The Innovation Attorney Podcast

11:01

AI Usage Based Pricing Contract Renewal Terms

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/07

A venture backed company that renews its software contracts on the old per seat template this year is agreeing to pricing mechanics it cannot audit, cap, or benchmark, because the vendor on the other side of the table has already rebuilt its own billing engine around usage and outcomes.Salesforce sold its Agentforce product under a flat $2.00 per conversation fee at general availability on October 29, 2024. Seven months later, on May 15, 2025, it added Flex Credits, priced at $500.00 per 100,000

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15:42

Employee Equity Liquidity After Carta And Pulley Exit...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/06

Startups now design employee equity liquidity through company sponsored tender offers, broker matched secondary sales, direct buybacks, or option financing, since Carta exited secondaries and Pulley closes December 8, 2026. Carta exited the secondary trading business on January 9, 2024, citing a conflict of interest it could not manage between holding customer cap table data and trading against it, and Pulley, the rival platform that built its business on being the alternative to Carta, will shut

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18:52

Stock Option Backdating Cost the UnitedHealth CEO...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Stock option backdating cost former UnitedHealth Group chief executive William McGuire $468 million on December 6, 2007, after the SEC alleged he selected low price grant dates retroactively.Backdating means writing a grant date earlier than the date the board acted, so the exercise price matches a historical low. A $30 exercise price on a stock that trades at $50 hands the executive $20 per share on the first day. The practice violated federal securities law when companies hid that gap from

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28:10

Deep Fission Gravity Reactor

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Deep Fission’s one mile deep Gravity reactor has no Nuclear Regulatory Commission license application on file as of September 2026, and its June 2026 prospectus describes the design as conceptual. The Commission’s pre application record under Docket 99902126 shows no date for a combined license submission. The Department of Energy approved a Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for the project in July 2026, a milestone that authorizes no operation.Gravity is a miniature pressurized water reactor fueled

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12:42

The Lyft Settlement For Gig Worker Misclassification...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

On October 1, 2026, Lyft agreed to pay $272.5 million to settle a California Labor Commissioner lawsuit accusing the company of misclassifying drivers as independent contractors from April 6, 2016, through December 15, 2020. Eighty seven percent of that figure, $236.875 million, goes straight to drivers rather than to the state treasury or to outside counsel. The Labor Commissioner’s office filed the underlying case in August 2020, which means Lyft spent six years and a California Supreme Court

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34:44

Government Action and Fraud in Six American Financial...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Executive SummaryGovernment deregulation and supervisory forbearance caused or worsened six American financial crises between 1982 and 2008, and fraud enlarged the losses in each one. The Savings and Loan Crisis, the dotcom crash, the Enron collapse, the WorldCom fraud, the 2008 mortgage crash, and the 2005 to 2006 stock option backdating scandal each began with a government decision that widened the room for risk or loosened the supervision of it. Fraud then converted ordinary business failure into

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23:54

The 2026 Venture Fund Anti Money Laundering Landscape

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

No federal law requires venture funds to establish a formal anti money laundering compliance program in 2026, because FinCEN delayed the Investment Adviser AML Rule until January 1, 2028. The final rule making that change was published at 91 FR 36 on January 2, 2026. An exemptive relief order issued on August 5, 2025 had already suspended every requirement of the rule in the interim. A venture fund adviser has no program, reporting, or recordkeeping duty under 31 CFR Part 1032 for the next seventeen

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16:53

Oklo Natural Nuclear Reactors

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Executive SummaryThe Oklo natural nuclear reactors in Gabon, discovered in 1972, sustained uranium fission chain reactions about 2 billion years ago and remain the only confirmed natural reactors on Earth. Sixteen reactor zones across the Oklo, Okélobondo, and Bangombé uranium deposits reached criticality because natural uranium then held about 3.5 percent uranium 235 and groundwater slowed neutrons inside ore that contained very little neutron absorbing material. Boiling water shut each zone down

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13:41

Should Startups Hedge GPU Costs With Futures Contracts

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Nvidia H100 and B200 rental futures began trading under NYMEX rules on October 5, 2026, giving a venture backed company its first public, exchange traded price for the hourly cost of renting the chip that runs most frontier model training today. The contract settles in cash against Silicon Data’s published rental index, and it pays or costs a company the difference between that index and the price locked at purchase, without ever delivering a chip. For a startup carrying a seven figure monthly

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40:17

How Far Will AI Inference Costs Fall

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

A model developer’s own benchmarking shows the cost of answering the hardest questions in its most demanding category rising three to eighteen times a year, even while the price it charges per token keeps falling. That is not a contradiction. It is the fact a deep tech founder setting a three year or five year AI product price needs to understand before signing anything, because it means the single number most founders reach for, the published per token price trend, describes a different product

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14:40

Stripe Bought OpenRouter

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/05

Stripe’s acquisition of OpenRouter for more than $7 billion, announced in August 2026, puts the company that marketed itself as the neutral alternative to picking one AI model inside the payment processor that already handles a large share of the software industry’s revenue. A startup that signed with OpenRouter specifically to avoid depending on a single model provider now depends on a single company for model access, billing, and the routing logic that decides which model sees its traffic. The

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18:43

Copyright Ruling Makes AI Coding Tool Indemnification...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/04

The Copyright Office settled one question about AI generated code in its January 29, 2025 report and left the harder one standing: code a tool such as Cursor writes without a human supplying the expression cannot be copyrighted, but the report never says who bears the loss when that same code infringes somebody else’s copyright or patent. The District of Columbia Circuit closed the door on a related argument in Thaler v. Perlmutter on March 18, 2025, holding that human authorship is required as a

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11:51

California and New York Ban Algorithmic Price...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/03

California Assembly Bill 325 and New York General Business Law Section 340-B, both in force by January 2026, prohibit two or more businesses from using a common pricing algorithm to set prices, rents, or wages, and both let a plaintiff win without proving the businesses ever spoke to each other directly. AB 325 amends the Cartwright Act to punish a company that distributes an algorithm built on competitor data or that coerces another company into following that algorithm’s recommendation. Section

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18:28

Nine Figure Series A Rounds

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

A term sheet for two hundred fifty five million dollars arrived at Fundamental in February 2026 pricing the company at a one point four billion dollar post money valuation, and the founders gave up about eighteen percent of the business, the same percentage a traditional fourteen million dollar Series A has cost founders for years. That single fact answers the question most founders are asking backward. The size of the check does not set the price of the round. The credibility of the valuation

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15:36

California Suspends Venture Capital Demographic...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation suspended enforcement of Senate Bill 54’s venture capital founder demographic reporting mandate on March 17, 2026, and told covered funds to pause all work related to reporting until further notice. The statute, codified at California Business and Professions Code section 22949.85, was six weeks from its April 1 reporting deadline when the department pulled it back for a rulemaking it expects to take about a year. A fund that spent the

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13:32

Accredited Investor Reform Reshapes Startup Secondary...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

The Securities and Exchange Commission’s September 30, 2026, vote to open the accredited investor definition to professional credentials, not only income and net worth, lands on a capitalization table that already has fewer places to run a clean secondary sale. Carta closed its secondary trading desk in January 2024, and Pulley shuts down for good on December 8, 2026, so the same founders who are about to meet a larger buyer pool are doing it with two fewer platforms built to manage who actually

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17:30

How Do State AI Hiring Laws Affect Startups

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

Colorado’s legislature killed its own flagship AI statute before it ever took effect. The Colorado AI Act, Senate Bill 24-205, was supposed to start governing employment screening tools on June 30, 2026, after an earlier delay pushed it from its original February 1, 2026 date. Instead, Governor Jared Polis signed SB 26-189, the Automated Decision-Making Technology Act, on May 14, 2026, repealing the mandatory impact assessment program and replacing it with a narrower notice and human review model

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14:45

Nvidia’s Circular Financing Web

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

Jensen Huang told Goldman Sachs’ Communacopia and Technology Conference in September 2026 that Nvidia collects roughly $100 in customer orders for every $1 it commits to artificial intelligence labs, and he treated that ratio as a complete answer to circular financing criticism. It is not a complete answer for the founder who signed a three year capacity reservation on a frontier model application programming interface, or the general counsel drafting a term sheet for an infrastructure round,

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30:06

Hiring Junior Engineers or AI

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

A founder who reads SignalFire’s 2026 State of Talent Report and concludes that artificial intelligence has made junior engineers obsolete is reading the easy half of the data. The harder half, several pages past the headline decline in entry level hiring, is a randomized trial showing that the same AI coding tools made experienced developers 19 percent slower on the kind of codebase a startup actually has three years after it stops hiring juniors. The founders acting on the easy half of this report

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35:03

China Shipped Most of the World’s Humanoid Robots...

The Innovation Attorney Podcast ·

2026/10/02

Agibot shipped roughly 8,400 humanoid robots in the first half of 2026, more than the entire global industry shipped in all of 2023. The company passed Unitree for the top global shipment position inside a market that grew between 272 percent and 432 percent year over year, depending on which tracker counted the units. Between 77.9 percent and 97 percent of every humanoid robot shipped in the first half of 2026 came out of a Chinese factory, and the two leading companies controlled roughly three

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