Forbes Daily Briefing

When Jay Shetty started his podcast On Purpose in 2019, he remembers people telling him he was too late. The medium was already saturated, they said, with little room for growth. And wasn’t he really just a content creator?

Seven years later, the 38-year-old self-help guru hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, competing not only with the biggest TV, radio and internet-native talk shows but blurring the lines between them entirely. Just as many people watch his lengthy interviews with celebrities (including Michelle Obama and Matt Damon) on YouTube as listen on the iHeartMedia network—distribution deals that Forbes estimates paid Shetty $21 million over the past 12 months. And when those deals expired this year, Shetty landed a new kind of contract, in which the audio and video of his show will not only be distributed by Spotify; it will also stream on Netflix, with the two companies combining to pay him an estimated $100 million over the next three years.

“When I started, video wasn’t normal for a podcast,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Now we had the four largest streamers bidding for the show. To see that kind of interest and enthusiasm was pretty amazing—for me and for the industry overall.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter
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For a dozen years, Forbes has partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to highlight the companies that are likely to become unicorns in the near future. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and worth less than $1 billion. In a sign of the times: Nearly all this year’s list members use AI in some fashion as they work on everything from bone marrow to biological threats, cybersecurity to creative design. Our track record is striking: Of the 275 alumni of this list, 60% did indeed become unicorns, including household names Duolingo and DoorDash. Another 60 were bought (or were merged). Nearly half of last year’s picks already are worth more than a billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters—just six companies, about 2%, imploded or shut down.
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On Jesse Vega’s first date with Deaunda Lira, a romantic sushi dinner in Colorado Springs three years ago, he was upfront: He has epilepsy and suffers severe seizures. “It could be scary,” Jesse, 49, recalls telling her. Deaunda, 52, was wary at first, especially after witnessing one of his seizures firsthand. But she shortly came around. “He’s so handsome, I’m gonna have to give it a try,” she remembers thinking, laughing.

The seizures started in 2002, when Jesse was 25. At first, they were minor, leaving him flushed and nausea­ted before smelling a scent of ammonia. These temporal lobe seizures (sometimes referred to as “déjà vu” seizures) happened about 60 times a day and left him exhausted. They eventually progressed to grand mal seizures: violent shaking and stiff muscles, vomiting, tongue-biting and a loss of bladder or bowel control. The couple married in 2023, and Deaunda quit her nearly $50,000-a-year job in medical billing to take care of Jesse. He wasn’t working either: He had to give up his job at the Department of Defense because of his condition. Money got so tight that the middle-aged newlyweds moved in with Jesse’s dad.

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Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced itself to the world with the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that kickstarted the modern EV era. Now the company’s two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic rebuttal to Tesla’s brutalist Cybertruck swagger.

Rather than start with another compact crossover chasing Tesla’s top-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when it launched the Roadster – is coming to market with a whimsical truck roughly the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something from the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of Tesla’s pickup. But TELO is borrowing one important page from Tesla’s original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and cofounder Jason Marks told Forbes the company initially plans to make just 500 units, and then scale up to a 5,000-vehicle-per-year run rate after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he thinks the company can turn a profit.

By Alan Ohnsman,

Senior Editor
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In Lafayette, Indiana, a small city with a population of just over 70,000, the local police force decided to try out a new AI tool sold by law enforcement tech giant Axon, the company with a $35 billion market cap best known for making the Taser. Called Form One, it promised to save officers time by listening to the audio from their body cameras, then filling out the administrative details of a police report: officers and citizens’ names, ID documentation, license plates and other vehicle information. For Lafayette’s captains who’d worked closely with Axon on previous AI projects, it seemed like a no-brainer.

But after seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette’s officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague.

By Thomas Brewster
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