This 22-Year-Old Built TikTok for Mobile Games, and It’s Growing Fast | E2276
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
LinkedIn Jobs - LinkedIn.com/twist Every.io - every.io Render - render.com/twist
Today’s show:
*Imagine scrolling through mobile games the way your flip through your TikTok feed. What if you could build your own game in 90 seconds and share it with the world? That’s what over 100,000 users are enjoying right now on Nanogram.
On TWiST, we meet the co-founders: 22-year-old CEO Albert Brotherton and 24-year-old CTO Boris Radilov. They demo the app for us on the air, and Jason immediately spies the potential. Power users are playing 25+ games per session already.
We’re digging into the co-founders future plans, including the potential for ads in your game feed, in this TWiST exclusive.
PLUS domestic helper bots are here. NEO from 1X Technologies can do the laundry, open the door for guests, and even read and understand Post-It Note messages.
Alex talks with CEO Bernt Børnich about building the safety-first 66-lb humanoid, why world models are so crucial for training robots in particular, and why homes are even tougher places for robots to navigate than factory floors.
Timestamps:0:59 Nanogram co-creators Albert and Boris join the show
3:42 Nanogram is TikTok for casual AI-generated games
4:27 Building Nanogram with Google Gemini
5:49 Draper and Associates: https://www.draper.vc
6:11 Integrating ads into the game feed
7:36 Roblox: https://www.roblox.com World of Warcraft: https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com
8:25 Building in New York
9:07 Jason is obsessed with the Staples Baddie https://www.tiktok.com/@blivxx
10:12 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/twist
20:36 Every.io - For all of your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes or other back-office administration needs, visit https://every.io
21:40 1X CEO and founder Bernt Børnich joins the show https://x.com/BerntBornich
22:31 Designing robots to actually live around people
26:30 Teaching NEO about movement in the physical world
29:00 TechCrunch coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2026/01/13/neo-humanoid-maker-1x-releases-world-model-to-help-bots-learn-what-they-see/
29:58 Render: Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.
31:04 Moving beyond training data to true general intelligence
33:17 Ensuring NEO pursues the safest possible path
34:19 Why are world models so important?
41:51 1X World Model Challenge on GitHub: https://github.com/1x-technologies/1xgpt
45:14 Robots need to train on a lot of data… Where does it all come from?
50:14 Manufacturing NEO from raw materials in San Carlos
56:32 Robots building robots
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Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to This Week in Startup. |
| 0:01.4 | With me, Lon Harris. I'm Jason Calacanus. |
| 0:03.5 | This Week in Startups is brought to you by Render. |
| 0:06.6 | Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, render. |
| 0:11.6 | Go to render.com slash twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500,000 to $100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers. |
| 0:21.4 | Every.0.io. |
| 0:22.4 | For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, |
| 0:26.9 | or other back office administration needs, visit every.io. |
| 0:31.0 | And LinkedIn jobs. |
| 0:32.4 | Higher right the first time. |
| 0:34.3 | Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at |
| 0:37.7 | LinkedIn.com slash twist. |
| 0:42.2 | We've got Albert Brotherton and Boris Radalov, Jason. They're the co-creators of |
| 0:46.2 | Nanogram. I really like this. This is a cool thing. It's basically TikTok for mobile |
| 0:52.0 | video games. It's available right now. |
| 0:54.5 | It's in the Google Play Store. |
| 0:55.9 | It's in the iOS store. Guys, thanks so much for being here. Thanks for having us, guys. So tell us what you're working on. Yeah, Boris, do you want to kind of bring up the demo and walk them through it? Yes. Yes. Just give me one second to get your screen. Sure. And this is, I have it on my phone, Jason. So this is, it's available now. |
| 1:10.3 | It's basically work. |
| 1:11.2 | It's like think TikTok, but people can create their own video games very quickly, like casual mobile games. And then you just scroll and you're tired of playing one. You just scroll up and you go to the next game. It's pretty remarkable. Typical TikTok feed, this is the MVP we put out a month and a half ago. You're playing the, you get bored, and you're going to the next game. You play this game, you get bored, you're going to the next one. It's a very simple concept proving to be quite interesting. But the whole brain raw maxing of playing multiple games in a row is just part of the flywheel. The second half of the flywheel is the creation aspect. When you're looking for a new game to play, it can be that complete, like, tyranny of choice, like choice paralysis. Like, there's hundreds of games. I don't have time to research every single video game. This is just like, open your phone, start playing a game. The creation is even cooler. If you go on your create tab, you put create with AI and you have all these templates, you could go off or you could do a custom template. |
| 2:05.0 | I'm just going to quickly demo something real quick for you. |
| 2:07.7 | So when I was like 14, I started programming because I wanted to make video games. |
| 2:12.8 | And you know now with AI and agents, something that would have taken me a week back then now takes 90 seconds. |
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