This Week in Startups - Video

Bastian Lehmann didn't want to start Postmates. Users demanded it. The company he now runs - and loves - is like Uber for courier service, making it easy to have prepared food, or anything else, delivered in under an hour. The service launched in DC this week and is already rolled out in San Francisco, New York, and Seattle. But that wasn't the original idea. Now, like Uber, the service is catching on like wildfire in the rapidly-expanding world of on-demand services, and is profitable in two cities.

Can one guy be both a wunderkind and an elder statesman? If anyone in the world of tech fits the bill, it's Kevin Rose. He made national headlines in 2006 as his site Digg soared in popularity and investors gave it a $60m valuation. He left Digg to found more companies: Milk, Revision3, and Pownce. Now at 36, he helps other entrepreneurs secure funding and develop their ideas - as a VC at Google Ventures, and eventually, through his extremely popular syndicate on AngelList. As of early December, he had 658 backers, to the tune of $2.8m per deal. When he sat down with Jason in November at Launch Hackathon, he described why he 'loves and hates' being a VC, and whether he's ever getting back into the ring as a founder, and tips for pitching your product to investors. Plus, the Bitcoins he sold when they hit $300.

Glenn Greenwald takes his renown - and all of Snowden's leaked documents - with him to a new for-profit news venture backed by Pierre Omidyar. A source inside Uber leaked a screenshot with its revenue numbers to Valleywag, and the company is doing better than observers thought. A look at Twitter a month out of its initial public offering. And for the Bing Launch of the Week: SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket actually launched a commercial satellite into orbit, Amazon's Jeff Bezos unveils plans for drone delivery of packages in 4-5 years, and subscription tech news site The Information launches. Our panel of top journos Sarah Lacy, Paul Carr and Molly Wood dig into the big news. Plus, Paul and Sarah on NSFW's acquisition by Pando.

Rose Broome was walking down the street in San Francisco when she noticed a homeless woman living on the street. She thought, there must be a service to help people in need get crucial items like food and personal hygiene products, with some amount of transparency. When she couldn't find one, she founded HandUp. The for-profit benefit corporation partners with local charities and city services to get more aid directly to homeless and poor people in San Francisco. People in need - members - join HandUp and can create a personal profile on their website. Donors can read individual stories, or give to people they meet in the city via SMS or from the site. Broome isn't only civically-minded. She's ambitious. With progressively minded technologists in the Bay Area looking for ways to give, a large needy population, and millions of dollars in government aid issued in the form of debit cards, she sees HandUp as a tool to solve homelessness through a for-profit venture. Think: a privately-run Food Stamps or SNAP program. Jason gets excited about tackling the seemingly insurmountable issue of homelessness, and how maybe charity isn't enough. Stay tuned for a surprise at the end.

QuizUp is the hottest thing in the App Store right now. Why? It's beautiful, social, and addictive. Everyone one loves trivia, says Founder and CEO Thor Fridriksson. And it's inherently competitive. QuizUp allows you to challenge strangers to matches, chat with them, and get in discussions around anything from physics to Game of Thrones. They go deep about how to develop a great app. Plus, Jason challenges Thor to a match!

Drones, quadcopters and UAVs are some of the hottest products nerds can get their hands on. Why? Flying robots! We break down the space with Chris Anderson of 3D Robotics, and OMGPOP founder and quadcopter enthusiast Charles Forman. Not sure which ones are autonomous, which are goofy consumer gadgets, and which are military or research-grade? Come check it out. From applications in aerial photography, to research, to police work. Plus, massive valuations for Snapchat and Spotify. Will the easy money stick around? Never miss an episode! Subscribe in iTunes: Audio (http://bit.ly/TwiStA (http://bit.ly/TwiStA)) || Video (http://bit.ly/TwiStV (http://bit.ly/TwiStV)) ============= Thanks to our great partners -- show your love for the show by thanking them on Twitter! http://clicktotweet.com/O4Ecy (http://clicktotweet.com/O4Ecy) Mandrill, transactional email from the fine folks at MailChimp. What's transactional email? Only crucial to your business: password resets, order confirmations and more. Sign up at mandrill.com (http://mandrill.com). And Hiscox, provider of small business insurance. Visualize your career with the Hiscox Reactor (http://reactor.hiscoxusa.com), powered by the details of your LinkedIn profile. Every action has a reaction. Learn more at reactor.hiscoxusa.com (http://reactor.hiscoxusa.com). ============= Follow on Twitter: @jason (http://twitter.com/jason)@TWIstartups (http://twitter.com/TWIstartups) (http://twitter.com/jason)@chr1sa (http://twitter.com/chr1sa) @charlesforman (http://twitter.com/charlesforman) LAUNCH: Launch Ticker: http://launch.co  (http://launch.co ) Launch Events (Mobile, Hackathon, Festival): http://events.launch.co (http://events.launch.co) Special thanks to the members of the TWiST Backchannel Program! Highlights 3:10 - Snapchat raising huge valuation. Advertising and virtual goods. No one knows user numbers. Interesting: 70% of users are women 3:55 - JC what do you think, CA? Is this out of line? 4:05 - CA: I’ve stopped guessing at valuations. I’d heard of Snapchat before, but just barely, and because I have kids. 4:35 - JC These things get very big, very quick today. 4:49 - CF: they should take the money and run! 5:30 - When you sold OMGPop, did you feel it was the biggest you could get? 5:48 - CF: We were #1, and where do you go from there? You just go down….maybe that large investment from teens, is taking value out of Facebook 6:44 - JC: Chris, having been the editor of Wired for a long time, do you have inner tells on things like that? 7:05 - I was an early user of Twitter, but I was wrong about that. I don't think anyone can tell if it’s sustainable, or if teenage fickleness is going to move on? 7:33 - JC: Spotify is reporting $600M in revenue (vs Pandora’s).  What do you think? 7:53 - CA - the licensing deals, it’s got apps on all platforms, it’s a sophisticated cloud service. 8:22 - CF: I use it; I love it. Engineer friends are going to use those subs to explore other opportunities for revenue.  Video, etc. Extreme brand loyalty to the people who use it. 11:00 - 12:05 - JC: Chris, why did you leave Wired? 12:30 - CA: It boils down to Follow your heart. But I started messing around with Lego Mindstorm with my kids. They weren’t impressed with walking or rolling robots. What if they could fly? They lost interest, but I started a community called DIY Drones.  The 2007 period is when sensors became super cheap. The community grew; people shared design files. The open source model could build a drone. I was having my kids pack kits into pizza companies. 14:25 - JC: can you describe these? When you think “Drone,’ you think military drone. 14:45 - CA we’ve had radio controlled aircraft for decades. Shows quadcopter & octocopter.  They have autopilot, which means they fly themselves. Difference between radio control and UAM and fully autonomous drones. Only been possible over the past few years – smartphone technology.

If you've never heard of AngelList or Naval Ravikant, you'll never forget the man or the platform after this interview. The online community lets potential investors and startups mingle, meet, and get deals flowing. And now with the addition of syndicates, smaller investors can join in on the deals of angel investors they back. As Naval put it, "it's like Kickstarter, but for equity." When he sat down with Jason at LAUNCH Hackathon, they cut to the core of what early-stage entrepreneurs want to know. Should I join an accelerator? Which one? How do I get through my Series A crunch? When do I stay lean, and when do I try to scale? All these questions and more answered in this great episode.

There wasn't a big enough swear jar! And things got juicy... and deep. When Jason sat down with Dave McClure, he opened up about the PayPal mafia, which VCs are doing the best work, and how he was essentially fired from Mint at age 41. Live from RockSpace, Jason talks with the founding general partner of 500 Startups. If you haven't yet heard this interview, now's the time.

No one needs an introduction to Wikipedia. It's the 6th-most visited site worldwide, and 7th in the U.S. But when it comes to the company's origin, the first name on your lips is probably not Larry Sanger. Larry was hired by Jimmy Wales to edit his online encyclopedia, then called Nupedia in 2000. It was Larry who conceived of the site's ethos, built the community -- and crucially -- adopted a little-known editing system called 'wiki.' Though rarely, if ever, recognized by Wales, it was Sanger who put the 'wiki' in the Wikipedia. He even coined the name. Today on the show, the little-known history of one of the most important innovations of our lifetimes. Jason sits down with Wikipedia cofounder Larry Sanger. Plus, how if the site had stayed for-profit, Wales would have been richer than Larry Page.

Need to get smart about online ads? Wait, that's not a question. Your business definitely does. Sahil Jain of AdStage is here to break it down. The 23 year-old ad genius won LAUNCH 2013 in the Best Business category. That's after dropping out of high school to start working at Yahoo when he was just 17. When he sat down with Jason he gave us the scoop: why Bing is an underrated place to advertise, why LinkedIn clicks are priced so high, and why multitouch attribution is the future of advertising. Plus, how retargeting works. Sahil should know -- AdStage takes ad campaigns for Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, and soon Twitter, and brings them into one dashboard to maximize the money you spend on advertising.

Rafe Needleman is a long-time technology journalist and frequent guest. He runs developer relations and the accelerator at Evernote. When Jason stopped by Evernote HQ, Rafe turned the tables, and interviewed him. From how his goals as an entrepreneur have changed over time, to his original career path (FBI agent), Jason goes deep on some of the personal motivations that keep entrepreneurs going. Plus, how the startup ecosystem has been helped -- and hurt -- by low costs and big capital.

It's starting to seem like Google wins at everything. (For more on that, see Jason's recent editorial (http://blog.launch.co/blog/googlewinseverything-part-1.html)). They're jumping into the smart watch contest, with a model due to arrive in the next few months, and just revealed that mysterious barges off San Francisco Bay and Portland, Maine are not floating data centers. Instead, they're showrooms for Google X projects. In other words, party barges. The NSA is still trying to spoil the party, however. The latest revelation from the Washington Post, drawing on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, shows the NSA attacked servers that link up data centers owned by Google and Yahoo. That's on top of limited front-door access the agency has negotiated with internet giants. And the Launch of the Week, brought to you by Bing! Motorola teams up with Phonebloks on modular phones. An affordable desktop 3D printer raised $3m on Kickstarter. And aircraft manufacturer Aerion is planning a supersonic business jet. Liz Gannes of AllThingsD and Declan McCullagh of CNET join in on the fun. Last chance to register for LAUNCH Hackathon! Nov 8-10 in San Francisco: hackathon.launch.co (http://hackathon.launch.co) Never miss an episode! Subscribe in iTunes: Audio (http://bit.ly/TwiStA (http://bit.ly/TwiStA)) || Video (http://bit.ly/TwiStV (http://bit.ly/TwiStV)) ============= Thanks to our great partners -- show your love for the show by thanking them on Twitter! http://clicktotweet.com/l2ubR (http://clicktotweet.com/l2ubR) Squarespace (http://squarespace.com/twist) makes it fast and easy to create exceptional-looking website. No credit card required, starts at just $8/month. Try it free, and if you decide to keep it, use the code TWIST11. And to Mandrill, transactional email from the fine folks at MailChimp. What's transactional email? Only crucial to your business: password resets, order confirmations and more. Sign up at mandrill.com (http://mandrill.com). ============= Follow on Twitter: @jason (http://twitter.com/jason)@TWIstartups (http://twitter.com/TWIstartups) (http://twitter.com/jason)@declanm (http://twitter.com/declanm) @lizgannes (http://twitter.com/lizgannes) LAUNCH: Launch Ticker: http://launch.co  (http://launch.co ) Launch Events (Mobile, Hackathon, Festival): http://events.launch.co (http://events.launch.co) Special thanks to the members of the TWiST Backchannel Program! Highlights 4:27: Jason: Is there any company as ambitious as Google right now? 5:01  Which of their projects is most fascinating? 5:09: Liz: unclear whether moon shots will work. self-driving cars cool. Still, no one else is driving around the world taking photographs of every single street. They’ve achieved what seemed like moonshots a few years ago. 6:09 - Declan : Google is looking at big problems. Automobile accidents, etc. In terms of the barge, more interesting when we didn’t know what it was. 7:20: bizarre - floating barge showroom. what is the thinking there when we have Apple stores everywhere? 7:40: Liz: so fun to watch this. people are all over this. harassing barge. 10:00: Jason: Google and Yahoo servers “hacked” by the NSA - quotes on purpose 10:40: Declan: Companies should be outraged. We should be outraged. From the NSA’s perspective. 3 ways to do it: 1. front door. 2. snip the connections between users and Google. 3. Point a parabolic microphone at Google’s windows. That’s what this feels like. 12:25: - 14:05  Thank you http://Squarespace.com (http://squarespace.com). 14:09 Jason: how is this going over, overseas? Will this negatively impact US companies? 15:50: Jason: Slide from NSA MUSCULAR deck looks like a big post-it note by Dilbert. Declan is this real? 16:29 - Declan: Everything leak attributed to Snowden has turned out to be real so far. no reason to assume this isn’t real. We don’t know what percentage of links were already encrypted. The overseas caveat is kind of silly. 18:36 - Bing! Launch of Week

Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet. Almost. Quantcast ranks it #31 in the U.S.. But with 81 million monthly views worldwide, it’s ahead of CNN and the New York Times. Celebrities, book authors, even President Obama are hosting Ask Me Anything threads to reach that massive audience, which skews young, male and libertarian. Alexis Ohanian and cofounder Steve Huffman started Reddit in the inaugural YCombinator class in 2005. After selling Reddit to Condé Nast in October of 2006, Alexis stayed on until 2010. Now, he invests in companies and advises other young entrepreneurs to have fun, make money, and do good on the internet. When he sat down with Jason in New York City, Alexis talked about the wonder of a multimillion dollar exit at age 23, avoiding censorship on reddit, and how tech leaders need to step up to politics in an era of SOPA, PIPA and NSA intrusions into privacy. His new book is Without Their Permission.

Entrepreneur and angel investor -- commonly heard together. But add Oscar & Emmy winner? You’re almost definitely talking about Bill Warner. The founder of AVID Technology revolutionized film and music with digital editing suites AVID & ProTools, and many other products along the way. Bill is also a great champion of entrepreneurship in Massachusetts -- he mentors companies through MIT Engineering, TechStars Boston, MassTLC Innovation unConference, and helps them grow at the Brickyard Collaboration Space in Cambridge. More than the idea, he invests in the entrepreneur. When he sat down with Jason at This Week in Startups Live, they discussed the future of angel investing, how Bill missed his chance to get in early on Twitter, and much more.

Among the many companies at LAUNCH Mobile & Wearables, Pebble and Misfit Wearables are pushing the wearables market to new places. Pebble took the possibilities of crowdfunding to new extremes, raising $10m on Kickstarter. Cofounder and CEO Eric Migicovsky shows us the new features and possibilities, as heavyweights Apple and Samsung see the possibilities, and are trying their own smart watches. Misfit Wearables, meanwhile has design on lock. Its tiny, sleek tracker looks like a necklace or lapel decoration. And it was an accident on the road to another product, which CEO Sonny Vu hints at in his interview with Jason.