Get the Check

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 HackerRank
02:15 From counting Golf Balls in a 747 to LeetCode
05:55 Refounding HackerRank With Chakra
08:56 Process vs. Output and why partial credit matters
12:31 Who Adopted Online Assessments First
14:20 Why Hiring Is a Lagging Indicator
17:38 What Candidates Like About Chakra
18:20 How to Remove the Incentive to Cheat
22:44 The Three Ways People Cheat
26:59 Why Hiring Is a Hard Problem and Build-Your-Own Is Overrated
28:11 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 twin
03:25 Wildest Sentience use case: it made someone invest in his company
06:54 Is taste actually a moat, or will AI catch up
08:36 The reason there are so many AI dentistry companies
12:39 Would Sam follow an AI-generated Anika on X
13:48 The answer to people who are anti-AI
14:39 Is AI replacing human relationships
17:31 Why is Anthropic bad at creative writing
18:24 Will Sentience be a dumb product if you’re dumb
20:42 Memory from a technical POV for AI assistants and digital twins
23:05 AI’s emergent behavior is anthropological
25:15 Why Sam doesn’t believe in engineering standups
26:30 How to monetize consumer AI agents
29:01 Sam’s favorite investor
30:16 Are we all going to have our own models, or will agent harnesses be durable?
33:12 Is the biggest business bottleneck compute
34:14 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 founder
39:37 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 recap
02:40 Cognition hits $1B ARR faster than anyone
06:38 The four eras of AI coding
14:30 Anthropic and OpenAI cut token prices 50% and push their IPOs
21:20 Why frontier coding spend is going to become talent spend
23:27 Crusoe: from Bitcoin mining to a $30.9B Series F
31:10 Why data center backlash is the one bipartisan issue
33:33 The Boom Supersonic deal that fell apart, and does Crusoe get the check
This 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.

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down the three launches taking over the timeline: Jev, the new System 1 model from typesafe.ai, Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant, and Spec, Snapchat's big AR glasses keynote.
They start with Jev, whose launch video pulled 36 million views on X. Founded by Diogo Almeida, one of the co-creators of ChatGPT, the pitch is a model that's 200x faster and 400x cheaper than a frontier LLM because it doesn't generate text at all — it makes decisions. Maya breaks down how it works under the hood, and why its sweet spot is high decision volume with bounded answers. The pod debates if trading bots will be a killer use case or purely hype. Priya explains how she used Jev to sort candidates in GTC's recruiting inbox.
Next, the pod gets into Muse, Meta's Instinct competitor that hit 900K users in its first week. Priya's already sold because it connects to iMessage, which Instinct can't do. Anika is mid-switch after Instinct got slow, stopped being proactive, and can't even check out a cart anymore. The girls debate whether it's worse to hand your data to Meta or a startup — they end up agreeing tune in to hear what they pick. Meanwhile, Instinct is raising at a $10 billion valuation with around 100K active users. During the Sunday recording the hosts say they’re long Meta and woke up Monday to the stock up 11%.
Then comes Spec. Maya watched the entire keynote and calls it objectively the best AR glasses out there, but she still wouldn't buy them. Snap popped 2% on the news but is still down about 93% over five years, and Evan's control of the company has kept activist investors locked out.
Finally, the pod announces its SF Tech Week event with Brown Girl Angels on October 10th at the AngelList office, featuring Jaya Gupta of Foundation Capital, and Brown Girl Angels founder Bhargavi, with Anika moderating.
Also, the pod ate dinner next to Taylor Swift?! Tune in for the full story.
This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, whose market calibration data the pod literally cites mid-episode to explain how Jev might be trained. 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.
00:00 Marc Benioff moggs at Dreamforce00:22 Why your husband should be ‘pre-economic’05:12 Jev is 200x faster and 400x cheaper than LLMs22:16 Muse vs Instinct: AI assistant wars29:42 Is Snapchat back with the Spec launch