Get the Check

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/.
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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

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down the week AI safety took over the timeline: Dario's "We Must Pace the Frontier" essay, OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, and Apple's foldable iPhone Duo.
They start with the resignation tweet that hit 171 million views in six days, with Anthropic's own head of alignment publicly agreeing there's a 10% chance we're all dead within a decade uhhh what. The pod runs through every theory: regulatory capture, an IPO-timed cover story for businesses no longer paying frontier prices, and Anika's theory that the whole rollout, Dwarkesh essay included, was coordinated between Sam, Elon, and Dario. Next they debrief Dario's essay itself on RSI and his three step plan. The Nasdaq dropped 1.5% this morning on the news.
Next, GPT-6 Astra: OpenAI's biggest training run ever, 98.6 on ARC-AGI 3, a 10,000-agent swarm taking a swing at Navier-Stokes, and computer use that's finally good. It's also the first OpenAI model classified as a critical cybersecurity capability, which has Maya wanting to change all her passwords. The pod agrees OpenAI is so back, and chat about ChatGPT trying to looksmaxx Anika during a glasses run in New York.
Finally, Apple's September event: the $1,999 iPhone Duo arrives seven years after Samsung's foldable, in a market that only moves 20 million units a year, aka just one month of iPhone sales. Maya has been waiting years for this phone and now isn't sure she wants it. Classic Maya haha.
Tune in to find out if the pod would give the Duo their check.
This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, where the pod checks the odds on AI milestones and market swings in real time. 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 Debriefing NYC
07:29 The AI researcher tweet that hit 171M views
09:46 Does Anthropic have an incentive to over blow AI doomerism
11:49 Why didn't Sundar and Zuck comment publicly
13:05 Dario's essay on pacing the frontier
17:06 Anika's hot take that the doomer takes were coordinated
19:34 The China problem
25:13 The nuclear weapons parallel
26:15 Our take on how serious AI safety risks are
26:41 Bernie's corporate death penalty for superintelligence
27:58 The market reaction
28:59 GPT-6 Astra
29:22 Is it AGI
31:28 Why AI's computer use was so bad for so long
33:07 The startups Astra killed
33:40 Astra and cybersecurity
35:11 Astra on the benchmarks
39:25 Loop transformers are more efficient but a safety risk
40:24 Maya still loves Googling
41:02 ChatGPT tries to looksmaxx Anika
41:51 Apple's September event
42:42 iPhone prices keep creeping up
43:20 Maya wants a Duo (or does she??)
46:13 How big is the foldable phone market actually
48:01 Coding from your phone is here

Years ago Michelle Lim posted an essay about Marxism and startups. This year it landed Flint a Fortune 500 customer. This week Get the Check sat down with Michelle to talk about writing online as a founder, running a third of Robinhood's app at 19, joining Warp when the company was a slide deck, and of course scaling Flint.
Maya and Anika get into how a founding engineer becomes a head of growth. Michelle ran Warp's launch back when nobody did launch videos, built the referral flows and lifecycle emails herself, and kept hiring until the board asked her to step into the role. Michelle’s experience at Warp turned into Flint, the first self-improving system for performance marketing: AI agents that run your ads and optimize your landing pages for you.
The hosts also get into her startup hot takes like why you should reference check your manager and hold out for great hires even if it means moving your own office furniture.
00:00 How many agents do you run at once?
02:05 Singapore’s culture around careers
04:01 The class at Yale that changed her life
04:43 Learning to code in her 20s
05:19 Interning at Slack and Robinhood when they were early
07:12 Why Robinhood put a news feed in the app
08:56 Meeting Ali Partovi changed her life
10:13 Joining Warp off a slide deck
16:34 Moving from eng to growth
17:31 Making the first launch video on X (we think…pls don’t fact check this)
20:28 Hiring social media creators at tech companies
23:14 Hot take, developer marketing is the most valuable job in tech right now
28:17 Reference check your manager
29:28 Why Michelle still hires new grads when many of her friends don't
30:30 The one resume tell that a candidate will be good
30:59 What Flint does
34:30 Landing a Fortune 10 customer
41:09 Michelle's writing on Marxism
45:19 How to get hired at Flint
This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, the prediction market where you can trade on the stories the pod covers every week. 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.