Binance hack, Google and Amazon earnings, Thrive Holdings buys ADT

OpenAI just acquired Odessia, the AI travel agent Francis Davidson started less than a year ago, and he’s joining OpenAI to keep working on travel. The pod sat down with him right before the news broke. It’s a full circle moment, about ten years ago, Francis thought about starting an AI company, saw that a nonprofit called OpenAI was already on it, and went back to building his hospitality startup.Francis was a philosophy major at McGill with a near-perfect GPA who couldn’t land a single hedge fund interview, so he started renting out students’ empty apartments to travelers for the summer. He showed up in SF to fundraise with zero connections, a CRM of 50 VCs, and one strategy: ask everyone he met for intros to the top three people they knew. By 2019 Sonder was worth $1.1B and had signed leases to triple its supply. Then COVID hit and tanked revenue so much it literally broke their financial model.What followed was five years of operating in turnaround mode. Francis warned of impending bankruptcy to get out of leases, organized a “go public or die” SPAC, and a Marriott deal that finally got the business to break even after four years of struggling through Covid. Then the board fired him from his own company he started at 19. Four months later, Sonder filed for bankruptcy.The pod also gets into:Tokenmaxxing is not dead: Francis used 70 billion tokens last month and says his team got about 3x faster once he removed their token limitsBy his math, the world’s current compute can only support 500K to 1M people using AI the way he does, so he thinks we’re underbuildingHis biggest Sonder lesson: he should have let the turnaround guy take over. If your industry gets nuked, walk awayWhy he doesn’t expect mass job loss from AI, and why tour guide might be the job of the futureThey dig into what OpenAI just bought. With Odessia you can plan and book flights, hotels, trains and experiences over iMessage, WhatsApp, email or the browser. Behind the scenes, background agents have written a detailed report on every four and five-star hotel in the world, so it can rank 1,200 New York hotels in under a second on things no filter covers, like which floors are quiet or whether the gym has a squat rack.Finally, Francis talks about his wife Maria Davidson’s new $50M solo fund, Relational Capital, and what the best investors actually do for founders.00:00 Dropping out of college as a philosophy major02:40 Making it in Silicon Valley with ZERO connections04:22 How Silicon Valley has changed over the last 10 years05:31 Managing 1,000+ employees08:19 Does Francis "believe" in philosophy after studying it11:22 COVID killed his hospitality company Sonder14:03 Trying to recover from a 100%+ drop in revenue14:59 How do labs project compute demand17:01 Hot take: tokenmaxxing works20:24 Taking a company public even though he didn't want to21:56 Fired from the company he started at 1927:10 Why he started a company a second time28:36 How do you decide to put an AI agent in a browser vs iMessage38:17 Who will actually use personal agents40:02 The future of work and labor economics46:11 Wife Maria's $50M solo GP fund Relational CapitalThis episode is brought to you by Kalshi. This week Jensen Huang publicly confirmed having an affair and over 50%+ traders on Kalshi think he’s out by the end of 2029 as the CEO of the world’s most valuable company. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code GETTHECHECK.

All 15,000+ Matics that have ever been shipped were built in one building. The pod went inside the Matic factory to see how a home robot goes from a box of parts to a custom greeting at your front door.The pod shows the development of the Matic design, beginning from its origins in 2017, before the company even had an industrial design, to the current version that is sent out today. Matic shipped its first 375 or so paid units in November 2024. It recently moved to a new production line that now allows for 200 robots to be built every shift.Next, the pod follows a robot down the line. Matic inspects 100% of its sub-assemblies from vendors in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Taiwan before they go anywhere near a robot. Matic then flashes its software in-house, gearing up the robot with its own program.From there, each Matic is built in 16 steps along an assembly line before it’s run through five tests: airflow, outbound quality control, noise, camera calibration, and a final sweep and mop on a test track.Finally comes the fan favorite. Every Matic gets programmed with a custom greeting before it ships. Though Matic planned to do that only for its first 400 customers, people loved it so much that the team kept it going, prioritizing the customer experience with birthday and Mother's Day messages included.00:00 — Welcome to the Matic factory!01:12 — Every Matic ever shipped was built right here02:23 — Why Matic inspects 100% of its parts04:21 — The batch of 5,000 noisy motors06:12 — Building a Matic in 16 steps08:01 — The five tests every robot has to pass08:50 — Inside the noise boxes and the 55 decibel rule12:12 — Calibrating five cameras with a robot arm13:50 — Why every Matic ships with a custom greetingThis episode is brought to you byKalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.Known. Use code GETTHECHECK at known.com to skip the waitlist and get a free date.Matic. Use code GETTHECHECK at maticrobots.com/getthecheck for $$ off your order.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

80% of people who buy a robot vacuum stop using it within three months, and the whole category had a Net Promoter Score of negative one. In 2017, Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic, decided to spend the next nine years building the robot that people continue to use.Back then, Mehul and his co-founder Navneet had just left Nest. Silicon Valley had 200+ self-driving car startups yet basically zero companies were building robots for the home, even though families spend about 45 hours a week on chores, 3x more than they spend driving.It turns out homes are harder than roads: There is no Google Maps or GPS for your living room, so the robot has to map itself and figure out where it is.Matic first launched in April 2023 got mostly ignored. However, by pivoting and sending robots to tastemakers with no strings attached, Wired gave Matic its first 10/10 for a robot vacuum in over a decade, amplifying the robot’s reach and audience. Matic went from about 400 robots shipped in 2024 to 5,000 last year to roughly 13,000 this year.Now, by learning from thousands of homes, 99% of the fleet hasn’t gotten stuck in 100 days. Mehul talks about continuing to update their active robots, using pre-built sensors to make voice and gesture capable overnight. Even now, he explains why Rosie the Robot won't be one-shotted, why Matic's next robot is a "five to 10-year-old," and why the company offers six-year vesting and wrote "not for sale" on day one.00:00 — Meet Mehul, co-founder of Matic03:01 — Why robot vacuums had a negative NPS04:49 — Why there's no Google Maps or GPS for your home07:23 — Why Matic took nine years to ship14:52 — How Matic made robot vacuums cool again17:23 — Is a $1,500 robot vacuum worth it?23:02 — The Matic Cues launch that hit 11M views25:55 — Is robotics overfunded? Mehul on humanoids and demos34:17 — Why Matic's next robot is a "five to 10-year-old"37:09 — Six-year vesting and a company that's not for saleThis episode is brought to you byKalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.Known. Use code GETTHECHECK at known.com to skip the waitlist and get a free date.Matic. Use code GETTHECHECK at maticrobots.com/getthecheck to get $$ off your order.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

In this episode of Get the Check, Halloween is in the air and Anika makes her return. The pod breaks down the largest crypto hack ever, the Google and Amazon earnings that dragged down the market, and Thrive’s $7.6B bet on a 150-year-old security company.They start with the Binance hack that shook crypto last week. North Korean hacking group TraderTraitor, the same crew behind the $1.5B Bybit hack in February 2025, drained about $6.3B from Binance’s “Binance 14” wallet. They compromised one engineer’s laptop and sent around 50 requests to the signing machine until one went through. The worst part was Binance’s hot wallet kept refilling itself from cold storage, so the hackers could keep draining it for an hour before anyone noticed. About $3.5B in stablecoins got frozen, which is a little ironic for an industry built on nobody being in control. To fix this, Binance says it will make every customer whole using its $1B SAFU emergency fund plus corporate cash, with no third-party insurer. And if that’s not enough theft for this week, Polymarket also got hacked for $2.6M. Long Kalshi.Next, the pod gets into Google and Amazon earnings. Google dropped about 12%, its biggest fall since 2004, after search slipped below 50% of total revenue for the first time. While AI searches are growing, they are monetizing worse than traditional ones. Google Cloud doubled to around $30B, closing in on AWS at $45B, leaving questions on why exactly Google is winning. Meanwhile capex hit $51B for the quarter, the hyperscalers have sold $218B in bonds this year, and advertisers are furious that Google quietly stopped running fair ad auctions. The conversation spirals into the K-shaped economy and a revisit to why Maya theory on the timing of Anthropic’s IPO.Finally, Thrive Holdings is taking ADT private for $7.6B ($15.3B with debt) at a 46% premium. They are betting that AI can cut the $433M ADT spent on customer service last year while keeping its 6 million customers. The pod walks through the AI roll-up playbook, debates whether engineering at a holdco is the future or just a well-paid detour, and reminds viewers they called roll-ups before anyone else did. Which raises the real question: are the three of them one roll-up away from a med spa empire?Tune in to find out if Thrive is quietly building the surveillance state.00:00 Landon Barker, Heidi Klum, and Maya’s iconic Halloween costumes02:06 Maya relearning how to say the intro03:28 North Korean hackers steal $6.3B from Binance05:16 How one laptop drained Binance’s hot wallet13:30 Will Binance be able to fix this?17:57 Google and Amazon earnings tank the market28:46 The K-shaped economy and shorting the Anthropic IPO33:34 Thrive Holdings takes ADT private for $7.6B38:30 AI Roll-Up Playbook43:01 Should we have started Holdings Co?This episode is brought to you byKalshi, where you can trade on whether the Anthropic IPO actually happens on November 16th. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.Known, if you’re tired of swiping, Known is for you. Use code GETTHECHECK at known.com to skip the waitlist and get a free date.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

In this episode of Get the Check, Maya and Priya hold down the fort (RIP Anika) to cover Anthropic finally filing its S-1, AI uncovering a 14-year-old flaw in the code behind ~70% of the internet, and OpenAI acquiring Orchestra Bio.They start with the long-awaited Anthropic S-1, filed the day of recording, with projections putting the IPO at a $1.5–2T valuation as early as the week of November 16th. The pod walks through how the filing likely saved the market from another “margin call Monday”: a 10% operating margin, compute spend down from $2 to about 55 cents per dollar of revenue, and enough cash after the IPO to have more net cash than any tech company except Berkshire Hathaway. They also point out what’s missing. 80% of revenue comes from models released in the last six months, and Q3 isn’t in the filing.Next, the cyber segment, always Priya’s favorite. Wiz and Calif independently used AI to find PHP-to-Shell, an exploit that lets attackers take over the servers behind websites. The pod covers how responsible disclosure fell apart, from the first exploit attempt Amazon spotted on October 17th to government sites going dark. Finally, they get into OpenAI acquiring Orchestra Bio, which builds agentic workflows that coordinate all the vendors behind getting a drug to market. The pod explains why every day a trial slips can cost a GLP-1 maker around $100M, why tech people overlook pharma (hi, Veeva), and how this fits into OpenAI’s push to deploy its own engineers inside enterprises. Would Orchestra Bio have gotten the pod’s check before the acquisition? Listen to find out why top-down selling in pharma is everything.00:00 Anika leaves the pod (sort of)00:24 Maya’s F1 weekend in Austin01:40 Nicki Minaj at a Trump rally02:22 Welcome and headlines04:01 Breaking down Anthropic’s S-111:51 Cloud marketplaces, AI spend, and bubble talk15:12 Token budgets and $6.6M revenue per employee17:34 AI finds PHP flaws and sites go dark23:25 Another cert disaster26:38 OpenAI buys Orchestra Bio29:49 Why pharma software is a goldmine34:52 Would Orchestra Bio get our check?If the Anthropic IPO has you wanting to call the market, you can trade on it on Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod talks about everyone panicking over the market, Bumble going private for roughly a tenth of its peak valuation, and Modal hitting a $15.75B valuation. A really fun lineup, assuming you haven’t checked your portfolio…They start with the rumored “Black Monday” that thankfully didn’t pan out, but the underlying concerns go deeper than AI companies signing contracts with each other. The pod breaks down how higher energy prices feed into inflation and Treasury yields, making future borrowing more expensive for companies like CoreWeave. Its data center buildout depends on debt, so higher financing costs eat into margins, which makes the business riskier to lend to, which can push borrowing costs even higher (not the kind of flywheel you want). CoreWeave’s CEO points to $100B+ in contracted revenue, but delivering on those commitments requires more GPUs, more data centers, and more financing. Maya, Anika, and Priya get into what hedge funds buying insurance on CoreWeave’s debt are betting on, and whether another big model drop could turn the mood around.Next, the pod gets into Bumble’s $1.3B take-private deal by Ithaca Holdings and whether new ownership can make people excited about downloading Bumble again. The conversation covers Ithaca co-CEOs, former Meta executive John Hegeman and former Instacart COO and CFO Ravi Gupta, plus why Conviction backing this deal is an interesting departure from its usual AI bets. With paying users down 16%, the question is whether an AI concierge can fix the experience or whether the brand itself is the problem. The pod debates the advantage of an existing user base, whether ads could improve dating-app incentives, and a $10K success fee for finding love. Naturally, this comes with a few personal case studies because apparently SF has about seven single people (and two are on the podcast…).Finally, they cover Modal going from $60M in annualized revenue to over $1B as its valuation climbed from $1B to $15.75B. The pod explains why coding agents need sandboxes, why running 20 agents on small tasks can beat giving one agent 20 tasks, and why labs don’t want to pay for idle compute between reinforcement learning runs. They also get into Modal’s cold-start optimizations and why paying only for the compute you use can make more sense than reserving GPUs around the clock. Modal gets the pod’s check, and GTC helps recruit for them if you’re interested in joining.00:00 Maya and Priya hang out with Anika’s ex00:57 OpenAI’s spy drama03:39 101 episodes in and still scheming07:27 Why everyone’s portfolio is down09:31 CoreWeave’s debt is making everyone nervous17:36 Anthropic’s growth, neo clouds, and the private credit boom21:58 Bumble’s $1.3B reset37:01 Why Modal gets our check even at $15BIf reading the CoreWeave news makes you want to track compute markets you can on Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.

Nadya Okamoto has built an audience of more than 6 million followers, founded the period care company August, and spent over a decade turning social media audiences into real communities. Now she’s co-founder and CMO of Pie, the social app bringing online communities into real life. We sat down only 30 minutes after a bird pooped on her but in typical Nadya fashion she still made the podcast and filmed the whole experience, which you can find on her socials (@nadyaokamoto).Nadya originally joined Pie as a user. She started a run club in New York, wanted one place to manage its events and members, and became one of the app’s early power users. That eventually turned into a co-founder gig alongside Bonobos founder Andy Dunn…we wish our app addictions turned into co-founder offers!She tells the pod about starting the role weeks before her wedding, leading her to work from her honeymoon in Switzerland (TikTok was NOT happy about this). She also learned that employees need to tell someone before leaving the country. In her defense, it’s her first time ever having a boss.Nadya also explains why creators can bring early-stage companies both capital and distribution. She began writing $10K to $25K angel checks after raising for August. She talks about why equity, SAFEs, stock options, and advisor grants remain unnecessarily gatekept. She also shares what she’s building at Cherub to help more creators become investors.Finally, the pod talks hustle culture and capitalism. Nadya responds to criticism over working until 1 AM, explains why ambition often overrides her anxiety, and shares how she handles feedback from millions of people. She also discusses losing 8,000 followers after a Meta partnership, whether creators can authentically use AI while criticizing the industry, and why opting out of imperfect systems rarely changes them.00:00 Why Nadya posts every day01:34 From political organizing to content creation02:38 Building August and moving from CPG into tech04:20 Unconventional way Nadya became Pie’s co-founder05:42 Why creators should become angel investors08:20 The gatekeeping of startup equity11:38 Why the IRL economy is growing15:05 Nadya has a boss for the first time18:03 How she manages multiple companies and 6M followers20:05 Getting over the fear of posting online21:30 A bird poops on Nadya before the podcast??22:20 Compartmentalizing stress25:10 Hiring Pie’s marketing team27:15 Why influencing is viewed differently in New York and SF30:00 Using technology to fight the loneliness it helped create32:00 Pie is the matcha of social media??34:00 Capitalism, nonprofits, and changing systems from within38:05 Nadya responds to the hustle culture criticism45:25 Why TikTok hates AI46:15 Losing 8,000 followers after working with Meta

The first time Vivek ever flew internationally, he asked the flight attendant before takeoff, "This is going to San Francisco, right?" He was on his way to a 10-minute Y Combinator interview with PG, Sam, Jessica, Paul Buchheit, and Harj. His co-founder Hari couldn't come because his visa was denied. They got into YC, and started HackerRank which later became the template of how to hire engineering talent efficiently.Vivek started the company in 2010 as Interview Street, a mock interview service. The idea came from his time interviewing engineers at Amazon, where he saw that resumes didn't say much about skill. HackerRank went on to create the online assessment which every engineer has grown to know and well, hate. Now, in what Vivek calls a "refounding moment," they're tearing it down and rebuilding it to match how the job of an engineer has changed in the era of AI.Vivek walks through how tech interviews have always copied whoever the hottest company was. First it was Microsoft's "how many golf balls fit in a 747." Then Google's data structures and algorithms. Then Stripe's API integration rounds, which Maya had to grind through as a new grad in 2022. Now the job is orchestrating agents, so how do you tell a vibe coder from a real production engineer?Vivek's answer is Chakra, HackerRank's agentic interviewer. Candidates work on real-world problems with whatever frontier model and harness they want, and Chakra watches the process. Vivek's take is that anyone can produce an output with AI, so the signal is in how you got there.Chakra is now live and you can try it free at hackerrank.com/chakra.This episode is brought to you by Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code GETTHECHECK.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.00:00 Meet Vivek, Founder of HackerRank02:15 From counting Golf Balls in a 747 to LeetCode05:55 Refounding HackerRank With Chakra08:56 Process vs. Output and why partial credit matters12:31 Who Adopted Online Assessments First14:20 Why Hiring Is a Lagging Indicator17:38 What Candidates Like About Chakra18:20 How to Remove the Incentive to Cheat22:44 The Three Ways People Cheat26:59 Why Hiring Is a Hard Problem and Build-Your-Own Is Overrated28:11 First Indian YC Company and a First International Flight

One of Sam Kececi's investors never got pitched by Sam. They found a link to his Sentience, talked to his digital twin over several days, and by the end the investor asked to write a check. Sam (the real version) just had to send the SAFE.Sam is the founder of Sentience, which builds digital twins of founders, operators, and execs that write, think, and communicate like them. Get the Check co-host Anika tried it over the last couple of weeks, and it actually writes exactly like her.Sam’s hot take is that AI does have taste. It's just one taste, and it's Claude's. Sam's mission comes from a Naval one-liner: no one can compete with you at being you. He can't out-dunk LeBron, but nobody can out-Sam Sam at building his company.They get into what converging on the mean has meant practically. Sam shares the YC startup idea that he’s pretty sure was just Claude slop.Anika also asks about their moat against Anthropic (as any good podcaster or investor does). Sam explains why writing likely isn’t key to unlocking RSI. In fact, if you’re “dumb” your Sentience would be too.They also discuss the technical evolution of agent memory and how to build a harness that remembers relevant context vs. all context. Sentience compresses older memories the way the brain does. And if you ask Sam’s Sentience to write you a poem, it should say "I'm good" instead of generating a haiku about digital twins. Anika also asks if down the line everyone will have their own model.Sam runs his company on his product: nearly every email goes one shot through Sentience, engineering standup is just Sentiences talking to each other, and candidates chat with his twin late into the night after interviews. He also floats a future where you pay to talk to someone's twin, Cameo style.Finally, a speed round where Anika asks about his favorite investor, what a post-AI high school should look like, and where he'd work if he weren't a founder.Sentience is hiring across engineering and growth and you can try it here: https://sentience.com/.This episode is brought to you by Kalshi. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code GETTHECHECK.Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.00:00 What’s the difference between a personal assistant and a digital twin03:25 Wildest Sentience use case: it made someone invest in his company06:54 Is taste actually a moat, or will AI catch up08:36 The reason there are so many AI dentistry companies12:39 Would Sam follow an AI-generated Anika on X13:48 The answer to people who are anti-AI14:39 Is AI replacing human relationships17:31 Why is Anthropic bad at creative writing18:24 Will Sentience be a dumb product if you’re dumb20:42 Memory from a technical POV for AI assistants and digital twins23:05 AI’s emergent behavior is anthropological25:15 Why Sam doesn’t believe in engineering standups26:30 How to monetize consumer AI agents29:01 Sam’s favorite investor30:16 Are we all going to have our own models, or will agent harnesses be durable?33:12 Is the biggest business bottleneck compute34:14 If you could talk to one digital twin, who would you pick?36:00 What should a post-AI high school look like?37:50 Where would you work if you weren’t a founder39:37 What roles are they hiring for? DM us if you’re interested!

This week the pod covers one of the fastest companies ever to $1B ARR, the real reason Anthropic and OpenAI are delaying IPOs, and the data center company that started out mining Bitcoin.They start with Cognition. Devin the “first AI software engineer” launched in March 2024 and was a meme. Now there are ads around SF that say "Remember Devin. It's good now". Turns out the target audience just wasn’t in SF it was huge enterprises like Nvidia, Mercedes, the Army, the Navy, and Citi, which has 40,000 developers on the platform. One mystery customer is 10% of revenue and the pod has theories on who it is. Comeback of the century!Next, token economics. Anthropic dropped Opus 5.5, OpenAI dropped GPT-6 Sol and Luna, and both cut prices in half because nobody's paying for the fancy models anymore. Vercel's data shows Fable 5 lost two-thirds of its spend share in one month, and open source went from 7% to 56%. OpenAI pushed its IPO to 2027, Anthropic is rumored to follow, and the pod gets into what the labs will do now (hint: there’s a reason Anthropic just opened a wet lab). Maya predicts that in the future frontier coding spend is just talent spend — so lower growth rate companies will spend less.Then comes Crusoe, the story the pod had the most fun researching. Two high school best friends started it in 2018 by sticking data centers on oil wells to turn flared gas into Bitcoin, with a seed deck that said basically "we're a Bitcoin business, but we believe in this AI thing" before ChatGPT existed. They chase energy nobody else wants. In Abilene, Texas, there was so much wind power that prices went negative, so they said "we'll take free energy" and that's now OpenAI's 1.2 gigawatt Stargate campus. They sold the crypto business, raised a $3.9B Series F at $30.9B, and are now building data centers in factories and shipping them on trucks. The hosts also go into the data center backlash and why Americans hate data centers.00:00 Weekend recap02:40 Cognition hits $1B ARR faster than anyone06:38 The four eras of AI coding14:30 Anthropic and OpenAI cut token prices 50% and push their IPOs21:20 Why frontier coding spend is going to become talent spend23:27 Crusoe: from Bitcoin mining to a $30.9B Series F31:10 Why data center backlash is the one bipartisan issue33:33 The Boom Supersonic deal that fell apart, and does Crusoe get the checkThis episode is brought to you by Kalshi, where the pod is watching the odds on whether Anthropic IPOs this year or gets pushed to 2027. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.