO of Wayve, an AI company working on self-driving. You might recall that Wayve raised $1 billion earlier this year, but TWIST wanted to know how the company intends to commercialize —and how soon. From there, it was back to the Bitcoin mines. Figuratively, as the hosts dug into MicroStrategies' Bitcoin buying bet. Precisely why it is trading at such a NAV premium remains occluded to the show, but we did chase down its debt terms. | E2050: Jason and Alex have Fredrik Haga on the show to discuss Norway's controversial wealth tax and its impact on startup formation, including the exodus of top taxpayers. They explore Dune Analytics' revenue growth, Michael Saylor's bold Bitcoin strategy, and OpenAI's new browser project and its potential to reshape search. Plus, they dive into CoreWeave's IPO and the evolving GPU cloud market. | TWiST Partner Offers | Squarespace: Turn your idea into a new website! Go to https://www.Squarespace.com/TWIST for a free trial. When you’re ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. LinkedIn Jobs: A business is only as strong as its people, and every hire matters. Go to https://www.linkedin.com/twist to post your first job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Notion: Notion combines your notes, docs, and projects into one beautifully designed space with AI built right in. Try it for free today at https://notion.com/twist
| LAUNCH Cloud Kitchens Incubator | Applications are open for Cohort 2 of the LAUNCH CloudKitchens Incubator (LiCK). We're looking for food entrepreneurs who wish to expand into the ghost kitchen space or tech founders with a team and a great idea. The application and more information can be found at https://ck.launch.co/. | | The TWiST500 newsletter is the new, updated, and improved TWiST Ticker. |
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