Get the Check

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod covers three stories: why everyone has a robotics data collection startup, whether AI is actually killing jobs or just making everyone work more (maybe both??), and Cognition's comeback after everyone thought the model players would cook them.
They start with robotics data labeling. As humanoid robots become a real thing, the race is on to get the training data to make them work. The problem is you can't just scrape Reddit like you could for GPT. Priya breaks down the data quality hierarchy: real sensor data from robots at the top, teleoperated data second, simulated data third, and egocentric POV footage (the kind you get by strapping a camera to someone's head) at the bottom. The pod covers the startups going after this: Shift just went viral on X for offering free NYC house cleanings in exchange for head-cam footage, Human Archive (YC W26) is collecting in developing countries, and Pronto, which started as the "Uber for maids in India" recently realized they were sitting on a data goldmine.
Next, the AI and layoffs conversation for probably the millionth time, but maybe not the last. The pod actually has a valid excuse to revisit it: Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have both walked back their apocalyptic predictions about AI job displacement, and Maya thinks it's because they're IPO-ing and need Joe Schmoe in North Carolina to buy their stock. Priya and Anika push back a little. Tune in to hear the whole debate. They dig into the Goldman Sachs CEO's NYT op-ed (AI won't eliminate 25% of jobs, it'll automate 25% of work hours), and breakdown Jevons paradox (short explainer video here: https://www.instagram.com/getthecheckpod/reel/DZBLK0lyVtq/). They also debrief the Corgi founder vs. Linear CEO beef.
Finally, Cognition raises $1B at a $26B valuation. Revenue went from $37M to $492M in 12 months, 90% of internal code at Cognition is now written by Devin (up from 13% in December), and they managed to turn around the Google / Windsurf drama and make it a happy ending. With Cursor in talks to get acquired by xAI for $60B, Cognition is set to be the last major independent coding harness. Maya says she thinks the market is big enough for even a third player to make it big.
This episode is brought to you by:
Kalshi — Cursor's acquisition by xAI is not a done deal yet. Kalshi might have odds on that. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code.
Known — Use code GETTHECHECK at known.com to skip the waitlist and get a free date.
Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod.
03:05 Why does everyone have a robotics data labeling startup
15:34 How China is doing data labeling differently
20:15 Shift goes viral on X
21:51 Does egocentric data even work
25:31 Sam Altman and Dario Amodei no longer believe in the job apocalypse
40:57 Cognition is so back
43:59 What is a coding harness

One day on the Muni to work, Anika saw someone that looked familiar. She realized she knew him from his Slack profile picture, classic SF. Ken’s company, Kaizen, had been automating healthcare workflows at the health tech startup she worked at, saving hundreds of ops hours a week. She knew she had to get Kaizen on the pod, and this is that pod!
Kaizen is an AI agent automating the most repetitive, time consuming work in healthcare like credentialing therapists across 50 states and every insurance company. They entered YC pitching a dev tool, pivoted mid-batch, and then were doubling MRR week over week by Demo Day. Partners still use them as an example for new batches.
The pod gets into:
Why dropping out to do YC or a startup is overrated.
The four jobs that will survive AGI according to Michael. One of them is hot person, tune in to hear the other three.
Why healthcare admin is a trillion-dollar market.
Why they only hire platform engineers. They have zero ops and zero FDE.
How referrals now drive most of their pipeline because healthcare is all about “whisper networks”.
00:00 Their first podcast was TBPN
00:15 John Coogan's stage presence
02:03 Meeting at MIT
08:35 Starting Kaizen 13:01 Why you shouldn't drop out
14:02 Why pivoting in YC led to 2x MRR growth MoM
15:32 How Kaizen changes healthcare ops
19:46 Customers choosing Kaizen over Claude
23:46 What "whisper networks" really mean for GTM
24:24 Hot take you don't need FDE
27:40 Pain tolerance is the most important founder trait
32:43 Do founders get to have hobbies?

While Maya's been working till 1AM, Priya is going on a date. Tune in to hear where and how she met him.
In this episode of Get the Check, the trio dives into three stories: the AI data center debate heating up on X, Trump and Xi's historic summit in Beijing, and a $20 hearing aid that got 11 million views on X for being affordable and innovative.
Bernie Sanders and AOC proposed the AI Data Center Moratorium Act back in March, calling for a halt on any new facility over 20 MW until Congress passes national AI safeguards. When Gary Tan clapped back on X, it blew up the entire tech timeline. Of course it all ended with everyone talking about data centers in space again, which isn't a bad idea if it actually works. The girls break down both sides, from the real utility rate spikes hitting low-income communities to the race to the pressure the US is facing to build fast.
Then the pod covers the Trump-Xi summit in Beijing, the first US presidential visit to China since 2017. The two sides released very different readouts of the same meetings, and the hosts get into what that actually signals about the state of the relationship. Maya says this was a win for Trump, but Anika is wondering if anyone in America was even paying attention.
For the Get the Check segment, Anika and Maya sit down with Arish Shahab, co-founder of Amano Labs. Amano is building a custom-fit hearing aid for $19.99 that costs $1 to make, targeting the 1.5 billion people globally who need hearing support but can't a $4,700 device. In just 3 weeks of being in SF, their video went viral with 11 million views. Tune in to hear what's next for them.
This episode is sponsored by Known, which matches you with someone in SF that you're compatible with. Download the app and use code getthecheck (must be lowercase) to get your first date for free. Priya's match was apparently a great guy who correctly identified her as a red flag within the first hour, so the algorithm is working?! If you want to hear what makes Known different we recorded an episode with Celeste (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlQ2zxluGwM).
Follow the pod on Instagram @getthecheckpod!
00:00 Priya goes on a date from Known05:35 AOC and Bernie vs. Garry Tan on the data center build out30:14 Trump goes to visit Xi Jinping in China40:16 Arish co-founder of Amano Labs the viral hearing aid

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down three big stories: the Elon vs. OpenAI trial, SpaceXAI's compute deal with Anthropic, and the Cerebras IPO at a $49B valuation.
They start with the trial. Greg Brockman's personal journal got subpoenaed and read aloud in court, with entries saying "we weren't honest with [Elon]." Meanwhile, Elon admitted under oath that xAI distilled OpenAI's model, which is a clear violation of OpenAI’s terms & services. The biggest legal hinge is whether GPT-4o qualifies as AGI. Under OpenAI's original nonprofit charter, AGI had to be shared with the world. If it qualifies, Elon has a case. Kalshi odds have been around 50/50 all week (kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck), but Maya and Anika both think the judge rules against him.
Next, the pod gets into the SpaceXAI x Anthropic compute deal. Colossus-1 in Memphis has 300 megawatts of capacity and is running at only 11% utilization (the benchmark for a healthy data center is around 40%). With the SpaceXAI IPO approaching, showing up to public markets with an empty facility would be a red flag, and renting compute to Anthropic is tangible revenue that makes the story look a lot better. The pod also covers SpaceX's moonshot vision of data centers in space. While Maya thinks it’s all PR, Priya was surprised to learn that China already has underwater data centers.
Then comes the Cerebras IPO. The chip design is impressive: one giant wafer built so an entire model fits on a single chip with no inter-chip communication lag. The challenge is that the models have outgrown it. Cerebras can't run anything above GPT-OSS because it can't support the external memory needs of larger models. They're pricing at a 95x revenue multiple on $510M in 2024 revenue, with a $49B valuation. While revenue is growing a lot YoY, revenue is heavily concentrated in the UAE and OpenAI, which is making many chip plays at once. Priya thinks the $20B OpenAI commitment driving most of the hype faces a real threat in the OpenAI and Broadcom partnership. Tune in to find out if the pod would give Cerebras their check. This weeks’s answer is a hot take.
This episode is brought to you by
Kalshi, the prediction market the girls are tracking in real time for Elon's trial odds. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck.
Known, if you’re tired of swiping Known is for you! https://known.com/ is live in SF. Use code GETTHECHECK when you sign up to skip the waitlist.
Follow the pod on Instagram @getthecheckpod.
00:00 Intro03:03 Elon Musk v. OpenAI15:11 Elon wants Sam Altman to be hated by America16:01 SpaceXAI x Anthropic Deal17:47 SpaceX IPO18:25 Grok is dead21:30 Do we think Elon will win the case21:58 Cerebras IPO23:34 History of GPUs24:47 Limitations of the Cerebras chip31:59 Cerebras’s revenue concentration35:11 Would Cerebras Get Our Check?

In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down a huge week in tech. There’s the historic CEO transition at Apple, a meltdown over Big Tech's capex spend, and xAI’s new plan after Grok was adopted by zero companies we have heard of. Side note, does anyone know why all the big tech companies report on the same day??
After 15 years of running Apple, Tim Cook is stepping into an Executive Chairman role and giving John Ternus the reigns. The hosts start the segment with Tim Cook's legacy, and there's a lot to unpack. He took Apple from $350M to $4T, invented new categories (shoutout to the AirPod, which Anika insists she hates but has purchased 5 times and counting), and even built a $109B services business that now drives 41% of Apple's profits. They also talk about his misses. The Vision Pro ate 25% of R&D spend for years and was barely even adopted in the heart of SF. Then there’s the elephant in the room, which was no real AI product, even though Siri plus Apple’s personal context set them up perfectly to create consumer AI or some type of assistant. The podcast really needs an assistant, so if John Ternus could work on that the pod is forever indebted. Ternus is a hardware engineer who has worked on every important Apple project since 2001. Maya discusses the real reason she thinks Cook picked him and where he may place important bets.
Next they get into hyperscaler earnings, and the numbers are genuinely hard to comprehend. Meta, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon collectively announced $700B in data center spending for the year, which is roughly the GDP of most countries. Amazon's free cash flow is down 97%, Meta is burning $370M a day on construction, and the new bottleneck is not GPUs anymore, it is energy. Half of the planned 2026 megawatts are already canceled. The pod also digs into the Sam Altman vs. Sarah Friar drama at OpenAI, which is projected to lose $14B this year as they try to IPO.
Finally, they get into xAI's proposed deal with Cursor: either a $60B acquisition or a $10B payment for using Colossus, xAI's data center that is sitting at 11% capacity considering Elon’s in the middle of a lawsuit with its otherwise top potential customer OpenAI. Anika's hot take is that this isn’t just a model capabilities problem for Grok it’s also a brand problem - enterprises are not buying Grok after it thought it was Hitler. Priya points out that if this deal closes and Cursor gets locked into Composer only, which is there own model vs. their current approach, which allows users to select between all models then that is a huge opening for anyone else building coding tools.
This episode is sponsored by Kalshi, the only federally regulated prediction market. Trade on what actually happens in tech, business, and beyond. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck.
Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod. No seriously please we are really trying to grow on X.
00:00 Our take on the JPM sexual harassment lawsuit
06:49 Did Tim Cook achieve GOAT status
09:10 Cook expanding into SaaS12:00 RIP Intel
14:02 Where Tim Cook got cooked
14:05 Vision Pro fail17:08 iPhone growth stalls
19:31 Apple un-intelligence
27:27 Why Ternus won’t be another Cook
29:35 What we think Apple will bet on next
30:40 Hyperscaler capex freakout
31:35 FCF explained
45:28 SpaceX Cursor deal
49:58 Coding tool consolidation50:10 Maya rants about GitHub