How Founders Are Building the Next Great Startups | Paid.ai, iTruckr & Tenax AI | E2175
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2025
⏱️ 77 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Today’s show:
In this TWiST founder triple-shot, Alex digs into the real-world rollout of AI agents: Paid.ai’s Manny Medina explains agent economics and value-based pricing, iTruckr’s Camilo Ramirez shows agents booking loads and coordinating drivers, and Tenax’s Elise Myrans demos computer vision + drones that score a single home’s wildfire/flood risk for smarter underwriting—plus live office-hours on winning enterprise pilots without getting stuck in PoC purgatory.
Timestamps:
(00:00) Brainstorming hacks for sales cycles in regulated industries — castles, moats & alligators!
(03:50) Meet Paid.ai: tracking costs & monetization for AI agents
(04:35) Paid.ai’s Manny Medina on the “year of agents” & early enterprise traction
(09:04) Netsuite - Download the ebook CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist
(11:06) The tough economics of AI agents vs SaaS — margins squeezed by tokens
(18:20) How Paid.ai gets granular: tracking signals & agent activity with OpenTelemetry
(21:20) Coda - Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist
(29:16) Enter iTruckr: Camilo Ramirez brings AI dispatch to the freight industry
(31:43) .TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today.
(39:02) Scaling from small fleets to mid-sized trucking companies — lessons from AI Trucker
(55:59) Tenax ai helps homeowners & insurers manage wildfire, flood & climate risk
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Thank you to our partners:
(09:04) Netsuite - Download the ebook CFO’s Guide to AI and Machine Learning for free at https://www.netsuite.com/twist
(21:20) Coda - Empower your startup with Coda’s Team plan for free—get 6 months at https://www.Coda.io/twist
(31:43) .TECH: Say it without saying it. Head to get.tech/twist or your favorite registrar to get a clean, sharp .tech domain today.
Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland
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Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com
Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@founderuniversity1916
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So we need some vanguard here. |
| 0:02.3 | We need some early adopters who want to get early access. |
| 0:05.3 | So great. |
| 0:05.7 | Let's get some of those going. |
| 0:07.4 | And then the question I would put, this is something I'm loving, brainstorming around right now, |
| 0:12.8 | are different ways to hack sales cycles in really regulated industries that are slow moving, |
| 0:20.2 | right? So in that B-to-B space. I love talking about |
| 0:23.1 | this. And I love, I don't think you and I have talked about it, I would love to hear your thoughts |
| 0:26.5 | on that. You know, there's a tough one. You know, whenever you go into education, let's say, |
| 0:31.0 | or you go into housing, as you are, healthcare, these are some of the giant castles that are hard to scale. |
| 0:41.3 | We got moats around them. They got strawberries, got alligators in there, got arrow slits. It's not fun. |
| 0:48.3 | This weekend startups is brought to you by dot tech. Say it without saying it. Head to get. Dot Tech slash twist or your favorite |
| 0:57.4 | registrar to get a clean, sharp dot tech domain today. Coda. Coda empowers your startup by bringing |
| 1:03.8 | words, tables, and teams together. Strategize, plan, and track goals effectively with all your |
| 1:09.4 | valuable data in one place. |
| 1:11.4 | Go to coda.io slash twist to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. |
| 1:18.2 | And NetSuite. |
| 1:20.0 | The business landscape is very chaotic right now. |
| 1:23.1 | That's why you need NetSuite by Oracle. |
| 1:25.9 | Download the CFO's guide to AI and machine learning |
| 1:28.5 | for free at NetSuite.com slash twist. |
| 1:32.6 | Hey, everybody, welcome back to Twist. This is Alex. In today's episode, it's all about |
... |
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