Get the Check

This week the pod kicks off with Anika's unexpected internet fame after a photo of her and her ex's ex went viral with 11M views. If that sounds really random it’s because it was. Tune in to hear the full story and follow us on X @getthecheckpod. If you just want to see the tweet you can go to @anikamirzaa…
Then they dive into Capital One's $5.15B acquisition of Brex, which is down over 50% from its peak valuation. Maya, Anika, and Priya break down the Brex vs. Ramp rivalry and how Ramp caught up despite a two-year head start. They get into the weeds on revenue multiples, who actually made money on the Brex deal (spoiler: YC got 800x), and why this acquisition might be the right move for Brex given Capital One's unlimited balance sheet. The hosts also debate whether Capital One can compete with Amex for corporate cards by combining luxury lounge perks with Brex's software.
Next, they cover the Davos drama. Trump wants to buy Greenland, Denmark said no, and NATO allies are not happy. The hosts explain why Greenland matters strategically: missile defense from adversaries, rare earth minerals, and trade routes. All of this becomes more important as the Arctic melts. Maya shares her thoughts on Trump, in case you didn't know them already.
Finally, the pod covers Humans&, a new AI lab that raised a $480M seed round at $4B. The founders are ex-every major AI lab and their mission is to build "human-centric" AI. The pod discusses the workplace productivity tools they’re going after like Claude Cowork, Notion, Slack, etc. Maya and Anika get into a full debate about whether this is actually different from what every other lab is doing. The pod ends with them agreeing to disagree.
00:00 Anika goes viral
04:41 Capital One acquires Brex for $5.15B
08:20 The Brex vs. Ramp rivalry
19:00 Davos 2026 and the Greenland crisis
25:00 Why Greenland is so important
34:00 Would Humans& the new AI lab “Get the Check”?
44:30 Anika and Maya debate if Humans& is meeting its mission

This week the pod dives into the AI labs making big moves in healthcare. OpenAI dropped ChatGPT Health, a separate tab for all your medical questions. Hundreds of millions of people a week are already using ChatGPT for health including Priya. Maya roasts OpenAI's enterprise healthcare approach, arguing that their pilot with only 1,000 seats / hospital is a very modest start to cracking a huge problem. Maya’s hot take is a bottoms-up GTM approach makes sense in healthcare, and doctors should control their own tools. They also cover Claude for Healthcare, which is going deep on the admin layer: prior auth, claims, coding, ICD-10, FHIR integrations. The hosts get into the weeds on how prior auth actually works (spoiler: it's a lot of doctors getting on phone calls, which AI can't really fix yet).
Next, the streaming wars continue. Netflix just locked in a $7B Pay-1 deal with Sony. Also, the Warner Brothers acquisition drama is still going on. Paramount wants to outbid Netflix but analysts are calling them "high-levered and risky," because they have a $14B market cap and are trying to make a $95B acquisition. Trump somehow inserted himself into this too because of course he did. Tune in to hear about how.
Finally would insurtech “Get the Check”. The hosts break down why insurance is a $2 trillion industry (bigger than SaaS!) with legacy problems similar to healthcare. They cover Corgi a YC-backed, full-stack AI insurance for startups that has an insane team culture with actual corgis and matching tattoos, and WithCoverage a broker play founded by the Opendoor founder that just raised $42M from Sequoia. Corgi gets the check. Anika thinks full-stack is the way and YC distribution is unbeatable. WithCoverage might get cut out by companies like Corgi that go direct. The hosts compare it to Brex's early strategy of landing every YC company and growing with them.
They wrap by heading to a hotel slumber party in their own city…
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00:24 Intro
02:46 OpenAI and Anthropic launch healthcare products
35:12 Netflix and Sony $7B deal
40:51 Warner Brothers acquisition battle continues
49:25 Would Insurtech Get the Check? Corgi (YC) and WithCoverage raises

Get the Check welcomes Florian Juengermann, CTO and co-founder of Listen Labs, to talk about his journey from a small town in Germany to becoming an international mathlete and starting an AI company.
Maya and Priya ask about Florian's origin story from wanting to program his toys to winning IOI medals (the olympics for nerds). They also dig into his path to America: Harvard, Tesla's self-driving team, and the moment he realized he wanted to build after watching a company with no product raise $3M off a pitch deck when he'd actually built the product they pitched.
From there, Listen Labs is born, but v1 was a viral consumer AI image app with 20k users and a scary GPU bill charged directly to their personal credit cards. They still had a positive margin though!
The real insight came when they realize the hardest part of building products is understanding what users actually think, so they flip the model: instead of AI answering questions, they build AI that asks them. Listen Labs becomes the AI interviewer that can talk to thousands of customers at once and turn those conversations into real insights.
Maya and Priya deep dive into how the company found product-market fit, why marketing teams turned out to be the perfect first customers, and how Listen Labs went from scrappy demos to landing massive enterprise clients. Florian shares what it felt like to raise a Series A and then a Series B in rapid succession—and why it finally felt like the market caught up to what they'd believed all along.
The episode also delivers one of Listen Lab’s most memorable moments: the story of the infamous San Francisco billboard. Just a string of numbers. No logo. No explanation. Turns out it's an elaborate puzzle designed to nerd-snipe engineers and recruit talent in the most on-brand way possible.By the end, the conversation zooms out to what it really means to build in Silicon Valley, and Florian's philosophy around AI deepening human connection instead of replacing it.

00:00 Intro
00:18 Learning about programming in a small German town
01:46 Becoming an international mathlete
06:21 The dream of going to Harvard
07:33 Working at Tesla
10:19 Creating a viral app with co-founder Alfred Wahlforss
10:47 Founding Listen Labs
23:19 Finding product market fit
27:40 Fundraising and market validation
28:59 The power of customer insights
37:07 The SF billboard that went viral
44:01 AI and human connection
44:59 Why you should join Listen Labs

Maya woke up to Happy New Years texts from people she hadn’t heard from in awhile. She thought it was really special till she realized she texted them first the night before and forgot. Including Anika and Priya who got 5 Happy New Years texts from her each. Another year, and the same friends.
The pod talks about 2026 as an IPO comeback year and highlight SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cerebras. Maya gives her hot take on why SpaceX’s Starlink numbers look better than they are because their EBITDA hides how much depreciation their satellite business has. Anika explains why she’s still bullish. Next they discuss why OpenAI and Anthropic are considering a 2026 IPO. The trio breaks down why both companies are sprinting toward IPOs and how many $Bs they’re spending each quarter. Priya draws a comparison to Uber IPO-ing pre-profitability, but model technical growth may mean the product catches up with the spend in this case. Lastly, is Cerebras, the AI chip company with a previously attempted IPO. The group explains why having one customer account may be tough in the public markets. They also discuss the recent Groq <> Nvidia deal’s impact on the company.
The episode then pivots into full scale political discourse with the California billionaire tax debate. What started as a policy discussion on X quickly turned into tech billionaires threatening to move to Austin and Ro Khanna who was once their go to guy joking that he doesn’t care if they leave. The pod talks about the right way to tax wealth and if they think there will actually be an exodus to Austin. Priya also debriefs the why behind Austin’s cheap housing.
Finally, this week the “Get the Check” segment goes global with Arya.ag, a company helping Indian farmers store grain, access cheaper loans, and use AI to improve crop yields. Maya and Anika are bias on this one because it reminds them of a Parafin and Fay combo.
00:00 Intro
02:35 Companies that are predicted to IPO in 2026
03:23 SpaceX’s IPO
06:37 Data centers in space
12:05 OpenAI and Anthropic’s race to IPO
22:52 Cerebras take two on an IPO
23:40 Cerebras G42 Controversy
28:06 Debate on X about billionaire tax in California
39:14 SF vs. Austin future tech hub debate
44:09 Would Arya.ag “Get the Check”?

In the final episode of the year, the pod gives out superlatives:
Most likely to dupe the FTC
Moment of the year
Most questionable purchase of the year
Biggest startup product letdown
They kick things off by debriefing the Somali-run fraud scandals in Minnesota (Anika’s home state), then dive into their superlatives.
They pick Nvidia and Groq’s $20B licensing deal as Most Likely to Dupe the FTC. Groq, last valued around $7B just months ago, is known for building Language Processing Units (LPUs) — chips designed specifically for inference, the process of generating real-time outputs from AI models. Unlike GPUs, which handle everything from training to inference, LPUs are narrowly optimized, which becomes a major advantage as inference costs explode across consumer and enterprise AI products. The pod also chats about Groq CEO Jonathan Ross, who originally helped create Google’s Tensor Processing Unit (TPU). The deal is part of a larger trend this year: licensing technology, absorbing talent, and leaving a shell company behind.
They name prediction markets like Kalshi as the Moment of the Year. With an estimated $44B in trading volume, major platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi raising significant funding, and partnerships with CNN and CNBC, prediction markets are increasingly positioned as the new media. The pod also discusses the “death of the expert” and how people are turning to prediction markets as a source of truth in a post-truth world. They debate whether insider trading is possible and get into all the tea around AlphaRaccoon, who some believe is an insider trader at Google. Use the podcast’s exclusive Kalshi sign-on deal before the year is over: https://kalshi.com/r/getthecheck.
Next, Scale AI takes Most Questionable Purchase of the Year, after Meta acquired a 49% stake for $14.3B. Since the purchase, Meta has seen high-profile departures, including Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist. Meta is rumored to be working on a closed-source model, but nothing has launched yet, and there are rumors that former Scale CEO Alexandr Wang has a different vision for Meta than its previous executive team, which has been focused on existing products like WhatsApp and Instagram.
Finally, 1X’s NEO humanoid wins Biggest Startup Product Letdown. Despite ambitious goals to perform household tasks like folding clothes, the robot currently requires someone to remote in and complete tasks while effectively peering into your house. Priya says that’s chill with her, if it’s doing her dishes. The hosts discuss why humanoids are such a hard problem to crack and why 1X decided to “launch” before the product was truly ready. Even though NEO was a letdown this year, the pod is excited to see what it can do once the company collects more data.
00:00 Intro
05:53 Most likely to dupe the FTC: Nvidia and Groq’s $20B licensing agreement
18:02 Moment of the year: prediction markets like Kalshi
35:00 Most questionable purchase of the year: Meta’s stake in Scale AI
48:05 Biggest startup product letdown: the NEO humanoid
59:43 Conclusion