Show Notes
Nadya Okamoto has built an audience of more than 6 million followers, founded the period care company August, and spent over a decade turning social media audiences into real communities. Now she’s co-founder and CMO of Pie, the social app bringing online communities into real life. We sat down only 30 minutes after a bird pooped on her but in typical Nadya fashion she still made the podcast and filmed the whole experience, which you can find on her socials (@nadyaokamoto). Nadya originally joined Pie as a user. She started a run club in New York, wanted one place to manage its events and members, and became one of the app’s early power users. That eventually turned into a co-founder gig alongside Bonobos founder Andy Dunn…we wish our app addictions turned into co-founder offers! She tells the pod about starting the role weeks before her wedding, leading her to work from her honeymoon in Switzerland (TikTok was NOT happy about this). She also learned that employees need to tell someone before leaving the country. In her defense, it’s her first time ever having a boss. Nadya also explains why creators can bring early-stage companies both capital and distribution. She began writing $10K to $25K angel checks after raising for August. She talks about why equity, SAFEs, stock options, and advisor grants remain unnecessarily gatekept. She also shares what she’s building at Cherub to help more creators become investors. Finally, the pod talks hustle culture and capitalism. Nadya responds to criticism over working until 1 AM, explains why ambition often overrides her anxiety, and shares how she handles feedback from millions of people. She also discusses losing 8,000 followers after a Meta partnership, whether creators can authentically use AI while criticizing the industry, and why opting out of imperfect systems rarely changes them.
00:00 Why Nadya posts every day01:34 From political organizing to content creation02:38 Building August and moving from CPG into tech04:20 Unconventional way Nadya became Pie’s co-founder05:42 Why creators should become angel investors08:20 The gatekeeping of startup equity11:38 Why the IRL economy is growing15:05 Nadya has a boss for the first time18:03 How she manages multiple companies and 6M followers20:05 Getting over the fear of posting online21:30 A bird poops on Nadya before the podcast??22:20 Compartmentalizing stress25:10 Hiring Pie’s marketing team27:15 Why influencing is viewed differently in New York and SF30:00 Using technology to fight the loneliness it helped create32:00 Pie is the matcha of social media??34:00 Capitalism, nonprofits, and changing systems from within38:05 Nadya responds to the hustle culture criticism45:25 Why TikTok hates AI46:15 Losing 8,000 followers after working with Meta
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In this episode of Get the Check, the pod breaks down the three launches taking over the timeline: Jev, the new System 1 model from typesafe.ai, Muse, Meta's personal AI assistant, and Spec, Snapchat's big AR glasses keynote. They start with Jev, whose launch video pulled 36 million views on X. Founded by Diogo Almeida, one of the co-creators of ChatGPT, the pitch is a model that's 200x faster and 400x cheaper than a frontier LLM because it doesn't generate text at all — it makes decisions. Maya breaks down how it works under the hood, and why its sweet spot is high decision volume with bounded answers. The pod debates if trading bots will be a killer use case or purely hype. Priya explains how she used Jev to sort candidates in GTC's recruiting inbox. Next, the pod gets into Muse, Meta's Instinct competitor that hit 900K users in its first week. Priya's already sold because it connects to iMessage, which Instinct can't do. Anika is mid-switch after Instinct got slow, stopped being proactive, and can't even check out a cart anymore. The girls debate whether it's worse to hand your data to Meta or a startup — they end up agreeing tune in to hear what they pick. Meanwhile, Instinct is raising at a $10 billion valuation with around 100K active users. During the Sunday recording the hosts say they’re long Meta and woke up Monday to the stock up 11%. Then comes Spec. Maya watched the entire keynote and calls it objectively the best AR glasses out there, but she still wouldn't buy them. Snap popped 2% on the news but is still down about 93% over five years, and Evan's control of the company has kept activist investors locked out. Finally, the pod announces its SF Tech Week event with Brown Girl Angels on October 10th at the AngelList office, featuring Jaya Gupta of Foundation Capital, and Brown Girl Angels founder Bhargavi, with Anika moderating. Also, the pod ate dinner next to Taylor Swift?! Tune in for the full story. This episode is brought to you by Kalshi, whose market calibration data the pod literally cites mid-episode to explain how Jev might be trained. Sign up at kalshi.com/sign-up?referral=getthecheck and get $10 when you trade using our code. Follow the pod on Instagram and X @getthecheckpod. 00:00 Marc Benioff moggs at Dreamforce00:22 Why your husband should be ‘pre-economic’05:12 Jev is 200x faster and 400x cheaper than LLMs22:16 Muse vs Instinct: AI assistant wars29:42 Is Snapchat back with the Spec launch