This Week in Startups - Video

Gil Penchina arrived in Silicon Valley in the late '90s with few contacts and a general interest in investing in startups. How did he become one of the top angels in tech? First, he attended 2 networking events a night, nearly every night, for a year. He was in early on PayPal, LinkedIn, and now is leveraging his influence through AngelList syndicates. He and Jason reveal how their growing influence with founders is making venture capitalists nervous, throwing elbows. This is a can't-miss interview for would-be angels and startups looking to get into the heads of their would-be investors.

Israel is exploding with startups and an entrepreneurial culture. Why? It's the Jewish mother, Yossi Vardi told Jason when they sat down at the Code Conference. And it's not about religion, but rather the guilt that pushes young people to meet their parents' sky-high expectations. Vardi backed ICQ, which was the largest internet acquisition to date when AOL bought it 1998 for over $400m. Plus, his "spray-and-pray" investment philosophy and why he passed on Waze.

Do you have a financial advisor? If you're under 40, the answer is probably no. That's exactly who Wealthfront hopes to reach. First, users pick their risk tolerance through a free, no-sign-up quiz. If they decide to move money over, they can sit back and let the internal engines take over. Wealthfront CEO Adam Nash sat down with Jason at the Code Conference and insists: individual investors and financial advisors will never beat the market. Younger users want to know their money is being looked after day and night. Now with over $1b being managed in the system, Wealthfront is betting those users will come to them first. Plus, Adam shares tales of his first job out of college at Apple, and what happened when he bounded up to Steve Jobs in the cafeteria.

Peter Pham and Mike Jones know a thing or two about building startups and helping them grow. Their project Science Inc. is a little bit incubator, a little bit growth hacking, with some acquisition power, too. "We call it a studio," Peter told Jason when the cofounders sat down for an interview at the Code Conference. Science has backed DogVacay and Dollar Shave Club, and acquired Delicious this year, the once ubiquitous social bookmarking site. Peter and Mike explain their model, and emphasize that no, they are not a fund. Plus, we dig deep on the career troughs that immediately preceded this venture: Peter with Color.com and Mike's time as the last CEO of MySpace.

Aaron Hirschhorn and his wife went on vacation a few years ago, and found that boarding their dogs cost more than the cross-country flights and accommodations. The germ of an idea - cost-effective, loving, in-home pet boarding - started with their own house. Since then, DogVacay has grown to cities around the country, with thousands of hosts. Aaron sits down with Jason to talk about the nuts and bolts of how you take a great, consumer-friendly idea, and really sell it to the press, find technical talent, and find your passion along the way.

Twitter considered buying Soundcloud. AT&T made a bid to buy DirecTV. GoPro is going public and wants to move away from hardware toward content creation. Why does everyone want to be a media company? And what does YouTube want with Twitch.TV after pouring money into video-game heavy multichannel network Machinima? Ben Parr of Dominate Fund and Dawn Chmielewski of Recode join us for this very lively roundtable. Plus, Matt Cutts search moves and in the Bing Launch of the Week: the internet of things comes to children's iPad games, golf clubs and even toothbrushes!

What's in a name? It's either a literal description of your company, or it evokes something in your customer. Think: Yahoo, Google. In this edition of WSGR Startup Basics from This Week in Startups, host Jason Calacanis shares tips and tricks for finding a great name. Plus how important is the .com domain?

With rapid population growth, limited resources and ever-increasing demands on our time, it's hard to eat well. On stage at LAUNCH Festival 2014, we look at the future of food. Taste-testing plant-based alternatives to eggs with Hampton Creek Foods, and the powdered shake intended to fulfill all your nutritional needs, called Soylent. Plus, leading venture capitalist Tim Draper is looking at the future of the state of California, and whether it might be better off as six smaller entities.

Marijuana is now legal for medical uses in 20 U.S. states, and for recreation in Washington and Colorado. What was once an industry of stoners, dealers and drug cartels has become increasingly polished and professional. With that, a batch of startups and investors who want to seize on the opportunity, looking to a time in the not-too-distant future when getting high could be legal throughout the U.S. In this special edition of This Week in Startups, Jason talks to potrepreneur AJ Gentile, who runs LA's SpeedWeed, a medical marijuana delivery service, which might one day be Uber for weed. And, Troy Dayton of the ArcView group, which hosts angel forums and pitch competitions for cannabis-related business. It's not just pot shops, people, we're talking vaporizers, testing equipment, infrastructure and farming technology.

Did you imagine you'd see a police robot in your lifetime? William Santana Li demos the stuff of science fiction with the beautiful Knightscope robot at LAUNCH Festival 2014. And if you haven't heard of Coin, it's the credit card that stores all your others. No reason to lug around a fat wallet anymore. Check out this real-time demo live on stage with Coin founder Kanishk Parashar.

How can startups help solve urban problems? And what's government's role? Those two questions were top of mind when Jason sat down with California's Lieutenant Governor, Gavin Newsom. An entrepreneur himself and former mayor of San Francisco, Newsom went beyond the stump speech to share his vision for the city, and the role that technology will continue to play in reshaping it. Top of mind: has San Francisco become Manhattan? Don't miss this meeting of minds across business and politics.

If you've ever looked at Reddit or come across a funny animal picture online, chances are good you've visited imgur. With 128m unique visitors per month, the photo sharing site is both storage and social network. Alan Schaaf founded Imgur while he was still in college at Ohio University, frustrated by poor image sharing options on Reddit. After 5 years bootstrapping - and all that insane traffic - the company took on venture capital for the first time this year: $40m from Andreessen Horowitz and Reddit itself. Jason sits down with Alan to ask whether imgur and Reddit are competitors and how the company will grow with the influx of funding.

In the mid 2000s, Flickr was a red hot startup. Cofounder Stewart Butterfield gets really honest with Jason talking about the early days of Flickr (initially as a tool for a failed game company), its acquisition by Yahoo and how he and the burgeoning photo site changed there. His next big project, Slack, is a IRC-style workplace chat tool that's the first product from his next company, Tiny Speck. Listen in to find out how this, too, was an enterprise tool born of a game that didn't last.

Why start a seed-stage VC firm? For Hunter Walk and Satya Patel, they wanted to work together again. The friends met at Google in the early 2000s as product managers on AdSense. Hunter joined the YouTube team when Google acquired it, Satya eventually moved on to Twitter, and to become a VC. Yes, they could have retired on those pre-IPO Google stock options. Instead, they founded Homebrew. Less than a year old, their initial $25m fund quickly grew to $35m, primarily from institutions. In this episode, we go deep on Google's inner workings: Hunter and Satya tell Jason who was really running the company when Eric Schmidt was CEO, how Larry Page has streamlined where questions and answers come from, and why YouTube on its own could be worth $75b. Plus, how starting a small VC firm to fund seed-stage startups, is a lot like raising a seed round at a startup.

The CEO of VC-backed ad startup RadiumOne got off too easily on domestic battery charges. In legal news, the FCC's next attempt at writing net neutrality rules will likely include a "fast lane" to allow ISPs to charge Netflix, Disney, and others extra for better speeds. Aereo hits the Supreme Court, Google may add wifi to its rapidly expanding fiber offering, and HBO's back catalogue will now be available to non-subscribers on Amazon Prime. Plus, in the Bing Launch of the Week: 3D printing with circuits, a "lamp" listening device that tweets the conversations it overhears, and on Kickstarter, the Ion light pairs with your phone, and changes colors to match the music. Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, Amy Schatz of Re/code, and long-time TWIST friend Tyler Crowley join us.