TBPN · Oct 19, 2026 · 2h 23m · 134m saved
With Bing Gordon, Partner at Kleiner Perkins and founding executive at Electronic Arts · Daksh Gupta, Founder and CEO of Greptile · Jean-Denis Greze, Co-Founder and CEO of Town · Quinten Farmer, Founder of Tolan
Greptile has raised a $50 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures, Daksh Gupta, its founder and CEO, told John Coogan and Jordi Hays, who host the daily TBPN tech show. Jean-Denis Greze, co-founder and CEO of Town, announced a $108 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation on the same broadcast.
AI companies usually pitch one model that does everything. Both founders said customers are asking for separation instead: one vendor to write code and another to check it, one assistant for personal life and another for work.
"We heard this first from Nvidia, which became our first large customer. They said, well, we buy coding agents from every good coding agent company that there is... but we wanted our validation to be separate." — Daksh Gupta
The broadcast also brought on Bing Gordon, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who helped found Electronic Arts and has a new book, "Everybody Wins," and Quinten Farmer, founder of the AI companion app Tolan. Katie Drummond, global editorial director of WIRED, opened the guest list with a review of the new Elizabeth Holmes film.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 2 hours 23 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Nvidia buys coding agents from every major vendor but wanted code validation kept separate, Greptile's first big customer told Daksh
Engineering teams scrutinize a $250,000 hire far more than a sudden jump in coding-agent token spend
Town raised $108M at a $1B valuation on the view that assistants, not apps, will be how people use digital information
Businesses want work assistants with privacy and security built in, kept apart from personal assistants
Tolan found that memory, not intelligence, was the hard part of building a personal AI
Steve Jobs dismissed 400M monthly gamers in 2007 because Apple started nothing below a billion
Bing Gordon traces his worst failures to two causes: taking shortcuts, and being right without convincing anyone
1. The Theranos Film's Pull
Katie Drummond, who interviewed director Nathan Fielder and has seen "You Can See Everything" twice, said her first viewing left her feeling real sympathy for Elizabeth Holmes. A second viewing, after she re-read the reporting on Theranos, complicated that reaction.
Katie Drummond says the film's first impression is sympathy for Holmes
"This woman has kids, she's going to prison. I feel like she's being manipulated by these men in her [life]." — Katie Drummond
She said Fielder chose to examine Holmes and her family rather than the failed blood-testing science, because he is "not a science journalist" but someone who studies people.
"We don't see an interrogation of the science, we see much more of an interrogation of her as a person, and her family and their dynamics." — Katie Drummond
Katie, John and Jordi picked out the stranger details the film revisits: a husky owned by Holmes that was killed by a cougar, a story the Bay Area News Group reported; Billy Evans' "Theranos 2.0" pitch; and the on-camera revelation that Holmes's father had worked at Enron.
