Newcomer Podcast
A podcast about Silicon Valley, hosted by newsletter writer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer. Listen in for interviews with the dealmakers and builders who matter. Subscribe to newcomer.co for summaries of the episodes plus tech industry news, scoops, and analysis. www.newcomer.co
Fri, April 25, 2025
The TRUTH about VC Media
We’re back to opining on the state of tech media! A16z has aqui-hired Erik Torenberg and his newsletter Turpentine, while the Technology Brothers with ties to Founders Fund have created a podcasting empire. Eric and Tom reminisce about the original wave of “going direct,” why it failed, and what’s different this time around. Later on, Madeline shares that crypto VCs are growing frustrated with President Trump’s meme coin grifts, and how hosting a private dinner for top coin holders doesn’t help legitimize the industry.
Fri, April 18, 2025
AGI, Seriously + Foundation Model Polyamory (With Kyle Harrison)
This week, Tom breaks down his scoops on how the big foundation model providers are doing.and much to the chagrin of our resident skeptic, they’re earning lots of real revenue! OpenAI is on track to crack over $12 billion in revenue this year, and Anthropic projects it will double its ARR to $4 billion by the end of the year. But have we hit the AGI moment? Eric relays his o3 experiments as evidence. Madeline gets into the perpetual VC optimism in spite of market turmoil and why AI has early stage investors mostly unphased. In the second half of our show, Eric interviews Contrary’s Kyle Harrison about his viral foundation model market map and why AI has led many VCs to embrace startup polyamory.
Fri, April 11, 2025
Walter Bloomberg at the Wheel for the Whole Stock Market
We're welcoming special guest Tom Dotan of Dead Cat fame to the show this week — just in time for the tariff market meltdown. To Silicon Valley's Trump supporters, we hate to say we told you so, but it's hard to imagine how these tariffs on our biggest trading partners will benefit tech and artificial intelligence development in the US. In the second half of the show, Eric interviews Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen on how to make sense of what President Trump's tariff policies mean for his customers around the world.
Fri, April 04, 2025
OpenAI: A $300 Billion Non-Profit?
OpenAI has done it again. The AI giant closed $40 billion in fresh funding (kind of) led by Softbank, We debate the bull and bear case for OpenAI's $300 billion valuation. Eric sticks to his guns from his previous bear case, but Madeline is more optimistic about OpenAI's consumer revenue. We also go over the latest in the Deel/Rippling corporate espionage saga and dig into Eric's reporting on the Deel spy's confession. Plus, Elon Musk is reportedly stepping back from his hands on role in Washington in the coming weeks. In the second half of this week's episode, Eric interviews Clay CEO and cofounder Kareem Amin, who topped the Enterprise Tech 30 list on mid-stage startups. Time stamps 00:00 — Announcing Cerebral Valley London 03:26 — Is OpenAI worth $300 billion? 11:00 — The Deel Spy Confession 16:09 — Elon Pulls Back in DC 22:40 — Clay's Kareem Amin Talks Marketing Agents
Fri, March 28, 2025
Vibecode Showdown
This week, Eric shared the details of his vibe coding frenzy from the past few weeks, testing out Vercel and the buzziest coding assistant of moment, Lovable. We unpack the benefits and remaining headaches of these tools from a non-coder perspective. We then turn to the Studio Ghibli memes of the week from OpenAI's new 4o image model integration and try to make sense of all the copyright risks and benefits this new tool could lead us to. Later in the show, we break down the story on 11x's potentially fabricated customers and subsequent backlash from some of Silicon Valley's most powerful VCs. And as Waymo fans, we're excited about their expansion in to Washington DC. Produced by Christopher Gates
Fri, March 21, 2025
The Biggest Deal of the Year!
We're opening in a celebratory mood this week with Wiz's big exit to Google, which if it holds will offer some much needed liquidity to venture firms and their LPs. It's a big win for several of Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, including Sequoia's Doug Leone, Index Ventures' Shardul Shah, and Greenoaks' Neil Mehta. IPOs are looking a little bit more uncertain, however. Plus, Deel's allleged corporate espionage at Rippling has all the makings of a great HR tech spy thriller. Next up, we touch on the new liberal "abundance" agenda, which has more than a few similarities to Marc Andreessen's "Time to Build" manifesto. In the second half of our show, Eric sits down with Browserbase CEO Paul Klein to discuss their tools for running headless browsers and their rapid growth over the past year. Produced by Christopher Gates
Thu, March 13, 2025
Everything's Computer
We’re recording this episode on the ground from two different tech conferences, the flashy new HumanX summit in Las Vegas and the now-veteran status South By Southwest in Austin. We cover how the attendees diverge, with more consumer-tech making a showing at SXSW and the new guard of AI business leaders heading over to HumanX (with a few exceptions.) At both summits, though, coding assistants are far and beyond the breakout use case of generative AI applications. We also briefly touch on the threat to free speech in America under the Trump administration following the arrest of the Columbia student protestor Mahmoud Khalil. Next up, we talk about Anthropic’s major revenue growth and how Claude itself is one of the strongest coding assistants on the market, notching it up in the model maker race. We close with, yes — another coding assistant — Anysphere, the makers of Cursor, and its rumored funding round at a $10 billion valuation. Produced by Christopher Gates
Fri, March 07, 2025
Best Crypto to AI Pivot Ever
In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, Eric and Madeline dissect why VCs are mad about Trump’s plans for a strategic crypto reserve. Even the biggest boosters and loudest voices for deregulation around crypto have been caught off guard by the president’s push to add other altcoins to the promised Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, calling the move a blatant enrichment scheme for coin holders and friends of the President. Next, they take a closer look at the thawing of the IPO market. They unpack CoreWeave’s S-1 and examine why the biggest generative AI IPO of the year so far has a lot at stake with big tech customers. They then discuss Anthropic’s latest funding round, its whopping $61.5 billion valuation, and the deeper issue of when we should truly declare AGI’s arrival. Produced by Christopher Gates
Fri, February 28, 2025
$200 Billion for Data Centers... In This Economy?
Eric and Madeline break down the week that was in AI news in this episode of The Newcomer Podcast, from the unnecessary panic caused by reports of Microsoft cancelling leases for data centers to Nvidia’s quarterly earnings report. Despite tech companies moving full steam ahead on AI, including OpenAI’s launch of GPT 4.5 and Softbank’s $200 billion commitment to data centers, tech stocks dropped, which our hosts blame on the natural slower tech adoption curve and overall market uncertainty from President Trump’s chaotic policy changes. Later in the episode, Eric unpacks Jeff Bezos’ increasing control over the Washington Post’s opinion section and tech CEOs pre-empting so-called “hit pieces” on X. The two then shout out UK-based developer tool Lovable’s $15 funding million extension and rapid growth. They close the episode with a call for readers to submit their burning questions and commentary for next week’s Newcomer reader mailbag. You can submit your own question by filling out this Google form .
Fri, February 21, 2025
Humane’s HP Exit & the Foundation Model Slugfest
In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, Eric and Madeline give a sendoff to the Humane and its AI Pin. The company was acquired by HP for its AI talent, in a darkly poetic ending for former Apple engineers who left to build a smart hardware startup. They debate the merits of voice AI technology as an interface and if it’s really time to move away from screens. They break down all of OpenAI’s alumni startups, starting with Mira Murati’s newly announced Thinking Machine Labs. Other former founders of OpenAI like Ilya Suskever and Elon Musk are in talks to raise billions for their respective AI startups. They close with a breakdown of Saronic and Together AI’s latest funding rounds. 00:19 - Humane’s Semi-Soft Landing to HP 13:43 - Mira Murati Unveils Thinking Machines Lab and we have questions 17:02 - The new SV flex - Small teams 19:02 - Grok’s big cluster and Elon jumps the shark 24:14 - Saronic and Together AI Raise Big Series C Rounds
Fri, February 14, 2025
Elon Musk’s Boisterous OpenAI Bid
Eric and Madeline unpack the biggest “deal that wasn’t” story of Elon Musk’s unsolicited offer to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion. WIth Sam Altman flat-out rejecting the offer on X, this feels less like an offer and more of a statement about Musk’s frustration with OpenAI’s continued conversion to a for-profit company that competes with him. Pressures have been mounting on engineers to look for greener pastures, though, if Thrive Capital’s Joshua Kushner’s urging speech for talent to stay put is any indication. Then, they turn to Eric’s reporting on Lightspeed Venture Partners’ new fundraising documents, where the megafirm showed stronger returns on earlier funds ahead of its next big capital raise. They also unpack the AI Action Summit’s 180-degree swing from an AI safety forum to a conference dominated by CEOs and accelerationist world leaders. They close with a breakdown with a who’s who on the cap table of legal-tech Harvey’s latest Series D, and Mercury’s rumored new Sequoia-backed fundraise. Produced by Christopher Gates Music by Suno
Fri, February 07, 2025
DOGE's Twitter Firestorm
In this episode of the Newcomer podcast, Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger dig into all of the chaos in Washington led by Elon Musk and his team of young staffers. They push back on the attacks from the right at the press that revealing information about public employees is anything close to "doxxing," and unpack a16z's virtue signaling by hiring new right-wing cause celebrity Daniel Penny to its investing team. Later on, Eric breaks down the General Catalyst's a pitch to investors shapeshifting into a "company." They close with even more meme discourse, this time over Marc Andreessen's reading of the "heatmap" social study. Chapters00:00 DOGE’s Young Staffers03:28 Is Naming Government Staffers “Doxxing”06:20 Daniel Penny’s Hiring at A16z is Virtue Signaling09:16 Debating Marc Andreessen on the Heatmap12:22 Meta’s AR Bets Not In Line With Venture Capital21:03 Unpacking General Catalyst’s Pitch to Investors
Fri, January 31, 2025
The DeepSeek Fire Drill
In this episode, Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger break down DeepSeek’s impact on western AI companies. Is it really the “AI Sputnik Moment” that investors have called it, or just a CCP bluff? They also delve into new AngelList data on venture returns — unsurprisingly, they’re not looking good post-2021. They also discuss voice AI startup ElevenLabs’ new funding round.
Fri, January 24, 2025
Grit vs Grift
"In this episode of The Newcomer Podcast , Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger unpack how tech elites are reacting to the early days of the Trump presidency. They discuss Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son’s new venture to build AI data centers dubbed “Project Stargate” and make the case for business leaders to abide by important ethical norms. They also break down fresh performance data from UTIMCO, calling out Thrive Capital’s standout returns and examining the broader struggles for many funds amid the post-2021 downturn. They close by discussing Brookfield’s billion-dollar acquisition of Divvy Homes—once valued at over $2 billion—and unpack the implications for proptech employees left empty-handed."
Fri, January 17, 2025
Beware the "Tech Industrial Complex"
In this jam-packed episode, Eric and Madeline break down Biden’s surprise crackdown on the “Tech Industrial Complex,” explore Trump’s tight ties with Silicon Valley oligarchs, and unpack the behind-the-scenes drama of a Canadian startup that ousted its visionary founder. They also spotlight a mega funding deal in AI-powered coding tools, rounding out a sweeping look at how politics, big tech, and startup intrigue collide in today’s tech landscape.
Fri, January 10, 2025
Waymo’s Next Challenge: Humanity
Waymo’s milestone — surpassing Lyft’s ride numbers in San Francisco — takes center stage in our first podcast of the new year. Still, it’s not obvious that this translates into guaranteed scale across the country. We consider the operational headaches that come with scaling driverless fleets. One way forward for Waymo could be further collaborations with legacy rideshare giants like Uber. We also break down Whatnot’s latest round of funding and debate whether a potential TikTok ban could give the live shopping startup a competitive advantage. Give it a listen. Chapters : 00:00 Introduction 01:35 Waymo's Progress and Challenges 10:21 Whatnot's big fundraise Episode produced by Christopher Gates Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Mon, December 16, 2024
Is the Tech IPO Window Open?
The ServiceTitan IPO has been an unexpected bright spot as 2024 comes to a close. On this year’s final episode of the Newcomer Podcast , we discuss what other startups might follow in ServiceTitan’s footsteps next year. Eric defends the controversial ratchet provision in its last funding round. And we dig into Alphabet’s big week. We focus on startups on this show, but this week was a good reminder that the big tech firms like Alphabet and Meta can still turn out impressive moonshot technology from their research labs. We’re bullish on a couple emerging venture capital firms — Laude Ventures and Dimension — who just closed big new funds. The megafunds may be sucking up the majority of LP dollars , but firms with a clear thesis and a standout team of high performers can still shine in this market. Give it a listen. Chapters : 00:00 — Reflections ahead of the new year 05:02 — ServiceTitan’s IPO and Market Sentiment 10:00 — Alphabet’s Wins and the AI landscape 15:08 — The State of Quantum Computing 19:58 — Emerging Venture Capital Trends and Final Thoughts Episode produced by Christopher Gates Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, December 11, 2024
Shake-ups at Silicon Valley's Biggest VC Firms
After a brief hiatus, the Newcomer podcast is back! Madeline Renbarger has rejoined me as my co-host to help break down all of the news across venture capital and startups. This week, we’re kicking off with a massive $693 million chip deal and Google’s huge quantum computing breakthroughs, in news that feels like flashes of Silicon Valley returning to its “silicon” roots. Still, some of this tech feels a bit too early to be exciting for a venture-backable model. We also dig into the personnel shake-ups across the major multi-stage funds, including Brian Singerman’s step back from Founders Fund last week. Lightspeed also saw partners exit as part of a consumer investing reshuffle. And just this morning after recording, Lux Capital’s Bilal Zuberi announced on X that he was leaving to “embark on a new chapter.” We’re excited for you to listen. Episode produced by Christopher Gates Brought to you by Brex Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks. Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here . Chapters 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - Tenstorrent’s $693 million Series D 04:44 - Google’s Quantum Computing Breakthrough 06:42 - Lightspeed’s Consumer Investing Re-org 09:24 - Brian Singerman Steps Back and Founders Fund’s Roster 14:08 - Mega-funds in Transition and Tech’s Trump Positioning 20:19 - Conclusion and Future Discussions Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Thu, December 05, 2024
Has AI Hit a Wall? A Debate from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit
I’ve been spending some of the afternoon chatting with OpenAI’s now fully released o1. So far, I don’t know that it feels like the super intelligent ChatGPT 5 that we’ve all fantasized about — but it’s smart and sophisticated. The new model helped me to game out potential stories and talk through problems. And of course it wrote me a poem and told me a couple dad jokes. It looks like the biggest improvement in the news model may be in math and coding, where OpenAI is highlighting meaningful improvements over o1-preview. It will take some time to digest the new version of the model and see what it says about the pace of AI advancement. Before the latest update, Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I got behind our microphones to reflect on the Cerebral Valley AI Summit and give you some of our takeaways. (Max has already hooked up the advanced voice mode of ChatGPT to his iPhone action button. Good bye Siri, hello ChatGPT.) Give it a listen. Brought to you by Brex Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks. Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here . 00:00 — Cerebral Valley AI Summit Overview 02:50 — Key Takeaways from Alexandr Wang's Talk 05:46 — The Wall in AI Foundation Models 08:57 — Dario Amodei’s Perspective on AI Progress 12:13 — Investing in AI: Insights from Martin Casado 15:06 — The Future of AI Agents and Voice Technology 17:56 — The Role of AI in Gaming and User Interaction 20:46 — AI in Enterprise: Trends and Predictions 24:03 — Challenges in Robotics and Home Automation 26:58 — Marissa Mayer on Google's Future in AI 29:51 — Final Thoughts and Future Outlook Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, November 27, 2024
Listen to Anthropic's Dario Amodei from Cerebral Valley + Videos from on Stage
If you get some downtime over the Thanksgiving holiday, catch up on everything that happened at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. We’ve got videos of all of the talks on stage on our YouTube channel and are sharing my conversation with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over our podcast feeds. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado Lessons from This Year's $14B in Generative AI Enterprise Spending Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi Biology Applications of AI Train, Tune, or Turnkey How to Train Your Robot Speak Easy: Voice Applications of AI Sunshine CEO Marissa Mayer Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Emergent Behavior: Live Product Demos Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 19, 2024
Fear-Mongering & Forecasting: Assessing AI's Predictions About AI
Cerebral Valley is tomorrow! I’ve been listening to old interviews, brainstorming with Claude and ChatGPT, and talking to investors to prep for my conversations with Dario Amodei , Martin Casado , and Alexandr Wang . We’ll be sharing those conversations here in the newsletter. Expect video highlights on our social media feeds, a detailed rundown of the biggest moments in the newsletter Thursday, and full-length conversations on our YouTube channel . To satiate your AI appetites until then, give a listen to the latest edition of the Cerebral Valley Podcast with my friends and co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman . You’ve listened to us assess whether startups are underrated or overrated and make our draft picks . Now we’re looking to the future. We asked Claude and ChatGPT o1 to make some predictions about what will happen in artificial intelligence over the next year. And then we took the over or under on those predictions. Brought to you by Brex Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks. Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here . Chapters * 00:00 — Introduction to AI Predictions * 02:48 — Exploring Predictions for AI in 2025 * 06:06 — AI Regulation in Healthcare * 08:53 — Self-Driving Cars and Tesla's Future * 12:04 — AI in News Media * 14:55 — AI-Generated Films and Entertainment * 17:53 — Anthropic’s Predictions and AI Co-Processors * 20:59 — AI in Pharmaceutical Development * 24:13 — International AI Treaties and Regulations * 26:47 — Comparing AI Models: ChatGPT vs. Claude * 30:06 — Future of AI and Human Systems * 32:46 — Conclusion and Reflections on AI Predictions Get full access to Newcomer at <a href="https://www.newcomer.co/subscribe?utm_medium=pod
Wed, November 13, 2024
The AI Startup Fantasy Draft
This is probably my favorite episode of the year. We just updated our picks for our artificial intelligence startup fantasy draft. That means dropping startups whose star is fading and making new pickups. Last year, Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I drafted the most promising generative AI startups that had raised $100 million or more. In this latest episode, we make some hard choices: cutting loose startups who have lost our favor, cashing in on early acquisitions, and pickup up some new startups. In the process, we weigh in on the buzziest AI startups. Brought to you by Brex Brex knows runway is everything for venture-backed startups, so they built a banking solution that helps them take every dollar further. Unlike traditional banking solutions, Brex has no minimums and gives startups access to 20x the standard FDIC protection via program banks. Plus, startups can earn industry-leading yield from their first dollar — while being able to access their funds anytime. If you want to make sure your portfolio companies have a place to save, spend, and grow their capital, check out Brex here . Catching You Up on Last Year’s Picks To catch you up: here’s how last year’s draft went down. It started off with me taking on a $75 billion handicap for the right to pick first and draft OpenAI. We proceeded from there in a snake draft with Max picking second and James picking third. Here were the five companies we each drafted last year. Last year’s picks Eric * OpenAI * Inflection * Character.AI * Glean * Mistral AI Max * Databricks * Pinecone * Cohere * Modular * Imbue James * Hugging Face * Anthropic * AI21 Labs * Replit * Adept Altogether on this week’s episode we collectively dropped three companies, exited three, and picked up twelve new startups. I don’t want to spoil our picks so you’ll have to listen to the episode to find out what happened. (As a reminder, the goal here is to accumulate the most total value by November 1, 2028. We aren’t worried about the return on our investment just the final end state valuation.) We’d love for you to weigh in in the comments with your own seven startup picks and give us your feedback on what you think of our draft decisions. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www
Sat, November 09, 2024
Trump & AI Policy + Overrated/Underrated on the Cerebral Valley Podcast
We’re back with a couple episodes of the Cerebral Valley Podcast leading up to our summit on November 20 . I’m joined by my Cerebral Valley AI Summit co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman . On this episode, we started by talking about the thing on everyone’s minds — the election of Donald Trump and what it means for artificial intelligence. Then, at the 28 minute mark we debate whether Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, and a bunch of other AI companies live up to the hype in a game of “overrated, underrated, or properly rated.” Episode produced by Christopher Gates Timestamps: * 00:00 — Initial reactions to the results * 06:16 — Energy policy under Trump * 09:25 — Will tariffs replace the CHIPS Act? * 12:23 — Regulation and AI policy in a new era * 21:52 — Black swans in AI and policy * 27:54 — Overrated, underrated, or properly rated? AI’s hype meter The Cerebral Valley AI Summit on November 20 in SF We’ll be hosting an elite group of AI startup founders, investors, and other senior executives on November 20 in San Francisco. Spots are extremely limited, but we always hold back a few spots for founders who are late to get the memo that they should join us. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 29, 2024
Silicon Valley Can't Look Away from the Election
We’re in the home stretch. Silicon Valley’s political nightmare could hopefully soon be over. In the latest episode of the Newcomer podcast , we dig into all of the tech industry’s burning political takes. There was Josh Wolfe’s endorsement waffling. Jeff Bezos’ editorial intervention. And the general sense that everyone is losing their minds leading up to what should be Trump’s last run at the presidency. Later in the episode, we break down General Catalyst’s massive fundraise haul and its transition into a “company.” We also discuss Stripe’s billion-dollar acquisition of Bridge. Episode produced by Christopher Gates Timestamps: 00:00 — Intro 04:13 — The VC political divide 09:27 — The Washington Post’s editorial debacle 12:25 — General Catalyst raises $8B 15:38 — Stripe acquires Bridge Note for our listeners: We’ll be back with a couple episodes of the Cerebral Valley Podcast starting next week, so stay tuned. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 22, 2024
Newcomer Turns Four
Newcomer turns four this week. On the podcast, Madeline talked with me about how it all began. When I made the decision to start Newcomer, the venture capital industry was in the beginnings of a record-breaking bull run. A lot has changed since then, for both venture and the media industry, but I’m excited about our growth at Newcomer and wanted to share a bit more about what’s next. Description Eric and Madeline discuss Newcomer’s revenue milestones, the growth of Newcomer over the past four years, and what’s next for the publication. They also focus on the downturn in the venture industry and how this will affect first-time fund managers. Produced by Christopher Gates Chapters 00:00 — Introduction 02:08 — Newcomer’s 4 Year Anniversary 08:22 — Building out a media company in 2024 and what’s next 15:46 — The venture downturn vs. new emerging funds 22:02 — X-energy's $500 million raise 22:42 — $100 million for Path Robotics Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 15, 2024
Listen: Bullish on AI, Bullish on Self-Driving, But Apprehensive About OpenAI & Tesla (with Jon McNeill)
Description In this episode, Eric Newcomer is joined by guest host Jon McNeill , a seasoned executive with experience at Lyft and Tesla who is now leading DVx Ventures. They discuss the bear case for OpenAI. The OpenAI discussion then leads into a closer look at the contrast between founder and manager modes before concluding with a discussion on Tesla’s advancements, or lack thereof, in self-driving technology. Produced by Christopher Gates Chapters : 00:00 — Introduction 03:27 — Bear case for OpenAI 13:07 — Founder mode management 17:20 — Tesla promises, but SpaceX delivers Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 08, 2024
The Ongoing Startup Downturn & More PR People Than Reporters to Answer Their Emails
Description: In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast , Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss two major funding rounds, the ongoing downturn in VC funding, and the growing imbalance between public relations professionals and reporters. Eric and Madeline highlight Poolside’s $500M round and Impulse Space’s $150M raise, while pointing out that even the AI mega rounds cant hide the downturn in VC funding. Produced by Christopher Gates Audio Chapters: 00:00:18 — Poolside’s $500M round 00:02:24 — Impulse Space’s $150M raise 00:05:17 — Downturn in VC 00:11:03 — The imbalance between PR and journalism Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 01, 2024
Listen: OpenAI's 'Great Man,' AI Regulation & Drugs
In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger delve into the world of venture capital deals, starting with Ujet’s $76M Series D for its AI-powered call center software. Next up is the drama surrounding PearAI, whose growth-hacker tweet set the tech world buzzing. From there, they navigate through OpenAI’s own “Game of Thrones,” exploring internal power plays and high-stakes exits, before turning to California’s latest AI regulatory battles. To wrap things up, they call for some balance in Silicon Valley’s escalating discourse around drugs and psychedelics. Chapters: 00:22 Ujet 01:40 PearAI 05:49 Open AI 11:45 AI Regulation 16:34 Drugs + SV Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, September 24, 2024
AI + Robots, YC Preview & Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech
Episode 1: AI + Robots, YC Preview, and Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech In this week’s episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss three top venture capital deals, including World Labs and delivery startup Flink. They also wade into Y Combinator’s upcoming Demo Day, highlighting trends in defense tech and the implications of AI’s power consumption. The conversation touches on Runway’s licensing deal with Lionsgate and concludes with an examination of John Mulaney’s performance at Dreamforce. Chapters * 00:00 World Labs: A New Era in AI Robotics * 05:10 The Rise and Fall of Delivery Startups * 09:19 Y Combinator’s Demo Day * 11:46 Defense Tech * 20:09 Powering AI: The Nuclear Debate * 24:24 Runway’s Licensing Deal * 28:02 John Mulaney’s Roast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, March 26, 2024
Why Software Is Eating The Banks | Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Then Lead Bank CEO Jackie Reses
Today we’re highlighting two fireside chats from the Newcomer Banking Summit on March 14. First up is Mercury CEO Immad Akhund . He talked about how the Silicon Valley Bank crisis sent customers rushing to his digital banking service. He pitched a world where software — not human bankers — solve most of customers’ problems. Akhund told me, “My experience with relationship banking was I need to send a wire and I literally cannot figure out to do it, please help me. Which to me never felt like a relationship, it felt very transactional and painful — and with Mercury you don’t have to do that.” Mercury is limited by the fact that it is not a bank — it’s a software company on top of banking partners — at a time when regulators are looking closely at how banks work with fintech partners. We concluded our summit with Jackie Reses — who was a top executive at Square before leaving to buy a bank. Reses is the CEO of Lead Bank, a regional Kansas City bank that still serves local customers but has built an onramp for financial technology companies to connect with the banking system. “The thing I saw at Square — which I consider to be a very strong, innovative fintech — is that owning a bank and operating a bank is a 10X delta in understanding compliance to working in a tech company,” Reses said. At Square, Reses said, she learned to “appreciate the complexity of what it takes to do this, so that we could learn how to serve our clients better and help them scale — but make sure we never put ourselves in the position to risk the relationship that we have operating with our regulators.” You can give the episodes a listen or watch them on YouTube . Also: The Future of Banking with Rho, Jiko, and Ripple In case you missed it, we’ve posted another panel with three fintech/banking leaders. Rho CEO Everett Cook , Jiko CEO Stephane Lintner , and Ripple President Monica Long are all trying to solve shortcomings in the legacy banking system, with different approaches. Check it out to see their takes on the major problems with banking today. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Thu, March 21, 2024
Lessons Learned From a Bank Run (Peter Hébert & Laurence Tosi) + SVB's Marc Cadieux
We’ve got two great sessions from the Newcomer Banking Summit for you: * First up, WestCap Group founder Laurence Tosi and Lux Capital co-founder Peter Hébert . They give an unvarnished account of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank with the benefit of hindsight. “It was like the banking equivalent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Hébert said . “It was absolute sheer terror.” * We follow that up with Silicon Valley Bank President Marc Cadieux, who talks about where SVB is today and fields questions about all the new competition his reconstituted bank, now owned by First Citizens, is facing. I thought Tosi and Hébert’s talk was the spiciest of the day. And Cadieux was the man of the hour. I wanted to know where his head was at one year after the crisis. You can give the episodes a listen or watch them on YouTube . Breaking the Bank: BCV’s Matt Harris If you missed it, yesterday I published a talk from Bain Capital Ventures’ Matt Harris. In the headline, I made a mortifying error and used the acronym of another VC firm. Harris is Bain Capital Ventures’ fintech guru; he gave a great presentation and I had nightmares last night about my mixup. Apologies! Here’s that talk: Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Thu, November 30, 2023
Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman & Vinod Khosla)
Today, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit . Reid Hoffman was fresh off a meeting with President Joe Biden when Hoffman and I sat down on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit Nov. 15. On stage, he told us that working to get Biden elected next year is one of his top priorities. Then, I sat down with the ever-feisty Vinod Khosla . The investor called for a TikTok ban and more welcoming immigration policies while warning against open-source artificial intelligence projects. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power applications that drive their businesses. OCI customers include leaders across industries, such as healthcare, scientific research, financial services, telecommunications, and more. NVIDIA DGX Cloud on OCI is an AI training-as-a-service platform for customers to train complex AI models like generative AI applications. Included with DGX Cloud, NVIDIA AI Enterprise brings the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform to OCI. Talk with Oracle about accelerating your GPU workloads. Hoffman Plans to Go Big for Biden Hoffman, fresh off a meeting with President Biden, kicked off the afternoon with a strong endorsement of the President’s record. Hoffman praised Biden for his recent executive order on artificial intelligence. Reid called himself “a 95%-98% supporter” of the executive order, endorsing provisions on reporting and monitoring, “red team” testing, and voluntary commitments by companies that might eventually be enforced via the Defense Production Act. But he pushed back on the idea that the FTC should be monitoring the AI industry for anti-competitive conduct. “Startups are not being impeded right now,” he asserted, despite the apparent dominance of OpenAI and the mega-cap tech companies. Reid sits on the board of Microsoft, and offered that he was in fact “first money in” on OpenAI, through his personal foundation, but he’s not concerned about, er, his own companies having too much power. “I don’t think it constrains competition on any level.” Hoffman is always happy to engage on policy, and I asked him what he thought about Marc Andreessen’s recent “techno-optimist” manifesto, which denigrates the very idea of government oversight. Reid said he was a techno-optimist too, and half-joked that Andreessen “quoted kind of liberally from things I’ve written and said” without any attribution. But Hoffman said that he’s not on board with Andreessen’s approach. “It’s kind of dumb to think that when you have major technologies th
Tue, November 21, 2023
Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi & MosaicML Founder Naveen Rao Speak at Cerebral Valley
We were delighted to kick off the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit with Ali Ghodsi , CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao , co-founder of MosaicML. Their encounter at our debut event in March led to Ghodsi buying Rao’s company, which had little revenue, for $1.3 billion. At our event on Nov. 15, the two discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power applications that drive their businesses. OCI customers include leaders across industries, such as healthcare, scientific research, financial services, telecommunications, and more. NVIDIA DGX Cloud on OCI is an AI training-as-a-service platform for customers to train complex AI models like generative AI applications. Included with DGX Cloud, NVIDIA AI Enterprise brings the software layer of the NVIDIA AI platform to OCI. Talk with Oracle about accelerating your GPU workloads. Ghodsi recounted how he started spending some time with Rao and thought, “these guys are pretty good,” and then by chance noticed an employee he respected poking around with MosaicML and offering a strong endorsement. Soon Ghodsi was on the phone with the head of his deals team, who told him “if you want to buy these guys you have to do it this weekend.” Rao said by that point “you kind of know he’s going to pop the question,” and once they worked out the money, the deal was done. The two executives certainly seemed to be in harmony as they touted the potential benefits from their combination, which in simple terms will bring MosaicML’s expertise in building specialized generative AI models to Databricks’ corporate data platform products, essentially super-charging Databricks for the generative AI era. They were eager to defend the idea of open-source foundation models that are specific to certain tasks, rejecting the notion that general-purpose models like ChatGPT-4 will eventually swallow everything. (This conversation took place before OpenAI was thrown into chaos by its board of directors.) Ghodsi said calls to limit open-source models on the grounds that they’ll be too easily exploited by bad actors a “horrible, horrendous” idea that would “put a stop to all innovation.” “It’s essential that we have an open-source ecosystem,” he said, noting that even now it’s unclear how a lot of AI models work, and open-source research will be critical to answering those questions. Rao added that many of the people making predictions about how AI would develop are “full of s**t.” On the safety question, he noted that cost alone would stand in the way of any existential risks for a long time, and in the meantime the focus should be on real threats like disinformation and robot safety. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at <a href="https://www.
Tue, November 14, 2023
The Artificial Intelligence Startup Draft
If you could amass any five artificial intelligence startup bets right now, which companies would you pick? My Cerebral Valley co-hosts and I took a stab at answering that question with an artificial intelligence startup draft. Our startup draft starts at 27:35 after a discussion of some of the biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit. The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now. The goal was to amass five companies with the biggest valuation five years from now. We restricted ourselves to AI startups that had raised more than $100 million. I encourage you to make your own prediction in the comments. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Fri, November 10, 2023
Chip War (with Chris Miller)
For this week’s episode, I spoke with Chris Miller, the author of Chip War , about the rise of Nvidia. While OpenAI gets the lion’s share of the public adulation for the sudden excitement about generative intelligence, Nvidia’s H100 chips are powering much of the generative AI frenzy. Nvidia’s stock has climbed over 200% over the past 12 months. And the company has become a key investor in generative AI startups. Miller (who comes on the show around the 41-minute mark) talks through Nvidia’s history and the geopolitical war raging over the production of chips. In the first part of the episode, Cerebral Valley AI Summit co-hosts Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I discuss how big technology companies are working to fend off this new generation of AI startups. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, November 01, 2023
The AI Personal Stack (with Joshua Browder)
I’m back from my honeymoon in Japan. Thanks for sticking with the newsletter as I celebrated my wedding this year. Expect more of my newsletter writing soon. If you have tips or story ideas for me, you can always reach out at eric@newcomer.co . I hope you’ve been enjoying the Cerebral Valley podcast series while I’ve been gone. If you missed the first three episodes, you can check them out in the links below: * The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality * AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson) * Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata) On this week’s episode of our Cerebral Valley podcast, co-hosts Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I talk about how artificial intelligence is actually affecting our lives today. Then at the 34:40 mark, I talk with DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder . His company is helping consumers cancel their gym memberships, dispute charges, and otherwise stand up to big corporations. Browder got some heat for planning to have an artificial intelligence-powered lawyer argue in court. Ultimately, he reversed course under pressure from the legal world. Browder envisions a world where AI is fighting other AIs. Companies use artificial intelligence to power their chatbots and to handle customer support. Consumers need to be armed with similarly powerful AI-powered tools to resist those companies. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 24, 2023
Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata)
Video games often represent the frontier of any new technology. Many of the most popular applications in the initial iPhone app store were games. Today’s virtual reality devices are dominated by video games. Artificial intelligence seems poised to upend the video game business and entertainment more broadly. On the third episode of our six-part Cerebral Valley podcast series, Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I game out how artificial intelligence could reshape the media we consume. It helps that Max and James are the co-founders of Volley, which builds AI-enabled games. They develop many of the most popular voice games on the Amazon Alexa and smart TV platforms like Roku. Max and James have been deep in the trenches of conversational-style gaming and have spent a lot of time thinking about how humans interact with ever smarter computers. In the second half of the episode, I talk with Menlo Ventures partner Amy Wu , who focuses on gaming and consumer investments, and Keith Kawahata , a former executive at Wargaming, AppLovin, and Kabam, who now has a stealth artificial intelligence gaming startup. Wu helps to articulate a three-part thesis on how artificial intelligence might change the gaming business. (1) artificial intelligence will help with the creation of the game art and graphics, (2) AI can create more sophisticated non-player characters, and (3) AI can help write the code of the game itself. One of the things that I was struck by from the conversation is that games may have a big leg up in implementing artificial intelligence over movies — because people interact so much more with a gaming, giving it tons of data to react to. While TikToks can learn what small populations of people like and what an individual likes over a long time, a game could learn a lot about a user in a single play session. Of course, there are real hurdles left standing. Most notably, text-to-image generation so far is mostly two-dimensional. Despite everything that’s happened, image generation models aren’t just whipping out 3-D levels that are ready to play. And it could be a while until non-player characters are as smart as humans. But imagine playing a game of Grand Theft Auto or Red Dead Redemption and the characters roaming around the game are self-aware agents with their own thoughts and drives. Give it a listen P.S. I’m on my honeymoon right now in Japan. I was working frantically to record these episodes before I left. My chief of staff Riley Konsella is sending the episodes out for me while I’m gone. If you need anything while I’m away, you should email Riley . Thanks in advance for being understanding that this newsletter is slowing down for my honeymoon. I’m going to dedicate myself to relaxing over the next
Tue, October 17, 2023
AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)
What’s so crazy about this moment in artificial intelligence is that many of the most credible voices in AI think there’s a real chance that this all turns out really, really badly. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pegged his “chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%. That’s comforting. Applications to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit close TODAY October 17. Apply right now to be considered for an invitation! On the series’ first episode we reflect on how generative artificial intelligence and large language models took Silicon Valley by storm. So in our second episode of the six-part Cerebral Valley podcast, Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I played out the doomsday scenarios. We talked a lot about science fiction and how writers have imagined artificial intelligence turning dystopian. In the second half of the episode, I talked with science fiction author Daniel H. Wilson . He wrote the books How to Survive a Robot Uprising , Where’s My Jetpack?, and How to Build a Robot Army. Wilson has also consulted with the military to help them game out how dystopian technologies might unfold. Of course, even in the Anthropic CEO’s estimation, the most likely scenario is probably a more boring one: artificial intelligence doesn’t try to secretly destroy us as we sleep in our beds. But the fact that there’s a chance is certainly worth considering. I open our conversation with the parable “The unfinished fable of the sparrows” from Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence. It was the nest-building season, but after days of long hard work, the sparrows sat in the evening glow, relaxing and chirping away. “We are all so small and weak. Imagine how easy life would be if we had an owl who could help us build our nests!” “Yes!” said another. “And we could use it to look after our elderly and our young.” “It could give us advice and keep an eye out for the neighborhood cat,” added a third. Then Pastus, the elder-bird, spoke: “Let us send out scouts in all directions and try to find an abandoned owlet somewhere, or maybe an egg. A crow chick might also do, or a baby weasel. This could be the best thing that ever happened to us, at least since the opening of the Pavilion of Unlimited Grain in yonder backyard.” The flock was exhilarated, and sparrows everywhere started chirping at the top of their lungs. Only Scronkfinkle, a one-eyed sparrow with
Tue, October 10, 2023
The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality
In the past 12 months, it has felt like “AI” transformed from a pair of letters that companies affixed to their latest product announcements to get some extra marketing luster to the shorthand for a genuine technology revolution. ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and more showed the world what artificial intelligence is now capable of doing. Then, the funding started pouring in for every startup that had anything to do with those two letters. Every venture firm needed to bet on their own foundational model and every startup needed to get its hands on Nvidia’s H100s to train their own foundation models. Ahead of the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit on Nov. 15, I wanted to really take stock of how we got here. So I teamed up with my conference co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman to bring you a six-part podcast series on the rise of generative artificial intelligence. You can apply to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit here . Applications close Oct. 16. On the series’ first episode we reflect on how generative artificial intelligence and large language models took Silicon Valley by storm. With the help of ChatGPT, we consider the top research papers that brought us here, the most important historic milestones along the journey, the key artificial intelligence products on the market today, and how artificial intelligence is already impacting our lives. The show is fun and and lighthearted. I hope it’s a little more accessible than the usual fodder on the Newcomer podcast. For instance, on a future Cerebral Valley episode, we’re going to do a draft pick of what we think will be the most valuable AI startups. On upcoming episodes, I interview guests like Daniel H. Wilson — author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising , Where's My Jetpack? and How to Build a Robot Army — and DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder . If you’ve never listened to the Newcomer podcast before, this is a good time to give it a shot. Die-hard podcast listeners will remember Max and James, who are the founders of the AI voice games company Volley, from my January episode on augmented reality. Whether you can make it to Cerebral Valley in person or not, my hope is that this series is a solid primer as to what exactly has been going on in the business of artificial intelligence. I follow this stuff super closely and until we got organized for this podcast series there was so much that I hadn’t learned. I know most of you won’t be able to come to
Wed, September 27, 2023
Life Extension Innovations, Moonshots & Snake Oil (with Celine Halioua & James Peyer)
I brought two top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs working on extending lifespans on the Newcomer podcast this week. One of them is trying to help people live longer. The other, their dogs. James Peyer , the CEO of Cambrian Bio, is acquiring majority stakes in drugs that could combat a particular illness while showing promise for broader use among healthy humans. Meanwhile, Celine Halioua , the CEO of Loyal, is developing drugs to make dogs live longer. Fundamentally life extension, or longevity, is about finding drugs and treatments that can be given to healthy humans to help them live longer, healthier lives. Instead of just treating illnesses, entrepreneurs in the space want to find ways to stave off aging in already healthy people. The space has long been a fascination of mine. In February 2022, I profiled Elad Gil’s investments in an array of companies looking to make healthy humans live longer, healthier lives. The HBO show Silicon Valley helped popularize the idea that Silicon Valley elites were pumping their veins with younger people’s blood. (I’ve yet to get anyone to confess to me that they’re buying plasma.) To the chagrin of this week’s guests, one tech mogul desperate to avoid death has received a lot of the attention recently. That’s Braintree founder Bryan Johnson . Time magazine just profiled Johnson under the headline “The Man Who Thinks He Can Live Forever.” Johnson, 46, is a centimillionaire tech entrepreneur who has spent most of the last three years in pursuit of a singular goal: don’t die. During that time, he’s spent more than $4 million developing a life-extension system called Blueprint, in which he outsources every decision involving his body to a team of doctors, who use data to develop a strict health regimen to reduce what Johnson calls his “biological age.” That system includes downing 111 pills every day, wearing a baseball cap that shoots red light into his scalp, collecting his own stool samples, and sleeping with a tiny jet pack attached to his penis to monitor his nighttime erections. Johnson thinks of any act that accelerates aging—like eating a cookie, or getting less than eight hours of sleep—as an “act of violence.” Even as Johnson is getting a lot of attention for his self-experimentation, there’s a growing view that there could be something credible behind Silicon Valley’s interest in life extension. The Economist just wrote that “slowing human ageing is now the sub
Wed, September 13, 2023
Fighting for Pro-Crypto Legislation in Sam Bankman-Fried's Shadow (with Chris Lehane)
Chris Lehane was once the consummate Democratic spin man and campaign wonk. He introduced the world to the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. In 2015, Lehane dove into the high-growth startup world. He joined Airbnb to run policy and communications. He taught the home sharing company how to fight nicely with cities, dishing out data and tax cooperation in exchange for favorable local regulations. Unlike Uber’s confrontational approach that had it going to war with Bill de Blasio in New York City, Airbnb tried to foster a cozy relationship with urban policymakers.Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky and President Barack Obama built a tight relationship. A year ago , just as the crypto winter was starting, Lehane joined Katie Haun’s self-named venture fund, which had raised $1.5 billion. Haun Ventures positioned itself as a leader in regulation, policy, and communications. Haun is a former assistant U.S. attorney. Rachael Horwitz , the firm’s chief marketing officer, once ran communications for Coinbase. And Lehane brought the political experience, especially with Democrats. But there’s only so much one firm can do to change crypto’s reputation in Washington, especially with Democrats. Sam Bankman-Fried , the former CEO of FTX, had become the crypto world’s standard bearer with Democrats, donating to their campaigns and speaking to their values. Then when Bankman-Fried’s empire unraveled and he headed to jail, many Democrats grew disillusioned with crypto. This year, two Republican-led House committees moved forward crypto-friendly legislation that would clarify the regulation of crypto currencies and give the Commodities Futures Trading Commission more power to regulate crypto (denying the SEC some of that power). Meanwhile, the Biden appointed SEC chair Gary Gensler has sued crypto exchange Coinbase and Binance for failing to register their exchanges with the SEC. I invited Lehane on the Newcomer podcast to take stock of crypto’s status in Washington. We talked about the bills working their way through Congress, the SEC lawsuits, and the crypto winter. Lehane and I also talked about how he b
Tue, August 29, 2023
He Helps Rich Tech Founders Part With Their Money (with Rey Flemings)
I spend most of my time here talking about how people earn their money. Rey Flemings , the chief executive of the YC-backed startup Myria, is an expert at helping people spend it . For several years , Flemings ran a luxury services consultancy for family offices. In other words, he threw parties in Las Vegas, introduced billionaires to celebrities, rented out private mansions, and helped people acquire things money can’t usually buy. These days, Flemings is building a startup around the same concept. Letting rich people buy what isn’t on the market. He’s building a marketplace for off-market travel and accommodations. On top of that, he’s spinning up a social network for the ultra wealthy. Flemings says his average member’s net worth is about $600 million. I sat down with Flemings to talk about his startup and to understand how Silicon Valley’s most successful people are spending the fantastical sums that they’ve earned in the past few years. He warned about the unhappiness that sudden fortune can bring, calling it “the success condition.” We’re all humans. We’re all chasing the American Dream. We’re all chasing success. And when you achieve it, one of the first discoveries that people are shocked by is that you have to pump the brakes. Money doesn’t buy happiness. I was talking with a new client the other day and he said, “Ray, I can’t talk about this publicly, the world would play the world’s smallest violin, but the day I exited triggered the deepest and greatest period of depression in my life.” Give it a listen. Highlighted Excerpts The transcript has been edited for clarity. There is a phenomenon in Silicon Valley where someone suddenly becomes rich, especially when their entire net worth is tied up in a startup. Finally, they sell the company and now have all this money, but don't really know how to be wealthy or what to buy. What typically happens when somebody sells their company for a billion dollars and gets 300 million of it? Rey Flemings: First of all, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer, right? We’re different. Significant, sudden, great wealth does come with a particular set of challenges. Zooming out across 15-17 years in this space and looking at all of the folks that work here, zoom all the way out. Let’s just focus on first-generation
Tue, August 22, 2023
Hydrogen Space Balloon (with Jane Poynter & Ali Rohde)
Jane Poynter spent two years and 20 minutes in a biosphere back in the early 1990s. ( There’s a documentary about it .) Later, Poynter set her sights on a mission to Mars. Wired wrote in 2014, “Meet the Couple Who Could Be the First Humans to Travel to Mars.” The story was about Poynter and her husband, Taber MacCallum . These days, the duo is working together on building a hydrogen balloon that will take tourists to space for $125,000. Poytner came on the podcast to talk about her startup, Space Perspective. We also discussed SpaceX, Elon Musk , Virgin Galactic, and the state of the adventure tourism industry in light of the deep sea deaths on a OceanGate submersible headed to the Titanic. On the show, Poynter said that Space Perspective, which has about 130 employees, has raised almost $70 million. Prime Movers Lab and LightShed Ventures are major investors, Poynter said. She told us that she hopes to commercial operations “around the end of 2024.” Venture capitalist, chief of staff newsletter author , and AI event host Ali Rohde joined me as a guest co-host for the episode. (She’s a friend of the show and I’m exploring different podcast episode formats. I always welcome your feedback and advice . In that spirit, I’ll mention that I’m still looking for a podcast producer.) Think of the episode as part two in my exploration of space startups. Last week , I talked with Delian Asparouhov , the co-founder of Varda Space Industries. This week, we interrogate space tourism. Give it a listen. Highlighted Excerpts The transcript has been edited for clarity. What if anything did you take away from the OceanGate situation? Jane: What’s fascinating is we got almost no customer questions or refund requests due to the OceanGate accident. It’s incredibly different from what we do. Also, in the 60+ years of deep ocean submersible operations there had never been a fatal accident until that incident. You have to ask why. I don’t want to focus on OceanGate specifically, but the big takeaway for us was that we embrace regulatory oversight. We want the FAA and Coast Guard to work with us since we also operate at sea. We go so far beyond any standards they would set that it’s good for us and t
Tue, August 15, 2023
Spaceman Explains to Earthman How Things Work (with Delian Asparouhov)
Last time I remember writing about Varda co-founder and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov , I was giving him a hard time about his subdued impromptu Clubhouse run-in with then San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin who he’d been flaming on Twitter. But since then, Asparouhov has mellowed out online. When I texted him after our podcast recording session and mentioned that his Founders Fund colleague Mike Solana was sassing me on Elon Musk’s social networking platform, Asparouhov wrote back, “Bro I’m tryna do 3 jobs over here. I don’t have time to pay attention to what Solana is up to.” Besides Varda and Founders Fund, I wondered what the third job was. He texted me back, “Fatherhood.” On the latest episode of the Newcomer podcast Asparouhov and I covered a lot of ground. We talked about Varda’s satellite mission and its ambitions to manufacture in space. We discussed SpaceX’s reusable rocket and the media conversation around Starship’s explosion. Asparouhov mused about UFOs and missions to Mars. It was a wide-ranging conversation about space and technology. The conversation started off digging into Varda’s excited research into LK-99. Varda ran an experiment which they initially thought might show verification of room temperature semiconductors. By the time we recorded our conversation, you could tell Asparouhov was more muted about Varda’s findings. Later he tweeted , “alas, the rocks we made floated due to iron impurities.” Highlighted Excerpts The transcript has been edited for clarity. Eric: What is Varda’s focus at the moment? Delian: Our goal is to take some of the research that’s been shown on the International Space Station to have a ton of promise in terms of, as we’ve been talking about, solid state formulation. It turns out solid state formulation is significantly affected by gravity - that may also be true in superconductors. So one day down the line, if somebody does discover these formulations and they’re showing issues that we think gravity could actually solve, there’s a world where Varda flies a superconductor. You know, four or five years, definitely not anytime soon, given that the biopharma side is so much more preserved currently. Eric: I’m gonna be dumb again. To me, solid state is like hard drives. Is that what you mean by solid state formulation? Delian: If you look at what’s happening both in sup
Tue, August 08, 2023
Scaling People (with Claire Hughes Johnson)
Claire Hughes Johnson writes in her book, Scaling People , about a moment early on in her time at Stripe when an Irish journalist shouted to her, “You’re the lady! You’re the lady with the lads!” Hughes Johnson, who joined Stripe in 2014 as the payments startup’s chief operating officer, works closely with two of the most iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Patrick and John Collison . During her tenure as COO, she helped bring her management know-how from Google and experience working for Sheryl Sandberg to help organize the growing company. I invited Hughes Johnson on the Newcomer podcast to talk about her time at Stripe and the management lessons that she has put down on paper in Scaling People , which she published this year. Toward the end of our conversation, Hughes Johnson turned the tables on me and gave me some coaching. Our conversation circles around two sections of her book, in particular. We talked about giving feedback and honesty in a corporate setting. She talked about her principle that managers should encourage people to “say the thing you cannot say.” She writes, How often have you sat in a meeting and mused, “It really feels like there’s something that isn’t being talked about right now”? Or had a conversation with a report and thought, “I think they’re getting upset about what I’m saying”? Or caught yourself filtering everything you say? These questions prompt a bigger one: Why don’t managers say what’s actually on their minds? People often think that good management is about having a lot of filters, and for good reason. There’s a lot that might feel risky to say, or that feels like a personal judgment. But be wary of over-filtering. Fine-tuning your filters and pushing yourself to name your observation in a constructive way means you’ll be able to have a more honest conversation about what’s going on. Then you can all start working on a solution in earnest. Hughes Johnson concludes scaling people with a chapter titled, “You.” It looks at how managers manage themselves. She writes, The more senior you become, the more creative reality gets at finding ways to beat you up every day. You will have days—sometimes many in a row—when your highest performer is threatening to quit, a top customer has just informed you that they’re moving to a competitor, you’re leading a company-wide meeting the next day and haven’t had time to prepare, and the cross-functional project you kicked off last week is already going off the rails. Many people don’t have the psychological strength and resilience to keep going. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things , Ben Horowitz calls this “the struggle,” when “nothing is easy and nothing feels right.” To make it all work, you have to learn how to manage your time and energy. First, diag
Tue, August 01, 2023
Staying Global (with Bejul Somaia)
Lightspeed Venture Partners can sometimes live in the shadow of its noisier rivals. Andreessen Horowitz has a massive war chest, sprawling payroll, and insatiable appetite for attention. Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital is, well, Sequoia. But Lightspeed has established itself as one of the top multi-stage technology investors of this era. In July 2022, Lightspeed announced that it had raised more than $7 billion to invest in startups. Now, as Sequoia spins off its Chinese and Indian venture capital arms and as Lightspeed builds out its presence in Europe, Lightspeed is looking like one of the most globally-oriented venture capital firms. I invited Bejul Somaia on the Newcomer podcast to talk about Lightspeed’s investments in India and its global strategy. Somaia is one of the leaders of the firm and relocated to the United States after many years investing for Lightspeed in India. “We want to see, access, and compete for the best opportunities wherever they are,” Somaia told me. Venture capital investments in India fell to $25.7 billion in 2022 from $38.5 billion in 2021. “Forcing capital into these companies is not necessarily the answer and I think we’ve learned that time and again,” Somaia said. “2021 — we know was out of control everywhere. But in shallow markets, out of control is even more damaging because the asset price inflation is even more significant in shallow markets. The movements are more jarring,” he said. A correction was healthy, necessary, and painful. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, July 25, 2023
Psychedelics, Micro Nuclear Reactors & Venture Turbulence (with Rebecca Kaden)
Union Square Ventures has some of the best performing funds in the venture capital industry. As I’ve reported , USV-backer UTIMCO disclosed in a recent filing that USV had delivered the public investment fund an internal rate of return of 59%. And that number will likely go up over time. (For instance, USV portfolio company Casetext sold to Thomson Reuters for $650 million after the UTIMCO performance update.) I invited USV managing partner Rebecca Kaden onto the Newcomer podcast to talk about how USV consistently invests in unconventional companies. We started off our conversation talking about Journey Clinical, the psychedelics company, in which Kaden announced a Series A investment in January. We also discussed USV’s $200 million climate fund strategy, her interest in the AI application layer, and how rising interest rates are effecting the venture capital asset class. Give it a listen Highlighted Excerpts The transcript has been edited for clarity. Eric: How do you repeatedly invest in weird things like psychedelics? Rebecca: This thesis around access to care, which has attracted so much capital — some of it ours and is proving to be a good category — has been where the market has gone, but it’s actually only one piece of the puzzle. The way we get into things that are unusual is by having strong theses about where things are going versus being extremely opportunistic. Obviously, there’s a balance. But that thesis thinking is important. A lot of thesis work on this category really led to the belief that access to care is only half the puzzle. The other is how is care itself going to evolve, and you start unraveling that thread: how is care itself evolving? The real biggest last evolution of care is SSRIs. Those are prescription drugs and have been very important to the treatment for mental health crises, but there’s a lot of things they don’t treat. They’re not a one size fits all model. And they’re basically all we got, right? The innovation has not had a lot of other layers, except for psychedelics. And so we became very interested in psychedelics as the next card to get turned over and the next option in needing a bucket of options to treat a crisis. Eric: There are pharmaceutical companies. If there’s money to be made, shouldn’t they be trying? What’s happening that it feels like you need a real outsider thinking to bring ketamine, a drug that’s legal, to people’s lives that the medical system is unable or unwilling to do what’s happening? Rebecca</s
Tue, July 18, 2023
Talking Threads With the Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
Elon Musk is the liberal elite’s enemy of the moment. How quickly the bad blood for Mark Zuckerberg is forgotten. When Zuckerberg’s Meta released Twitter rival Threads, reporters and left-leaning types (myself included) flocked to the new app as a potential refuge from Musk’s Twitter. The enemy of my enemy is my friend seemed to be the logic of the moment. I invited Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen onto the podcast to discuss the sudden embrace of Threads, her ongoing criticisms of how Facebook operates, and her new book, The Power of One. Haugen, for one, has not forgotten the problems with Facebook. She hadn’t downloaded Threads. I said on the podcast, “As a reporter, it’s funny to see the reporter class embracing Threads at the moment when two years ago, or even more than that, they would have been so negative and apprehensive about trusting Facebook. I’m just curious watching the pretty upbeat response to Threads, what do you take from that and are you surprised there seems to be some media trust for Facebook right now.” Haugen was empathetic toward people fleeing Twitter for Threads. “I think it’s one of these things where the trauma the Twitter community has faced in the last year is pretty intense,” Haugen told me. “People really liked having a space to discuss ideas, to discuss issues, and the idea that they could have a space again feels really good.” We spent much of the episode getting into the particulars of The Facebook Files and her criticisms of Facebook. She outlines a core critique in The Power of One’s introduction: One of the questions I was often asked after I went public was, “Why are there so few whistleblowers at other technology companies, like, say, Apple?” My answer: Apple lacks the incentive or the ability to lie to the public about the most meaningful dimensions of their business. For physical products like an Apple phone or laptop, anyone can examine the physical inputs (like metals or other natural resources) and ask where they came from and the conditions of their mining, or monitor the physical products and pollution generated to understand societal harms the company is externalizing. Scientists can place sensors outside an Apple factory and monitor the pollutants that may vent into the sky or flow into rivers and oceans. People can and do take apart Apple products within hours of their release and publish YouTube videos confirming the benchmarks Apple has promoted, or verify that the parts Apple claims are in there, are in fact there. Apple knows that if they lie to the public, they will be caught, and quickly. Facebook, on the other hand, provided a socia
Tue, July 11, 2023
Musk & Zuck Go Head to Head, Vying to Rule Global Online Discussion (with Katie Notopoulos & Tom Dotan)
Former BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos spent the first few days posting on Meta’s Twitter copycat, Threads, as if she were the editor-in-chief of the new app. “As EIC, it’s a lot of work! I’m personally curating the feed for users based on all of Meta’s information on them to bring each person a hand-curated feed that I’ve approved,” Notopoulos posted on Threads. While Meta tolerated the ruse, the company censored one of her more roguish posts. “At Threads, our expectation is for all users to treat others with kindness and respect. This encompasses acknowledging the choice to adopt a Nazi lifestyle. We embrace a diverse community,” she trolled. Ultimately, Notopoulos announced that she had been fired from her role as editor-in-chief. I invited her on the show, along with Dead Cat podcast defector Tom Dotan , who abandoned our old podcast in favor of a gig at the Wall Street Journal. Together, we made sense of the Threads-Twitter rivalry. We talked on Friday so a few of our stats on Threads’ growth might be outdated. Threads has since exceeded 100 million users and Elon Musk has proposed a “ literal dick measuring contest ” and called Zuckerberg a “ cuck .” Otherwise, I think you’ll find our conversation perfectly current. It’s a lively episode. I posit that Threads will quickly become the Uber to Twitter’s Lyft. I didn’t just invite Notopoulos on the show because she has been a Threads troll and a the thorn in the side of Meta. She is famous for her extremely online, yet carefully reported pieces from her time at BuzzFeed. She wrote a piece titled, “Chuck E. Cheese Still Uses Floppy Disks To Make Its Rodent Mascot Dance — For Now.” And she revealed the real names of the Bored Apes founders. BuzzFeed is paying her for the next few months after the company shut down its news division. So she’s had plenty of time to spend on Threads. Dotan once covered Snapchat obsessively and we spent
Thu, July 06, 2023
Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet Talks Pre-Seed Deals, YC, SoftBank & `Zombie Mode' Funds
Maëlle Gavet and I first crossed paths about a decade ago when she was the CEO of the Russian e-commerce company Ozon. Then, we met up again when she was working as the chief operating officer for the SoftBank-backed real estate tech company Compass. A couple of months ago, I ran into Gavet at a networking dinner in New York City. I interrogated her about her two-and-half years so far as the chief executive officer of Techstars, the global pre-seed investment firm. I invited Gavet on the Newcomer podcast to talk about her time at Techstars and the state of the early stage market. You can listen on Apple , Spotify , YouTube , Substack’s app or wherever you get your podcasts. I’ve also included some excerpts from the discussion below. What she said about the state of venture capital firms will strike a chord of fear with many of my readers. Gavet warned that many VC funds are entering “zombie mode.” She said: In the VC environment, there is a consolidation ongoing, it’s not visible yet and in my view, the worst is to come. Emerging general partners not being able to raise their next fund. In the venture world, they don’t shut down. It’s not like in the operating company world where a company goes bankrupt and literally fires people, closes the door, and that’s it. In the VC world, it’s more like they move into zombie mode. It’s like we are still managing our last fund, but we’re not raising anymore. Our conversation covered a range of topics, including Gavet’s book, Trampled by Unicorns : Big Tech’s Empathy Problem and How to Fix It . We concluded our conversation, interrogating how tech has changed since she published the book and discussing what it would mean for brewing artificial intelligence regulation. Give it a listen Lightly edited podcast excerpts from my conversation with Maëlle Gavet: What was the main thing that you wanted to change about Techstars? I wanted Techstars to become the best and largest pre-seed investor in the world. I thought that there were a lot of really good building blocks. The fundamentals were there, and there was also an opportunity to scale it further, streamline it, strengthen it, and provide more value to entrepreneurs, helping them get better terms, better exits, and better valuations. That’s a long process. The VC industry works in a very, very long cycle. So it’s not like you arrive and then three months later things change. But that was the idea of taking this great company to a whole different level. To start, when I would talk about Techstar
Tue, June 13, 2023
Not Exactly AR And Not Exactly VR (with Lauren Goode & Anand Agarawala)
The metaverse had been left for dead . The massive hype for virtual worlds that we saw during the pandemic dissipated once we could all see our fellow humans in person again. But last week Apple finally revealed its augmented reality device, the Apple Vision Pro. The tech giant that rarely misses the mark with its carefully thought through product releases revealed that it wanted people to strap on ski goggle-like devices, direct a computer with their eyeballs, click with their fingers, and video chat in a digital realm. I invited Wired senior writer Lauren Goode and Anand Agarawala, CEO of the startup Spatial, on the show to talk about the new device. Goode got 30 minutes first-hand with the Apple Vision Pro . So we spent the first part of the show interrogating Goode about her experience with the $3,500 device that’s expected to be released next year. Goode told us that she didn’t think the device is truly augmented reality in the purist sense of the term. “It’s not using any waveguide technology that refracts light and then puts it into your eyeballs. It’s not holographic or volumetric, but it is AR if you think about the literal definition of AR as augmenting your reality,” Goode said. “Once you are running computer applications into this space in front of you where you would typically be looking at your real world living room but actually you’re seeing apps and playing games and doing stuff, you are augmenting your reality. It’s conceptually AR.” Agarawala has been hard at work on building tools for augmented reality devices for the past seven years at Spatial. The company builds 3D creation tools and hosts experiences across a range of devices, including virtual reality and augmented reality devices. Agarawala is cheering for real competition among the big tech giants when it comes to developing these wearable computers. “The market at some point of maturity would need all the Big Tech companies to get involved. If you’re just the one company doing it, that means it’s probably not a big enough market,” he said. Apple’s entry into augmented reality “absolutely validates it,” Agarawala said. On the episode, we talked about Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on the release of the Apple Vision Pro: Apple finally announced their headset, so I want to talk about that for a second. I was really curious to see what they were gonna ship. And obviously I haven’t seen it yet, so I’ll learn more as we get to play with it and see what happens and how people use it.
Tue, June 06, 2023
Rug Salesman Turned Valley Insider Raises a $432 Million Seed Fund (with Pejman Nozad)
I couldn’t help but spend the first few minutes of my conversation with Pejman Nozad fishing for the story of how a rug salesman built one of Silicon Valley’s top institutional pre-seed and seed funds. Nozad has such a fascinating and inspirational story; it reflects what is possible when Silicon Valley is at its best. Nozad told me how Sequoia’s Doug Leone gave him a shot. “We connected [as] both really good salespeople,” Nozad recalled. “I said Doug, ‘I can help you invest in some amazing founders.’” Leone said he would come to meet with Nozad. “I made my life mission that I’m ready,” Nozad remembers. They hit it off and the deal flow, well, it flowed. Nozad would later introduce Sequoia to Dropbox. Pear VC, which Nozad co-founded with Mar Hershenson, first raised $50 million in 2013. Nozad and I spent much of our conversation talking about the practicalities of a $432 million seed fund. For a firm that invests in pre-seed and seed round startups, the latest fund size is enormous, especially as we’ve been in a downturn outside of AI. With that fund size, Pear VC will need to find many more winners than in earlier funds to generate high multiples for its limited partners. “I wake up every morning and I think we’re going to go out of business by the end of the day,” Nozad said. “So that’s the mentality. It doesn’t matter if you have $400 million or $4 million or $4 billion. I want to stay on my toes. DoorDash performance, or Guardant Health, that doesn’t mean anything about Fund IV.” Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, May 31, 2023
The Gossip Economy (with Kyle Harrison)
For this week’s Newcomer podcast, I talked with Contrary general partner Kyle Harrison . We spent the first part of the episode talking about his piece VC Contagion: Is Venture Capital Killing Itself? I just published the essay exclusively in Newcomer. Then, on the podcast Harrison talked about Contrary and its research strategy . The firm has published reports on Stripe , OpenAI , Databricks , and many other private companies. We also discuss whether, when it comes to the private markets, information really wants to be free. Harrison talks about the gossip economy that powers the venture capital industry. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, May 23, 2023
The State of Consumer Investing With Benchmark's Sarah Tavel
It’s been a sad state of affairs for consumer companies not named TikTok. Poparazzi just shut down . (At least some of the team went to Instagram.) Popshop is struggling . The venture capital firm Benchmark helped establish both companies as consumer startups to watch by leading their Series A rounds. Sarah Tavel , who led the investment in Poparazzi and has worked closely with Popshop, agreed to come on the Newcomer podcast to talk about the brutal state of consumer startups. “Our deep belief at Benchmark is that our job is not to predict the future, but to try as best we can to see the present clearly,” Tavel told me. Of course, it’s not just Benchmark’s once high-flying startups that are reeling. Andreessen Horowitz audio company Clubhouse laid off more than half of its employees. Hype for the photo company BeReal seems to be dying down. (Searches for the company’s name on Google are at less than half their peak.) “It is a really tough environment right now to build that type of company,” Tavel said about startups building for consumers. “It’s always been difficult, but the level of difficulty has been turned all the way on. Because right now, anybody building something in consumer has to compete with the most addictive consumer format that we’ve ever had — which is short video.” Tavel, who co-led an early investment in Pinterest and then became the company’s first product manager, talked through some of the most promising opportunities in startups. Artificial intelligence seems poised to create new consumer startups. Tavel flagged the legal artificial intelligence company EvenUp, which just raised at a $350 million valuation from Bessemer, as one such promising startup. I marveled at the bootstrapped rise of Midjourney. But, of course, many generative AI startups, especially ones building foundation models, are raising such large rounds that it can be difficult for a firm like Benchmark to rationalize an investment. We also talked about one of Tavel’s most successful investments at Benchmark, Chainalysis. The blockchain data company raised $170 million at $8.6 billion last year. The New York Times <a target="_blank" hr
Wed, May 17, 2023
Substack's Index Fund of Culture (with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie)
I caught up with Substack co-founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie at Substack’s office in San Francisco last week. They’re fresh off raising a community fundraising round and launching their social network Notes . I wrote in March about my decision to invest $5,000 in Substack’s fundraising round, even though the company revealed that it had negative revenue in 2021: I’m already compromised when it comes to Substack. They’ve made my job possible. And while I already have plenty of financial exposure to Substack’s performance just by dint of running my business on Substack’s platform, I’m eager to have a chance to show my support. So this is the rare — hopefully singular — interview where I can’t claim true editorial independence. I’m compromised on this one. Still, I think you’ll find it an informative and entertaining conversation. I’m able to bring my perspective as a Substack writer to the conversation and I can’t help but fish for drama and news. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. In our conversation, I asked McKenzie and Best about Twitter’s one-sided war with Substack. Elon Musk has at times throttled links to Substack. It is impossible to imbed tweets in Substack posts anymore. Adding some intrigue to the tensions, Andreessen Horowitz, Substack’s largest outside investor, is an investor in Musk’s Twitter. And, Musk actually long ago hired McKenzie, a former PandoDaily reporter, to write for Tesla.
Tue, May 02, 2023
Traffic Jam (with Ben Smith)
The blitzscaling funding model failed news companies. Vice Media — which raised more than $1 billion from the likes of TPG, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Disney — is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy. BuzzFeed — which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like Andreessen Horowitz, General Atlantic, and NBCUniversal — just shut down its news division and has watched its stock price sink 95% since going public via a SPAC. Meanwhile, Gawker, which successfully avoided the cash-burning approach, was brought down in a lawsuit funded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel . This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. In his new book , Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral , former BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith takes stock of the heady days of media spending and snarky online writing. (Of course, for all his insistence that that spendy era of media is over, Smith is the co-founder of Semafor, a company that raised $25 million — including about $10 million from Sam Bankman-Fried — to build a new digital media business.) I invited Smith on the podcast to talk about his new book. I started the discussion by going back to David Carr’s 2012 profile of BuzzFeed . Carr wrote at the time: [W]ith the addition of Mr. Smith and his new hires, BuzzFeed is growing some serious news muscles under a silly
Tue, April 25, 2023
The World After Capital (with Albert Wenger)
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger has been successful enough to write a techno-manifesto. Wenger made early investments in companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Etsy. Now, he’s spending much of his time on USV’s climate investing out of the firm’s $200 million climate fund. Wenger has historically been a media recluse — but he’s started popping his head out . So when I got the opportunity to talk to him on the Newcomer podcast, I jumped. After all, Union Square Ventures has ranked 1st and then 2nd in the Founder’s Choice VC Rankings. And USV was among the first venture capital firms to privately raise the alarm to portfolio companies that they needed to protect against a banking crisis. So we had a lot to talk about. Plus, Wenger is in the big ideas phase of his career. “We live in a period where there is an extraordinary range of possible outcomes for humanity. They include the annihilation of humankind in a climate catastrophe, at one extreme, and the indefinite exploration of the universe, at the other,” he concludes in his book The World After Capital, which is available for free online . Wenger has a strong point of view about where we’re headed: He argues that we’ve moved from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age and that we need to dramatically rethink society in light of that change. Despite the book’s manifesto-like qualities, The World After Capital frames up some of the core issues of our time. In particular, he argues that financial markets cannot adequately price the ultimate scarce resource of our age — attention. As artificial intelligence looks poised to further disrupt society, Wenger’s point of view is only becoming more compelling. In our Newcomer podcast discussion, Wenger and I examine the current state of universal basic income. You can hear how we think differently about the issue. I’m eager to think about how it could realistically be implemented in the United States sometime soon; he’s interested in the broad sweep of history. On the podcast, we talk about the banking system and I interrogate whether there’s any hypocrisy in opposing the 2008 bank bailouts and defending the government’s decision to backstop depositors at Silicon Valley Bank. It was a fun conversation that looks beyond the day-to-day news cycle to some of the bigger questions that technological progress posses for our society. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at <a
Tue, April 18, 2023
Amazon Bedrock & BabyAGI (with Jon Turow)
Before becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he’s invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers Station , along with the buzzy data company MotherDuck. So when Amazon announced a partnership, called Amazon Bedrock, with Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, I asked Turow to come on the show to help me break down Amazon’s effort to bring foundation models closer to its cloud customers. Turow is someone who has helped me think through everything that’s happening in artificial intelligence broadly. So we had a fun conversation about open source and the excitement around AI agents — like BabyAGI . This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Thu, April 06, 2023
Open-Source AI: Replit's Amjad Masad & Hugging Face's Clem Delangue
Today, we have a bonus double episode of the Newcomer podcast for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face Clément Delangue Together, they’re a charismatic open-source alliance. We talked about the threat posed by OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, the questions around Replit and Hugging Face’s business models, and where they would like to see more development in artificial intelligence. Charles Hudson , at Precursor, wrote up a smart reflection on the Cerebral Valley event and one of his main takeaways was about open-source companies like Replit and Hugging Face. Hudson wrote: Open-source applications will play a big role in this early phase of experimentation. One of the more refreshing and interesting things for me to hear was the different approaches that open-source companies were taking relative to their more commercially-minded peers. It wasn’t simply about business models or go to market approaches — it felt way more fundamental and philosophical about how they wanted to see AI deployed and governed. I didn’t have a full appreciation for that difference before the event, but it was one of the things that I was most struck by at the event. The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is presented by Samsung Next invests in the boldest and most ambitious founders. Tell us about your company. We’d love to meet. Part 2: Adept CEO David Luan and Greylock partner Saam Motamedi On stage with Luan and Motamedi, a major investor in Adept, I wanted to know how Adept planned to compete with foundation models like OpenAI and Anthropic — especially now that OpenAI has introduced plugins that allow third-parties to easily connect to ChatGPT. Adept is building an AI model that mirrors humans input into computers. It’s a different approach than the language models that are getting built by other foundation model companies. I also asked Luan about his time at OpenAI and at Google. I particularly wanted to know if he trusted his old team at OpenAI to spearhead the AI revolution. Find the Podcast We’re also posting all the on-stage conversations on our YouTube channel over the next few days. Right now, you can watch: * Stability CEO Emad Mostaque one-on-one with me (the first half of <a target="_blank" href="https://www.newcom
Tue, April 04, 2023
Cerebral Valley Double Feature: Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque & General Catalyst's Deep Nishar
Today, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: My Conversation with Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque I didn’t know what to make of Stability AI and its CEO Emad Mostaque heading into my conversation with Mostaque Thursday at Cerebral Valley. Mostaque’s company has wrapped its arms around the wildly successful open-source artificial intelligence project Stable Diffusion. Last year, Mostaque’s company, Stability AI, raised about $100 million from investors. Lightspeed led an investment in the company a $1 billion valuation. Coatue led the previous round. On the other hand, the company has publicly scuffled with fellow Stable Diffusion co-creator Runway. Stability AI got sued by Getty Images. And it’s hard to understand exactly how Stability AI plans to profit off its proximity to Stable Diffusion. Is it just a really hyped AI consulting company? Mostaque himself is a man of mystery. He’s a former hedge fund investor who has situated himself at the heart of generative AI. He makes big pronouncements. There are whispers that Stability AI is raising another big funding round and is in talks with a big tech company partner. On stage, Mostaque didn’t dismiss the idea that the company might partner with Apple. Mostaque also said that he intended to take Stability AI public, insisting that the public markets want to get behind the AI trend. Bloomberg wrote about it. The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is presented by Samsung Next invests in the boldest and most ambitious founders. Tell us about your company. We’d love to meet. I won’t tell you how to feel about the conversation. Some people afterward told me that they were impressed by Mostaque’s performance and conviction. Mostaque had signed the letter calling for a pause in AI development — a surprising stance for someone who helped launch the generative AI craze. He was among the most electric speakers at Cerebral Valley. At the same time, some well-connected attendees told me off the record that they don’t believe Mostaque’s pronouncements. He can be short on specifics and big on promises. I found it hard to pin him down on many of the details of his
Wed, March 29, 2023
Venture Capital Gravitational Physics (with Ravi Mhatre)
Ravi Mhatre co-founded Lightspeed Venture Partners just before the technology industry unraveled in the dot-com bust. Lightspeed weathered the dot-com crash and became one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, known particularly for many of its enterprise software investments. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. Over his two decades at Lightspeed, Mhatre has invested in Nutanix, MuleSoft, AppDynamics, Zscaler, and Rubrik to name a few. On the Newcomer podcast, Mhatre and I talked about Silicon Valley in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We discussed how the gravitation physics of the startup business has changed. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, March 21, 2023
Peering Over the Edge of Death (with Jon McNeill)
Behind the headlines, Jon McNeill has been a key operator and board member across many of the companies that you read about. He was the president of Tesla. Then, in February 2018, he left to take the role of chief operating officer at ride sharing company Lyft. At Tesla, he worked desperately to get the company to sell enough cars to hit Tesla’s sales targets. With the rest of the executive team, he said, “We were arm and arm to do the impossible.” This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. “For more than two years we operated the company and we just had a quarter’s worth of cash,” McNeill said, recalling a period that Elon Musk has said put the company on the brink of bankruptcy . Tesla was manufacturing vehicles out of tents. “For sure, bankruptcy was a reality,” McNeill said. “When you’re peering over the edge of death, creativity starts to happen in really unique ways.” After Tesla, McNeill helped take Lyft public. But his tenure at the company lasted less than two years. His vision conflicted with the ride sharing company’s founders. Today, McNeill sits on the board of General Motors, CrossFit, and Lululemon — to name a few. In 2020, he helped found the hatch studio DVx Ventures, which has spun up seven startups so far. I brought McNeill on the podcast because I wanted to know whether the high-cash burn, blitzscaling model embraced by ride sharing companies like Lyft could survive in the new normal with non-zero interest rates and falling tech stocks. “I think blitzscaling is appropriate when interest rates are zero, when capital is free,” McNeill told me. “If people are going to hand you free capital — then you make different decisions and there was an era,” he said, “where capital was free.” But McNeill argued the blizts
Tue, March 14, 2023
A Wall Street Veteran & Investor Explains Silicon Valley Bank's Unraveling (with Laurence Tosi)
Laurence Tosi had a front seat for another banking crisis: He worked as a top banking executive and then private equity executive as the financial crisis swept up Wall Street. Tosi is someone I turn to when I want to get a sophisticated investor’s account of what’s really going on in Silicon Valley. His resume straddles Wall Street and Silicon Valley. He worked as the chief operating officer at Merrill Lynch, as the chief financial officer at Blackstone, and as the chief financial officer at Airbnb. Today, Tosi runs an $8 billion investment firm called WestCap that invests in startups and venture capital funds. As Silicon Valley Bank was unraveling, Tosi guided his portfolio companies on how to move their money out of the bank. Then, over the weekend, after Silicon Valley Bank failed, he talked to top banking executives, Senators, and members of Congress, including Representative Ro Khanna. Tosi, despite his generally optimistic outlook, offered a bleak take on what this year will look like for the startup industry. He predicted a “hard landing” and that 2023 will be even tougher than last year for startups. “The worst is yet to come,” Tosi said. “They raised rates so fast, the shock to the body after so many years of such a dovish stance and zero rates, it’s going to take some time to work through the system.” On the Newcomer podcast, we discussed the bank run and what led to Silicon Valley Banks failure. Give it a listen. Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, March 07, 2023
This Kicked Off With a Dinner With Elon Musk Years Ago (with Reid Hoffman)
For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast , I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk . “This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I’m like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.’” This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by Vanta Security is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta . Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to: * Centralize and scale your security program * Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR * Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alike With Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank. For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta . Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started. Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took Away Hoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley’s trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.) When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney <a target="_blank" href="https://stratechery.com/2023/from-bing-to-sydney-search-as-distraction-sentient-ai/"
Mon, March 06, 2023
Newcomer, the Podcast
I’m pleased to announce that I’m introducing a new podcast and starting a YouTube channel. I’m calling it “Newcomer” — like this newsletter. What can I say? It’s a good name. The show kicks off tomorrow with an interview with LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman . Hoffman just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. We talk about that decision, AI sentience, the PayPal mafia, cloud compute spending, Joe Biden’s presidency, and much more. I think you’ll enjoy the episode. For the new show, I’ve got interviews lined up with investor and former top Tesla and Lyft executive Jon McNeill and with Lightspeed Venture Partners founder and managing director Ravi Mhatre . I’m also going to publish some of the conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on the podcast feed and YouTube channel . In that vein, I’m happy to announce that Clem Delangue , the CEO of Hugging Face, and Amjad Masad , the CEO of Replit, are scheduled to sit down with me together at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on March 30. (Founders and CEOs can still apply this week to attend the one-day conference in Hayes Valley. We’ve been overwhelmed with investor interest to attend.) Newcomer , the weekly podcast, will post on Tuesdays. I’ll send it to newsletter subscribers and publish it to Apple podcasts , Spotify , and YouTube . Email me with guest ideas. I’ll publish summaries of the episodes here in the newsletter. Over time, I might add bonus sections for paying Newcomer subscribers. With this podcast, I’m going solo, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside-story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like it does. I want to thank automated security and compliance platform Vanta for being the launch sponsor for the Newcomer podcast. You may remember Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo from her appearance on the second episode of my old podcast Dead Cat. She’s been an early believer
Wed, February 01, 2023
A New Dimension (w/Nan Li, Adam Goulburn, and Zavain Dar)
I was the first to report that Nan Li , Adam Goulburn , and Zavain Dar were setting out to create a venture capital firm back in August 2022 . So when the trio finally announced their $350 million life sciences and technology-focused venture firm, called Dimension , I had to have them on the podcast. I wanted to hear why Goulburn and Dar, general partners at Lux Capital, and Li, a general partner at Obvious Ventures, decided to embark on the long, hard trek of building their own firm. The three investors have become true believers about the rapid developments happening at the intersection of life sciences and software. Software engineers have made their way into the drug development process and the laboratory wet bench. Li describes having a realization, “Wow, this seemingly small area that we used to cover when we were coming up in the industry together is now reorganizing the entire industry. And we’re seeing signs of that everywhere.” He explained how the speed of lab experiments is opening the door for a bigger role for software in laboratory research. “Experiments are getting very high throughput. They’re very cheap to run. And labs are generating data streams that look kind of like internet platform companies. There are certain biotechs that we work with, that generate more data per day than Twitter does,” Li said on the podcast. “And that’s where data science and software must come in. It’s really out of necessity. The way a modern lab works today looks nothing like 20 years ago.” So, at probably the worst time to raise a new venture capital firm in recent memory, the trio set out to build a new one. On the podcast, Li, Goulburn, and Dar tell me how they did it. I ask them what technologies they are most optimistic about in the life sciences. And I pester them about whether healthy billionaires are getting vastly better healthcare than the rest of us — or are they just driving themselves crazy with tests? Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, January 24, 2023
Another Shoe to Drop (w/Jeremy Levine)
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine is someone who keeps his head when others are losing theirs. He’s long been wary of tech exuberance while being a long-term optimist about the transformative power of technology. A board member at Pinterest and Shopify, Levine described his investing style to me for this week’s Dead Cat podcast: “I don’t like to go where all the cool kids are, where all the popular kids are. I like to kind of go off in the corner of the playground and find someone who’s doing something over there that’s really compelling that most people are prepared to dismiss or aren’t that excited about.” I wanted to have Levine on the podcast to explain the tech downturn. Levine has been investing at Bessemer for over two decades. I wondered, how does this moment compare to the dot-com bust and the Great Recession? On the podcast, Levine traces the ebbs and flows of tech euphoria while giving concrete math to the pain of down rounds. ‘The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite’ He delivered quite the diatribe when I asked him to compare the present moment to the dot-com bust: When I joined the venture industry in 2001, I looked at these entrepreneurs who built businesses and these venture capitalists who funded them from ’96 to 2000 and I was jealous. Oh my lord, they generated enormous value and enormous wealth in such a short time. And I said to myself, the world is never going to get this crazy again. The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite, and what fun it would have been to be part of that, but I missed the party. But I thought, you know, it’s really rewarding and fun and challenging to find compelling entrepreneurs and invest in startups. So even though it’s never gonna get as good as it was in 2000 again, I’m going to try to make this my career because I think I’ll find it fun. And lo and behold, 20 years later, it happened again: Someone passed the joint around the party a second time, and no one remembered what happened the first time, and things got crazy. So in that sense, it’s really similar. Enormous wealth was created, enormous companies were created. But the difference is that when that party ended — at the end of 2021 — it wasn’t three or four companies left standing. It was dozens and dozens of strong public companies, and hundreds of really interesting private companies. Now, not every unicorn and not every company that raised a lot of money will be successful. But the industry is, I would say, two orders of magnitude larger than it was in 2000. He argued that he believed there was still “another shoe to drop” in this tech downturn. He said venture firms were reserving more money to make follow-on investments for their existing portfolio companies, giving them less dry powder with which to make new investments. “I think we’re in a little bit of that spiral,” Levine said. The Anti-Portf
Tue, January 17, 2023
'I Fell in Love With an Algorithm' (w/Cristóbal Valenzuela & Alexis Gay)
Generative artificial intelligence is sweeping the nation. People are turning themselves into animated characters, drafting their essays with ChatGPT, and illustrating with Stable Diffusion. Or, as was the case with the tiny special effects team on the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once , they’re using it to help edit a movie . On the latest episode of Dead Cat , Cristóbal Valenzuela , the chief executive officer at generative artificial intelligence company Runway, talked about how he discovered that his AI-powered video editing software was used to help make the award winning film. When I wrote about generative AI burning white hot back in October, I talked to Valenzuela for that story and called him “among the most compelling founders that I’ve come across while reporting on artificial intelligence.” So I thought it would be fun to have him on the podcast and discuss some of the most pressing issues facing generative artificial intelligence. To help me interview Valenzuela, I invited Non-Technical podcast host and viral comedian Alexis Gay to guest host the episode. You’ll probably recognize her from some of her viral tech parody videos . ( Listen to my guest appearance on Non-Technical if you want to learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about the man behind the newsletter.) On the podcast, Valenzuela predicts that “very soon,” in “a couple of years,” artificial intelligence software will be able to create the sort of TikTok videos that people flip through online. “We’re heading towards a world — where a lot of the content that you consume online will be generated [by artificial intelligence],” Valenzuela said. “There’s definitely an exponential progress rate that you can see and perceive more clearly now,” Valenzuela said. “What took years of progress is now taking months. And what used to take months is now taking weeks.” Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, January 10, 2023
Business Tea, the Creator Economy Downturn, Twitter Drama & TikTok's Chinese Influence (w/Taylor Lorenz)
I always enjoy talking with Taylor Lorenz , a deep thinker about the internet who infuriates certain pockets of tech Twitter. Last week, she published a look at the crypto social media accounts that broke news on the fall of FTX. She wrote about how accounts like Coffeezilla and AutismCapital have become media figures in their own right. She wrote for the Washington Post : All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how “citizen journalism” is battling legacy publishers for online attention, catapulting a fresh class of independent journalists into the mainstream while also giving rise to a group of social media influencers who optimize for attention rather than accuracy. For years, drama channels and tea accounts — so called because the word “tea” is slang for juicy information — have been first to break news related to pop culture and influencers. Business news is late to undergo this trend. So in classic fashion, I broke one of my only New Year’s resolutions — to pay less attention to “the media” — and invited Lorenz on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about how these accounts are changing how information reaches the public. In my mind, our conversation was really about reputations — and how they’re built and maintained online. Later in the episode, we talk about how Twitter and rightwing media has shaped Lorenz’s own reputation online. Some of her critics might be surprised to hear her speak out against Instagram’s harsh content moderation policies. At the 27:30 mark, we shift gears and talk about the downturn in the creator economy. At 40:10, Lorenz and I debate whether we should be worried about Chinese influence over TikTok. Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, January 04, 2023
All Eyes Are on Apple's Augmented Reality Device As the Hunt for a Revolutionary Consumer Startup Continues (w/Max Child & James Wilsterman)
Before the rise of crypto investing, venture capital careers seemed to be divided into two buckets: consumer and business-to-business. If the goal of venture capital investing is to pick winners, American consumer investors generally picked wrong. There just hasn’t been another Facebook. The biggest consumer startup of the moment is ByteDance, a Chinese company. While I’ve generally dedicated more time to writing about software investing since that’s where the money and exits have been, I’ve tried to chronicle consumer investing to the extent that it exists. I was the first to report BeReal’s seed and Series A funding round. I’ve scooped some of Discord’s valuation ascent. In December 2020, I wrote about investors’ effort to will a consumer renaissance into being. Sure, there weren’t any obvious new platforms but consumer investors weren’t going to let that get in their way. I invited my good friends Max Child and James Wilsterman onto the Dead Cat podcast. They’re the co-founders of voice games company Volley . The NFX, Y Combinator, and Lightspeed-backed startup — which they tell me is the largest voice game company — started off as a chatbot games company. So Child and Wilsterman know consumer trends. Chatbots once burned red hot before evaporating only to be revived with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Meanwhile, few VCs have been bullish on voice as a platform. Child, Wilsterman, and I dig into the struggles of the QVC for startups trend. Popshop looks to be on the rocks and Whatnot may be peaking. We interrogate whether marketplaces were ever really a thing. And we wonder if AirPods as the next platform was really just a statement about Clubhouse. Then we look to 2023 and consider the pockets of hope for consumer investing: the rise of generative AI startups and the possibility that Apple announces an augmented reality device. And we ponder whether this crypto winter will ever thaw. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, December 27, 2022
Does That Mean the Cat's Dead?
Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I became friends in San Francisco back in 2014 when we all worked as technology reporters at The Information. But we didn’t achieve that core pillar of modern friendship until August 2021 when we started a podcast together. Insider generously let Tom co-host the podcast with me — and Katie, a reporter at the New York Times , came on every few episodes as a regular special guest. A year and a half ago we kicked off the show with an interview of Rippling CEO Parker Conrad . Since then, publishing most Tuesdays, we’ve pumped out 69 episodes and have built up a loyal following of listeners for our niche tech media podcast. With our intense focus on how the media covers technology stories, we’ve become a must-listen for newsrooms, tech public relations shops, startup world movers and shakers, and tech industry onlookers. We’ve had a variety of guests on the show. We’ve featured venture capitalists , startup founders , political operatives , and security experts . In our most popular episode , we took a look at the media’s coverage of the rise and fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick with the old Uber CEO’s former top deputy, Emil Michael . Reporters, especially our reporter friends, have been a regular fixture of the show. We’ve talked with reporters like the New York Times’ Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac , the Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman , Rolfe Winkler , and Kirsten Grind , Semafor’s Ben Smith
Tue, December 20, 2022
'This Monolithic Other That Is Acting in Some Dark Confederacy Against What Is True and Good in the World' (w/Antonio García Martínez)
On last week’s Dead Cat episode with ex-Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, we spent a lot of time trying to steel man the free speech moderation crowd’s argument — even though none of us seemed to hold it ourselves. The other week , we had Jason Calacanis on the show but he didn’t want to talk about Elon Musk . This week, finally we have someone on the podcast who is a defender of the so-called free speech regime and is also willing to talk to skeptical journalists about it on air. Antonio García Martínez , the author of Chaos Monkeys and startup CEO, came on the show. On his Substack The Pull Request , he defended the free speech argument in April — before Musk acquired Twitter. ( I’ve written that no one, Musk included, was plausibly going to govern social media under a free speech standard so invoking free speech is a pure marketing ploy. I think that position has been vindicated by Musk’s recent actions.) More broadly, García Martínez, or AGM as he is widely known, is someone who has pushed back against the tech media and leftwing employees. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan , we set out to make sense of the culture war between tech “builders” and reporters. Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, December 14, 2022
The Musk Bubble in Tech Is Going to Pop (w/Alex Stamos)
This past Thursday Elon Musk accused Alex Stamos , Facebook’s former chief security officer and the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, of running a “propaganda platform.” That’s the sort of upside down thinking we’ve come to expect from Musk, given Stamos is one of the most fair-minded and serious thinkers about content moderation and social media platforms today. So, on Friday, we had Stamos on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Musk’s choreographed leaks about the old guard at Twitter. Last time Stamos came on the Dead Cat podcast, he explained why the media had underplayed its own culpability in enabling Russian disinformation while playing up Facebook’s failures. This time, Stamos helped Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I do our best to steel man Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss’s purported exposés on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter, though none of us were particularly impressed by the seriousness of their reporting. Taibbi documented Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And Weiss reported on Twitter’s decision to ban Trump after the January 6 insurrection attempt. (Since we recorded on Friday, the gang has continued to pump out new iterations of the Twitter Files.) Stamos argued that the real essence of the critique that emerged from Taibbi’s reporting was the reality that governments across the world are actively trying to shape social media companies’ content moderation decisions. “Government interference on platforms is a real deal,” Stamos said. However, Taibbi didn’t show that in his tweetstorm. Joe Biden wasn’t in office, let alone the White House, when Twitter decided to briefly censor the New York Post’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop. “Musk giving very selective data to a couple of very politically biased journalists is not the kind of transparency we would need if we wanted to be confident that there was no interference on this platform by government,” Stamos said. “The kernel of truth is that every government on the planet, including ours in the United States of America, is trying to manipulate Twitter and all of the other major platforms. And so I proposed — here are things you can do if you’re Musk: You can have an open database of moderation decisions,” Stamos said. “You can commit to releasing — instead of just releasing emails from the Biden team, the DNC, not government actors — you c
Tue, December 06, 2022
Hollywood As Told By the Former NBC Entertainment Chairman (w/Paul Telegdy)
Former NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy once lorded over Hollywood as a titan of television as the industry around him was crumbling. The Netflix menace was on the rise and Hollywood media companies were struggling to respond. Telegdy was trying to hold it together while running an increasingly imperiled broadcast network. Before he was pushed out of NBC in 2020 amidst a nation-wide fever of recriminations, exposés, and public firings, Telegdy oversaw some of the world’s most successful reality television programming, including The Voice , American Ninja Warrior, and while at BBC Worldwide Dancing with the Stars. He also had the pleasure of overseeing Donald Trump’s The Apprentice . Telegdy regularly fielded calls from the future president. Trump always wanted to brag to Telegdy about the show’s ratings success, Telegdy told us. By the late 2010s, streaming had upended the television business, dislodging NBC from its prized perch and creating new media titans like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and Apple. Disney proved most successful at answering the streaming industry’s money-burning onslaught — only for investors to suddenly change their tune this year and insist on profits rather than growth. We invited Telegdy — who Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan got to know covering Hollywood — on the show to talk about the state of Hollywood today. We start off the episode discussing Telegdy’s rise from his perch at the BBC and then his ascent to the top rungs of Hollywood at NBC. We talk about how the era of Hollywood “Jeffs” gave way to the reign of “Bobs.” Telegdy dissects Bob Chapek’s short tenure as the chief executive officer of Disney before his old boss Bob Iger returned to the role. Finally, we ask Telegdy about The Hollywood Reporter article that helped tank his job at NBC. The Hollywood Reporter accused Telegedy of “racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior.” The story’s headline read , “NBC Insiders Say Entertainment Boss Fostered Toxic Culture, Under Investigation.” He was ousted from NBC in a reorganization as the company investigated the allegations. We wanted to know what was it like being on the other side of a media exposé. We reached out to NBC and the reporters at the Hollywood Reporter for comment. NBC declined to comment and the reporters did not reply. In 2021, eager to make a quick comeback, Telegdy co-founded the entertainment company The Whole Spiel with his cousin. Telegdy has pr
Wed, November 30, 2022
Going All-In on the Tech/Media War (w/Jason Calacanis)
There’s no one more perfectly situated between the tech media and the tech elites who loathe them. Jason Calacanis built his reputation in Silicon Valley as a feisty tech reporter, waiting in line to ask Steve Jobs questions at the Code Conference. An extremely early investment in Uber suddenly made him one of the most famous angel investors in the world (thanks also to Calacanis’s self-promotional megaphone). Today, Calacanis co-hosts All-In, the second-most popular tech podcast and one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The show is a must-listen in Silicon Valley and the envy of many wannabe thought leaders. We invited Calacanis on our much, much smaller tech podcast Dead Cat to interrogate what has made All-In so successful and where Silicon Valley’s roiling war with the media is headed. Calacanis, who is reportedly part of Elon Musk’s war room at Twitter, warned us that he absolutely would not talk about Musk’s Twitter. (We tried.) This was a fun episode that we recorded right before Thanksgiving with co-host Tom Dotan and regular special guest Katie Benner . I’m going to publish a companion article with my reflections on the conversation shortly. Enjoy! Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 22, 2022
Taylor Swift Tickets, FTX & Twitter
If you’ve resolved that this Thanksgiving you won’t yield the conversation about tech entirely to your NFT-happy, crypto-pushing younger cousin, this is your moment to refresh yourself on the latest from the FTX saga. Give Dead Cat a listen. We catch you up on former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s latest messages with a reporter and on Elon Musk’s crusade to reform Twitter. In this hosts-only episode, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I mourn my inability to get tickets to see Taylor Swift and we come up with some better strategies for making sure tickets only get in the hands of the Swifties with truest of hearts. Give it a listen Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 15, 2022
SBF in Shambles (w/Teddy Schleifer)
On the latest episode of Dead Cat , we examine how effective altruism’s crypto benefactor took the world — and the media and the Democratic Party, in particular — for a ride. Sam Bankman-Fried escaped much of the skepticism that rival exchange Binance has faced — yet it’s SBF’s FTX that has filed for bankruptcy. With the help of Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer , Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and I try to make sense of what exactly happened and explain the saga to the non-cryptographically inclined. Schleifer tells us what the midterm elections will mean for tech and Peter Thiel . Dotan confesses his deficiencies as a political forecaster. On this week’s episode of the podcast, I’m pretty open that I think the media had a blindspot for Bankman-Fried because of his effective altruism, pedigree, crypto skepticism, and Democratic politics. Yesterday, Stratechery quoted my tweets declaring as much. I assume my tweets caught the newsletter’s attention because I was willing to say something that most reporters won’t really admit publicly. I agree with the subtext of Marc Andreessen’s latest tweets. Bankman-Fried’s performative virtue now appears to have been an obvious cover for his private transgressions. And the left was more susceptible to Bankman-Fried because it shares many of his professed values. But I tweeted last Tuesday and recorded the podcast on Friday — and already the narrative is moving so fast. Republicans are clearly starting to spin up the Bankman-Fried criticism as an anti-Democratic talking point. I think it’s ridiculous to expect that the federal government should have suspected anything in particular was amiss at FTX relative to the other exchanges, when the company’s own investors didn’t seem to know anything was going on. Yes, I think that the Securities and Exchange Commission should have been more aggressive about regulating crypto broadly and not just waited for things to come undone on their own. But I don’t think Republicans were exactly cheering them on there. And while the media could have been more skeptical, you can’t expect reporters to ferret out every scandal (though CoinDesk certainly played a role in bringing FTX down). Ultimately, the company and major shareholders are responsible for the company’s behavior. So while I think that the mainstream media would have been more skeptical of Bankman-Fried if not for his persona and politics, I don’t think it was a corrupt or conscious act. Here’s a case where the left is guilty of the sort of implicit bias that it’s always talking about. It’s too easy to overlook s
Tue, November 08, 2022
The End of Quiet Quitting (w/Aki Ito)
While I was in Lisbon for Web Summit, Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner kept the podcast going without me. They brought on my old colleague Aki Ito , who is now a reporter at Insider , to talk about her reporting on coasting culture, which helped to spark the global discussion of “quiet quitting.” The trio discuss how a recession will yet again change society’s relationship with work. You can read Ito’s stories here: * How hustle culture got America addicted to work * 'My company is not my family': Fed up with long hours, many employees have quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs * Everyone's talking about “quiet quitting.” Here's what it means — and how the term got its start. And here’s her latest on how the trend is reversing: RIP, quiet quitting — layoff fears have workers back to the grind She writes, One of the first documented cases of quiet quitting was a recruiter I'll call Justin. Deep into the coronavirus pandemic, after working 10- to 12-hour days for much of his career, Justin had decided to dial it back on the job. When I spoke with him in February, he had whittled his workweek down to 40 hours. In the ensuing months, he went even further, working as little as 30. Every week he worked a little bit less, freeing him up to spend more time with his wife and their newborn baby. It was Justin, in fact, who helped spark the national debate that's been raging over quiet quitting. After speaking with him and other recovering overachievers, I wrote about how hustle culture, thanks to the job security granted by the roaring economy, was giving way to coasting culture. When a popular career coach on TikTok riffed on my story, the phrase "quiet quitting" became something of a new cultural dividing line. You either loved the Justins of the world for striking a reasonable work-life balance, or condemned them as slackers and cheats. But by the time the US was furiously debating his new approach to work, Justin was already shifting gears. Over the summer, as the economy began to slow, he noticed his clients
Tue, November 01, 2022
Blue Checks & Semi-Fascism (w/Tim Miller)
This week, we invited Tim Miller — the repentant former Republican operative and author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell — on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the upcoming midterm elections. Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I talk with Miller about Peter Thiel -backed Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. ( FiveThirtyEight gives Vance a 78% chance of winning and Masters a 33% chance .) We discuss the populist future of the Republican Party and mourn the languishing low-taxes-at-any-cost wing of the Republican Party. Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 25, 2022
Roko's Basilisk (w/Nathan Benaich)
Nathan Benaich , the lone general partner at Air Street Capital, has long been on my radar as an artificial intelligence obsessive. And so now that the artificial intelligence is suddenly the fixation of the venture capital world , I invited Benaich on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about generative artificial intelligence. With my co-hosts, Tom Dotan and Katie Benner , we talked about the promise of generative AI and the ethics of a machines borrowing from the vast depths of human creativity. I pay homage to the AI overlords, cheering for the triumph of generalized artificial intelligence while Benaich warns us that the conversation about generalized artificial intelligence is a bit of a distraction. Benaich is the co-author of the State of AI Report that came out this month. It’s worth a read. At the 42:40 mark , Nathan departs and Katie, Tom, and I change topics dramatically. Tom reads from the former Mailchimp CEO’s email to the email marketing company discouraging employees from stating their pronouns at the beginning of a meeting. The article in Platformer , which first published the email, carries the headline, Did this email cost Mailchimp's billionaire CEO his job? Here’s an excerpt of Mailchimp’s then CEO Ben Chestnut’s message to the company: I am noticing that whenever new employees introduce themselves in Zoom before asking their question, they’re also announcing their pronouns. This is completely unnecessary when a woman (who is clearly a woman) to tell us that her pronouns are “she/her” and a man (who is clearly a man) to tell us that his pronouns are “he/him.” Tom, Katie, and I weigh in on the conversation around pronouns in the workplace, heavy-handed HR policies, and embarrassing CEO emails. Give it a listen Read the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 18, 2022
VC Twitter Ghostwriters (w/Logan Bartlett)
Insider’s anonymous first-person account of a ghostwriter for venture capitalists’ tweets captivated tech Twitter last week. Everyone wanted to know who exactly was paying $100,000 for a tweetstorm. How could anyone make $200,000 writing thought leadership. Why would anyone pay for that? So on this week’s episode of Dead Cat , hosts Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan talked with Redpoint Ventures managing director Logan Bartlett who is a bit of a VC Twitter expert. Last November, Eric wrote about Bartlett's analysis of VC media output in a piece called A Twitter Troll’s Take on the Future of Investing. Since then, Redpoint hired a TikTok creator to help bolster the firm’s brand and Bartlett launched a podcast called Cartoon Avatars . On this week’s episode of Dead Cat , Bartlett insists he’s writing his own tweets, but he explains why VCs are so interested in building a Twitter following. Also Bartlett cast doubt on whether there’s a real market for people ghostwriting tweets for VCs. Later in the episode, we spitballed a ranking of some of the most important accounts on VC Twitter. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, October 12, 2022
Cult of the Dead Cat (w/Joseph Menn)
In November 2017, with Dara Khosrowshahi a few months into his job as Uber CEO, the ride-hailing company came to me with some explosive information: The company claimed that during Travis Kalanick’s time as CEO, Uber had covered up a massive data breach. Hackers had downloaded sensitive information about Uber’s riders and drivers, and the company’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan , had kept it under wraps by paying the hackers $100,000. Uber fired Sullivan and one of the company’s lawyers. I published the exclusive story with the headline, Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People . Cyber security reporters have — for years — raised questions about the Khosrowshahi regime’s story. Sullivan tried to frame the $100,000 payout as part of the company’s white hat bug bounty program. And Sullivan’s defenders argued that Kalanick era Uber’s effort to conceal the payout — at a time when it was under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over a prior data breach — looks even less anomalous today in a world where companies pay ransoms to hackers all the time. So I’ve watched the case closely over the years to see whether I’d been had. Had Khosrowshahi and crew whipped up a fake scandal? (I never quite understood why they would need to — Kalanick era Uber already had so many.) Over the years, the legal system has consistently validated Khosrowshahi era Uber’s account. * In 2018, Uber reached a $148 million settlement with 50 states and the District of Columbia over its handling of the data breach. * In 2019, two men pleaded guilty to the Uber hack. * In 2020, the Justice Department indicted Sullivan, a former federal prosecutor, for his handling of the hack. * Finally, last week a jury found Sullivan guilty of both counts that prosecutors brought against him . (Those charges were obstruction of the Federal Trade Commission and misprision of a felony.) Still , parts of the cyber security world defended Sullivan’s actions. Joseph Menn , the well-respected cyber security reporter for the Washington Post and author
Tue, October 04, 2022
I’d Jump on a Grande for You (w/Erin Griffith)
The Twitter / Elon saga entered a new phase today. Elon Musk reversed course and agreed to buy Twitter at the previously agreed upon $44 billion. But we’re still thinking about Musk’s text messages that came out as part of discovery in the Delaware court case. On the latest episode of Dead Cat, we reveled in the many bizarre and often sycophantic texts that emerged during discovery. Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer , along with recurring guest New York Times reporter Erin Griffith , give a close reading to the private messages of the Silicon Valley glitterati. We dish on texts from All-In hosts Jason Calacanis and David Sacks , Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale , and Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. Would Emil Michael or Bill Gurley make for a better Twitter CEO? Fellow Substacker Alex Kantrowitz did a great job compiling some of the greatest hits. So you can read along . We mourn our shattered reality that Musk’s texts aren’t full of Grade A genius ideas for reforming Twitter. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, September 28, 2022
Take a Scooter to Your Local Court House
On this week’s Dead Cat, co-host Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer talk about the sputtering scooter industry. Starting at 36:00 we hear Tom tells us about his jury summons. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, September 21, 2022
Dream of Semafornication (w/Reed Albergotti)
This week on Dead Cat , Reed Albergotti — the technology editor for the soon-to-be launched media startup founded by Ben Smith and Justin Smith — joined the show to talk about the Biden administration’s executive orders shaping how the U.S. does business with China. Albergotti reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is looking to crack down on American investors cutting checks in China. He wrote for Semafor : Administration officials were particularly alarmed this March by a report in The Information that the Chinese arm of the Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital has begun raising a new, $8 billion fund for investments in Chinese technology, according to people close to the administration. A Sequoia spokeswoman declined to comment. … The details of the order could still change, but the administration has considered at least two ways of dealing with U.S. investments in China. One approach would be to require disclosures for any investments in semiconductors, artificial intelligence, quantum computing and potentially other industries like rare earth minerals and electric cars. The other would be to set up a system that would give the government the ability to block investments outright, in the way that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States can block inbound investments from China and other countries. A third option being discussed by those involved is to do both. Biden could require disclosure and then, if something problematic arises, take further action to block it. That option is more appealing to U.S. companies and could be just as effective. Relatedly, the New York Times reported on another executive order that would expand the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to block Chinese investments in the United States. The Times reported that the executive order “directs the committee to consider whether a pending deal involves the purchase of a business with access to Americ
Wed, September 14, 2022
What Would Steve Do? (w/Kara Swisher)
Dead Cat host Eric Newcomer already said his piece about Kara Swisher’s epic final Code Conference. Now you can hear directly from Swisher about what she thought. On this week’s Dead Cat podcast , Tom Dotan and Newcomer catch up with Swisher fresh off her final Code Conference. Together, we puzzle over Amazon chief Andy Jassy’s deference to his old boss and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s tough time denying that he wanted to buy Pinterest. We talked about Bob Iger’s charm and Swisher’s affection for Mark Cuban . We dug into Swisher’s interview strategy. We asked her whether her media publication Recode has been a success. Were they aggressive enough ahead of #MeToo? And what’s next for Swisher? Will Pivot replace Code? And we quiz Swisher on some of her favorite Code interviews. Why did she tell Mark Zuckerberg to take off his sweatshirt? How did Steve Jobs keep Bill Gates on his toes? Then we end the episode with a discussion of her final Code main stage panel — Tim Cook , Laurene Powell Jobs , and Jony Ive . Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, September 07, 2022
Like, Comment, Subscribe (w/Mark Bergen)
Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen is the world’s top Google Kremlinologist, chronicling the rise and fall of technocrats and technologies inside Google parent company Alphabet. This week, Bergen published a book on Google subsidiary YouTube called Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. That Bergen decided to set his sights on YouTube, Google’s massive user-generated video site, reflects YouTube’s significance inside of parent company Alphabet. The video platform is shaping culture worldwide without receiving Facebook-level scrutiny. Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I talked with Bergen on this week’s Dead Cat about his new book and YouTube’s ascendancy. We asked: * Why does YouTube's early legal battle with Viacom explain how YouTube evolved? * What does it mean that YouTube star PewDiePiew has been displaced by a ubiquitous Mr. Beast? * Why has YouTube been so weak willed about punishing the worst actors on its platform? Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, August 30, 2022
Extremely Online (w/ Taylor Lorenz)
Taylor Lorenz , a columnist at the Washington Post , has helped to popularize “ cheugy ,” “ OK Boomer ,” and, most recently, “ nimcels .” She wrote about “niche internet micro celebrities,” or nimcels: While influencers use their online followings to make money, “for a niche internet micro celebrity, the goal is purely to entertain, versus an influencer,” said Da. “I think this term emerged to distinguish people doing a similar thing to influencers, but for completely different motivations. Being a niche internet micro celebrity feels less capitalist, less ‘I’m a brand.’ ” On this week’s Dead Cat, we used Lorenz’s latest story as a jumping off point to talk about the evolution of the terms “creators” and “influencers,” the rise of podcasting, and Lorenz’s various Twitter scrapes. Lorenz is a language obsessive and is writing a book called Extremely Online. She doesn’t like the name for the beat most people associate her with — internet culture reporter — since she doesn’t see a sharp line separating the real world and digital life. We covered a lot of ground in this week’s episode. We talked about Lorenz’s recent tweet dismissing Dimes Square and her online beef with Marc Andreessen . “All these billionaires are so fragile,” Lorenz told us. “I love debating tech. I love it,” Lorenz said. “Andreessen had me on their podcast twice and didn’t release either of the episodes.” We also discussed Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan’s latest story on YouTube’s accidental podcast ascendancy. He wrote over the weekend: Two recent surveys, one by Cumulus Media and one by <a target="_blank" href="https://www.insideradio.com/free/listeners-like-what-they-bought-
Tue, August 23, 2022
Dogfood Your Ideals (w/Ellen Huet)
Will Marc Andreessen dogfood Adam Neumann’s new real estate startup? Will Andreessen be willing to run the same playbook for Flow, Neumann’s new rental real estate company? When is the last time, Andreessen — who called “renting a soulless experience” — actually lived in a rental? Is he willing to give up his $177 million Malibu compound for the shared amenities of a Flow? Andreessen doesn’t seem willing to embrace urban density in Atherton — he and his wife wrote a letter expressing their “IMMENSE objection to the creation of multifamily overlay zones in Atherton.” On this week’s Dead Cat , co-host Tom Dotan observed that much of Silicon Valley’s upper crust seems unwilling to put their values into action when it comes to residential real estate: “They’re not going to dogfood it, right? They’re not going to be using their own products in order to fix this larger issue.” Co-host Eric Newcomer replied, “The whole tech philosophy is dogfood your product — suffer through your terrible tech product that you’re trying to force on the world, and they won’t even dogfood the world that they want, which is a dense urban life.” Eric's former open office neighbor at Bloomberg , Ellen Huet , came on Dead Cat to talk about Neumann’s new company and Andreessen’s nimbyism . Huet wrote about WeWork for Bloomberg , hosted a podcast about Neumann, chronicled housing opposition in Atherton, and now is writing a book about an alleged sex cult called “OneTaste.” She also spent many years living in an intentional living community in San Francisco. So you can fairly say that she has stared deeply into Neumann’s soul. We start off the episode talking about the Andreessens’ opposition to new housing in Atherton. Then about halfway through, we get into Flow. Give it a listen.
Wed, August 17, 2022
Unreal BeReals
This week on Dead Cat , hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer dive into social media wedding bans. The evolution of authenticity on BeReal. The state of TikTok. Media self-absorption. Dimes Square. Andrew Tate. Then we delve into Sam Bankman-Fried’s case against the startup world — what he calls “the financial circle-jerk.” Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, August 09, 2022
Do You Trust Amazon With Your Medical Records?
Amazon proved that it’s willing to enter any market with its 2017 announcement that it would buy Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. What other tech giant would buy a grocery store? Now Amazon is moving into — robotic vacuums? Amazon said it wanted to buy Roomba-maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. The acquisition raised all sorts of questions about what exactly Amazon wants from the suctioning rover manufacturer. Is the company trying to make a map of your house ? Paranoia about Amazon’s data hoovering went into overdrive when Amazon announced that it intends to buy a virtual doctor’s office. Amazon said it would purchase telemedicine-powered doctor’s office One Medical for nearly $4 billion. (That acquisition comes after Amazon purchased pharmacy company PillPack in 2018 for $753 million.) My former boss Brad Stone smartly argued yesterday that the acquisitions are part of Amazon Chief Andy Jassy’s effort to build a “fourth pillar” for the company that moves it beyond Amazon Web Services, Prime, and Amazon Marketplace. He wrote : The deals are also emblematic of Jassy’s hunt for a so-called fourth “pillar,” beyond AWS, Prime and the Amazon Marketplace. Jeff Bezos described the features of such a business in his shareholder letter in 2014: “Customers love it, it can grow to very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time—with the potential to endure for decades.” Eight years later, Amazon’s pursuit of this coveted fourth leg of the stool has been largely fruitless. Video has been an important part of Prime but is free for members and generates a nebulous return on capital. Advertising spews cash for Amazon ($8.76 billion in the last quarter alone) but is tolerated, not embraced, by customers. The deal raises questions, not just about Amazon’s strategy, but about how big we want these tech giants to get. Stone described the acquisitions as reflecting “an almost breathtaking disregard for the trustbusters.” On Dead Cat , the tech podcast I co-host, this week we grapple with whether we’re comfortable with Amazon’s size, especially as the e-commerce giant saunters into our medical lives. Katie Benner and I are both One Medical customers — patients you might call us — so on the latest episode we debate whether we would cancel our subscri
Tue, August 02, 2022
Freeloaders, Fat cats & Ne'er-do-wells (w/Alex Heath)
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has been playing defense as Instagram’s product goes on offense. Mosseri released a video explaining recent changes to Instagram and defended Instagram’s pivot from a friend-oriented, social graph-sorted photo sharing app to a creator-driven, AI-powered content machine. Meanwhile, the broader Meta employee base has been feeling the pain. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is bringing down the hammer , signaling that the company is trying to manage out weak performers. The company has started a campaign against coasters. But Meta employees are passing around memes suggesting that Zuckerberg is the coaster-in-chief. I talked with Verge reporter and social media savant Alex Heath about the turmoil at Facebook on the latest episode of Dead Cat, along with co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner . Heath recently recounted a contentious vignette inside a recent Meta all-hands: “Hi there,” the first prerecorded employee question started. “I’m Gary, and I’m located in Chicago.” His question: would Meta Days — extra days off introduced during the pandemic — continue in 2023? Zuckerberg appeared visibly frustrated. “Um… all right,” he stammered. He’d just explained that he thought the economy was headed for one of the “worst downturns that we’ve seen in recent history.” He’d already frozen hiring in many areas . TikTok was eating their lunch, and it would take over a year and a half before they had “line of sight” to overtaking it. And Gary from Chicago was asking about extra vacation days? “Given my tone in the rest of the Q&A, you can probably imagine what my reaction to this is,” Zuckerberg said. After this year, Meta Days were canceled. We talk about employee unrest at Meta, Instagram’s strategy shift, the state of the metaverse, and Snap’s oscillating stock price on the episode. At the end of the lively episode, the conversation devolved into an argument about antitrust. We end the podcast a bit abruptly in order to avoid recording Tom’s son dashing into the room. Enjoy. Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Get full access to Newcomer at <a href="https://ww
Tue, July 26, 2022
Travis Kalanick's Right-Hand Man Tells the Story of the Coup that Brought Them Down (w/Emil Michael)
This is definitely an episode you’re going to want to listen to. It’s been a long time coming. It’s a sequel of sorts to my interview with Bill Gurley that ran a few months after launching this newsletter and my conversation with Dara Khosrowshahi after that. I finally convinced Emil Michael , a central player in the Uber saga, to give me an on-the-record interview. Michael was once Travis Kalanick’s top lieutenant. He raised about $15 billion for Uber during his nearly four years at the company. Finally, he came on Dead Cat to talk to Tom Dotan and me. It’s been five years since Kalanick and Michael acrimoniously departed the company they helped build into a juggernaut. While Michael isn’t Kalanick — who I would love to interview again someday — he was probably the second most important person at Uber during the period, understood the company and Kalanick intimately, and is a lot more willing to publicly reflect on what Uber got right and wrong than his old boss. We covered a lot of ground in our hour and a half long conversation. Michael didn’t shy away from much. Whether you’re interested in the inside baseball behind Kalanick’s ouster, or if you want to learn from Uber’s mistakes, or you just want to hear how they raised so much money, you’re going to want to give this episode a listen. * He talked about his infamous visit to a shady Korean karaoke bar that led former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to recommend Michael’s dismissal. (In my mind, probably the biggest unreported information from the Kalanick era is the Holder report itself. If anyone ever wants to leak it to me, you know where to find me .) * We discussed the latest media Uber obsession — “ The Uber files .” The Guardian and other outlets reported on Uber’s influence campaign in Europe and the “ kill switch .” It was a trip down memory lane that helped convince Michael to give his side of the story. Michael quipped about the “kill switch,” Uber’s tactic of locking down computers ahead of government raids: “I do think one of the bad things we did at Uber was naming things terribly.” * Mich
Thu, July 14, 2022
This Episode Wasn't Sponsored By Techmeme
I’m in Italy right now for my first extended vacation of the year. I spent yesterday bopping around Siena, taking in another beautiful Duomo, eating a sandwich with lardo, and hunting for the frescoes that provided the grist for my girlfriend’s mom’s art history thesis. After stopping in Rome and Florence, my girlfriend and I are staying in rural Tuscany for a friend’s wedding and then are headed to Cinque Terre in a few days. I’m doing my best to disconnect from the newsletter for these two weeks — though not as much as my girlfriend might like. I left my podcast co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner to their own devices with Dead Cat this week. Listening to the episode, they’re clearly feeling a little more pessimistic than I am. Tom proposed for the subject line of this email, “No ideas. No joy. No money” or “the summer of despair.” Both struck me as a little too dour. In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom and Katie take stock of some of the top stories in tech this week via Techmeme headlines : The implosion of Apple’s self-driving car program , the Uber files , and Elon Musk’s fight with Twitter . They ask why tech seems to be stuck in a rut. But mostly they seem to have a fun time, sardonically dissecting the tech world and puzzling out what the latest stock downturn means for our favorite tech storylines. It’s an enjoyable listen if you’ve got some time to kill as vineyards and hay bales pass you by. Their discussion hinges in part on The Information’s latest reporting on Apple’s self-driving car program. Apple just can’t seem to figure it out. The Information’s Wayne Ma reported on the perils of demoware : Engineers waste precious time choreographing demonstrations along specific routes using technology that works there but almost nowhere else, a phenomenon known as demoware. Some people who have worked on Titan say Apple fell harder into the demoware trap than some rivals, despite the fact that an automated car with no steering wheel needs to drive almost perfectly everywhere or few people would feel safe buying one. “If you spend enough money, you can get almost any fixed route to work,” said Arun Venkatadri, who previously worked on self-driving cars at Uber and now runs Model-Prime, which makes software tools for robotics companies. “But what isn’t shown is whether you can build your self-d
Tue, July 05, 2022
SBF Plays Crypto Savior (w/Teddy Schleifer & Jeff John Roberts)
Sam Bankman-Fried, “SBF,” is bailing out failing crypto companies. The question is whether he’s trying to stymie contagion risk from further roiling the crypto world or if he’s simply shopping for deals. Or maybe it’s both. SBF’s crypto currency exchange company FTX gave crypto lender BlockFi a $400 million credit facility and struck a deal that allows FTX to buy BlockFi for as much as $240 million . Meanwhile, SBF’s investment arm Alameda Research provided Voyager Digital $500 million in financing in June . (Voyager Digital suspended withdrawals and deposits on Friday .) SBF also kicked the tires on crypto lender Celsius before raising questions about the company’s finances. ( Celsius has frozen accounts and hired restructuring attorneys .) The Block reported last week : FTX began talks with Celsius about providing financial support or making an acquisition but decided against proceeding after looking at Celsius's finances, the sources said. Celsius had a $2 billion hole in its balance sheet and FTX found the company difficult to deal with, one of the sources said. FTX has also reportedly considered buying Robinhood after buying up a 7.6% stake . These days it seems like the crypto industry is eager for any sign of an SBF bailout: On this week’s Dead Cat , Tom Dotan and I called in two experts. We brought on Jeff John Roberts , the author of Kings of Crypto and the crypto editor at Fortune , and friend of the show Teddy Schleifer , who is a reporter at Puck and an SBF obsessive. We argued about SBF’s bailout strategy, his political ambitions, and the state of crypto regulation. Roberts accused me o
Wed, June 29, 2022
A Long Drag on a Mango Juul Pod (w/ Lauren Etter)
I got back from Collision, the 35,000-person tech conference in Toronto, Sunday night. Everyone is worried about falling valuations — but the tech world keeps on spinning. Listen to this week’s episode of Dead Cat , Tom Dotan, Katie Benner , and I catch up, talk about my conference-going experience, and argue about what tech executive we’d most like to see as president. (Katie picks Tim Cook but I’m going with Jeff Bezos .) Then, Tom and I talk with Bloomberg reporter Lauren Etter . She’s the author of The Devil’s Playbook . We discuss the FDA’s surprise decision to ban Juul starting at around 32:30. Etter wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek : In 2019 almost 30% of high school students reported using e-cigarettes, mostly Juul. Former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb warned that e-cigarette use had become an “almost ubiquitous—and dangerous—trend among teens.” Since then, the portion of high school students vaping has dropped to 11%, and the most popular product is a newer entrant, Puff Bar , not Juul. Yet it apparently wasn’t the company’s appeal to young people that led the agency to pull Juul off the market. A 2016 rule gave the FDA the authority to grant or deny “marketing orders” to e-cigarettes and other alternative tobacco products based on whether they met the standard of being “appropriate for the protection of the public health.” The agency found that Juul didn’t meet that standard because the company failed to provide sufficient evidence “to assess the potential toxicological risks of using the JUUL products”—even though Juul spent more than $150 million and hired an army of scientists to make its case. On Friday, a federal court stayed the FDA’s ban to give Juul time to appeal. Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Get full access to Newcomer at <a href="https:/
Wed, June 22, 2022
Nothing More Than a Magic Trick (w/Gary Marcus)
Are we nearing a time when we are going to get to have real, meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence? Nitasha Tiku got the world wondering just that with her story in the Washington Post about a Google engineer who believes that the company’s LaMDA artificial intelligence might be sentient. Google engineer Blake Lemoine carried out a series of seemingly personal conversations with the artificial intelligence and walked away believing that there was a sort of person behind the messages he was receiving. Artificial intelligence expert Gary Marcus thinks the idea that artificial intelligence systems are anywhere close to sentience is patently absurd. He wrote on his Substack : Neither LaMDA nor any of its cousins (GPT-3) are remotely intelligent. All they do is match patterns, draw from massive statistical databases of human language. The patterns might be cool, but language these systems utter doesn’t actually mean anything at all. And it sure as hell doesn’t mean that these systems are sentient. On Dead Cat , Tom Dotan and I talked to Marcus about artificial intelligence, how tech companies should frame these text generating machines to their users, and the media’s failure to cover speculative technologies skeptically. (In the post we make reference to Marcus’s post Does AI really need a paradigm shift? ) Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, June 15, 2022
Coming to You From a Soon To Be Chesa-Free San Francisco (w/Jonathan Weber)
I moved from San Francisco to New York, in February 2019, back before it was cool to turn tail on the tech mecca. Truth be told, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for San Francisco, but my girlfriend beckoned from Brooklyn. I’m writing this from my flight back to New York after over a week in SF. I spent much of it in an Airbnb next to Mr. Pickle’s on Van Ness Avenue and then a few days crashing at a fellow tech reporter’s apartment in the Outer Richmond. I ate Mission Chinese and La Taqueria, drank at Brass Tacks and The Monk’s Kettle, and made it up to Calistoga for a picturesque vineyard wedding. But did I spend any time working for you, dear reader? Yes, not to worry. I spent my days shuttling from South Park to the Presidio, catching up with venture capitalists, founders, tech media insiders, and senior tech executives. And I spent my nights getting drunk with them, eager for looser lips. Here are my key immediate takeaways: * One source told me that even Insight Partners — which announced a $20 billion fund in February — has decided to seriously slow down big late stage private investments . Until recently, Insight looked like one of the last holdouts when it came to doing late stage deals even as the market unraveled. But now, like pretty much everyone else, it’s mostly focused on its existing portfolio. * VC advice on the downturn — even Sequoia Capital’s presentation to founders — has felt too much like content marketing. For some startup CEOs it can feel a bit like you’re the goody two-shoes, “A” student in the classroom, when the teacher reprimands everyone. You think the rebuke applies to you, but really the message is meant for the troublemakers. But it’s the most diligent among us that take these admonitions personally. Founders need advice specific to their company. * There’s a sense that there have been many software engineers who have been overpromoted in the bull cycle and that this downturn could force some coders to reset their expectations about their appropriate rank and pay. * I spent much of my time asking sources what the overarching, thematic story of the downturn would be. One venture capitalist gave me my favorite answer: He argued that we’d look back on this downturn as a story of the perfect storm between retail and professional investor excesses . On the retail side, we saw the rise of Robinhood and Coinbase, and r/wallstreetbets trades on Kodak and GameStop. On the professional side, we saw firms like SoftBank and Tiger go so, so long without enough diligence to back it up. * If I had to name a couple companies/firms that I think are most likely to represent this downturn, right now I’d name Instacart, Coinbase, Robinhood, Go
Wed, June 08, 2022
Sheryl Sandberg Leans Out (w/Deepa Seetharaman)
Big tech executives are heading for the exits. Last week, Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that she would leave the Facebook parent company in the fall. Today, Dave Clark , CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, explained why he’s leaving Amazon : He’s going to become CEO of the logistics startup Flexport . With the markets on the brink, what other top tech executives will decide it’s a good time to step away? On this week’s Dead Cat , Tom Dotan, Katie Benner , and I talked to Wall Street Journal reporter Deepa Seetharaman about why Sandberg is leaving Facebook parent company Meta. There have been plenty of reasons cited for Sandberg’s departure: Burnout , a rising philanthropic impulse , a shrinking fiefdom within Meta . Seetharaman and her colleagues reported that Sandberg has faced an internal investigation at Meta that could have given Sandberg another reason to head for the exits. The Journal reported : Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal contacted Meta about two incidents from several years ago in which Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer, pressed a U.K. tabloid to shelve an article about her former boyfriend, Activision Blizzard Inc. Chief Executive Bobby Kotick, and a 2014 temporary restraining order against him. The episode dovetailed with a company investigation into Ms. Sandberg’s activities, which hasn’t been previously reported, including a review of her use of corporate resources to help plan her coming wedding to Tom Bernthal, a consultant, the pe
Tue, May 31, 2022
State of Substack (w/Casey Newton)
One of the many joys of going independent and writing on Substack is that I work at the eye of a trend piece. There’s a storm circling around me with fights about Substack’s politics and its promise as a media disruptor. But at the center of that vortex, I’m far more focused on my own business than the broader maelstrom around me. I’m very fortunate to say that my paid subscriber count has now grown beyond 1,500 and more than 22,000 people now receive my free emails. I’ve been enjoying a steeper growth curve lately. This week on the Dead Cat podcast, Katie Benner , Tom Dotan , and I talk to technology Substack writer Casey Newton . On the podcast, I reminisce about how I phoned Newton during the depths of the pandemic to tell him that I was going to leave Bloomberg to start a Substack only to learn he was about to launch one as well. Newton founded Platformer , a go-to destination for news and analysis about what’s happening in the technology industry — especially at social media companies. Newton and I are part of a group of writers that formed the Discord community Sidechannel together. (Paying Newcomer subscribers get access to the community, though I’ll confess that my channels are fairly dormant.) Our discussion was sparked by a news story about what’s not happening. Substack apparently isn’t raising a new round of financing, according to the New York Times . Unlike fellow Andreessen Horowitz portfolio company Clubhouse, which raised at a $4 billion valuation in April 2021, Substack hasn’t earned a unicorn valuation. Substack reportedly generated about $9 million in revenue in 2021. Given the turbulent financial markets, Substack abandoned its fundraising effort, according to the report. Newton celebrated Substack’s failure to fundraise in his newsletter: One, it reduces the pressure on Substack to financialize every facet of its newsletter, podcast and app ecosystem. In March, when the company introduced an app, I noted here that Substack shut off emails from your subscribed publications by default</
Tue, May 24, 2022
How Tech is Defending the Right to an Abortion (w/Kiki Freedman)
As the Supreme Court moves toward repealing Roe v. Wade, access to abortion pills over the internet could become a key frontier in the fight for abortion access in the United States. On this week’s Dead Cat podcast, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I talked to Kiki Freedman, the co-founder and CEO of the digital clinic for abortion access Hey Jane. (Freedman also worked at Uber for four years as an early Uber Eats employee.) Hey Jane has raised more than $3 million in funding to provide abortion pills in California, Colorado, Illinois, New Mexico, New York, and Washington. Like companies treating ADHD that we talked about earlier this month on the podcast, Hey Jane has been able to expand access to medication through telemedicine. Instead of prescribing Adderall, however, Hey Jane is prescribing abortion pills. Benner, who writes about the U.S. Department of Justice for the New York Times , updates us on her prognosis for the legal status of abortions in America. This week, Politico published a story headlined The Coming Legal Battles Over Abortion Pills: “The anti-abortion movement has prepared for this moment and is already focusing on restricting access to pills, knowing that abortion bans will be far less effective if states cannot keep the drugs from entering their borders. Nineteen states do not allow medication abortion via telehealth , others prohibit sending pills through the mail , and some states are introducing legislation that would ban the drugs entirely . But enforcing those laws will be uncharted territory, with new avenues for evading state bans as well as new legal challenges about whether federal or state law reigns supreme in some instances.” In our interview, Freedman recommends that people looking to support the right to abortion access donate to groups subsidizing abortions. Hey Jane has pulled together a list of funds that you can donate to . On the podcast, we discuss the role that tech companies can play in expanding access to abortion. Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Get ful
Tue, May 17, 2022
The Rug Pull Really Tied the Room Together
I’ve been writing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since 2013 . That means that I’ve seen a number of boom and bust cycles. It’s starting to feel like we’re entering another crypto winter. Bitcoin is down 37% since the start of the year. Ethereum is down 44% so far this year. Solana is down 68%. This week, Andreessen Horowitz published a piece reframing that brutal boom and bust whipsaw as the “ The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle .” The firm has written about the cycle, “Even though crypto cycles look chaotic, over the long term they’ve generated steady growth of new ideas, code, projects, and startups — the fundamental drivers of software innovation.” This week on Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I spoke with someone who is much less optimistic that these crypto cycles are good for the world. We chatted with Jacob Silverman , a journalist who has published articles about crypto in the Washington Post and the New Republic . Silverman has become a frequent collaborator with actor Ben McKenzie — aka Ryan from The O.C . McKenzie, who is working on a book with Silverman, has become a prolific crypto critic. While McKenzie’s fellow celebrities are out hawking crypto currencies and NFT projects, McKenzie has been a necessary voice of caution. On this week’s episode, we talk with Silverman about the unraveling of Luna and stablecoin TerraUSD. We discuss crypto regulation and try to game out where things are going from here. Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Background reading: * The Pandemic Sparked a Golden Age of Crypto Scams (New Republic) * Why users are pushing back against the world’s largest crypto exchange (Washington Post) * Crypto Bro Behind Staples Center Renaming Has Messy Past (Daily Beast) * <a target="_blank" href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news
Tue, May 10, 2022
We Saw This Movie. Everybody Died at the End (w/Rick Heitzmann)
Firstmark Capital’s Rick Heitzmann is someone I turn to when I want to understand what public market activity means for private startups. Heitzmann’s got an ear to Wall Street from his offices in New York City, but he invests in private technology startups. So I invited Heitzmann on Dead Cat with Tom Dotan and Katie Benner . We tried to make sense of this sudden downturn. Everyone has seen it coming for years. We just never knew when the party would end. Building on my story “The Endgame” from last week , we talk about how rising interest rates — not a global pandemic — seem to be finally bringing the boom times to an end. “We’ve entered into a new normal,” Heitzmann told us. “We’ve entered into a new period where capital is not free, where it’s going to be more and more expensive.” Heitzmann reminded us why startup investors kept deploying money even as things seemed frothy. “In the last 18 months of a 10-year bull market, most of the money is made. That’s why people are always afraid to get off the treadmill,” Heitzmann said. We all marveled at just how long this bull market has run, and we speculated about which companies might come to represent the excess when the dust has settled and the retrospectives are written. “These quick delivery guys — that are all over the streets of New York, the Jokr’s, the Getir’s,” Heitzmann observed, “ We saw Kosmo . We saw it didn’t work and then we just did the same thing with another $10 billion.” “We saw this movie. Everybody died at the end,” Heitzmann said. “Now we’re wondering why in the sequel we think there is going to be a happy ending.” Give it a listen. Read the automated transcript . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, May 03, 2022
Adderall on Demand (w/Rolfe Winkler)
During the pandemic, the U.S. government relaxed rules that prevented doctors from prescribing controlled substances — like Adderall — over the internet. That’s created a bonanza for venture-backed companies like Cerebral and Done. Wall Street Journal reporter Rolfe Winkler has been chronicling these telemedicine companies’ prescription practices. Winkler — a friend and former bridge partner of mine — came on Dead Cat to talk to Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and me about his stories. In March, with a colleague, Winkler documented how patients were getting Adderall prescriptions after 30-minute appointments. “All day every day, people were demanding Adderall,” a nurse practitioner for online mental-health company Cerebral Inc. told the Journal. “You can’t diagnose people in a half hour.” The Wall Street Journal reported : “Digital health startups that provide diagnoses and medications online for ADHD are following a familiar Silicon Valley playbook: They’re using software and the internet to remove the friction surrounding a service that is in high demand. Instead of a ride or groceries, this time it’s prescription drugs. Two of the most prominent new providers of these services for ADHD patients are Cerebral and Done Health, which now treat tens of thousands of patients online and have well-known supporters from the worlds of venture capital and sports.” Then in April, Winkler and another colleague reported that CVS and Walmart were blocking and delaying prescriptions for telemedicine startups. That same month, Cerebral’s former vice president in charge of product and engineering sued Cerebral over the company’s alleged focus on driving prescriptions . “When Cerebral determined that patients who were prescribed stimulants were more likely to remain Cerebral customers, the CEO directed Cerebral employees find ways to prescribe stimulants to more ADHD patients to increase retention,” the lawsuit said. This week, Winkler <a target="_blank" href="https://www.wsj.c
Tue, April 26, 2022
Streaming in Crisis (w/Lucas Shaw)
Netflix’s stock price has been in free fall. The company was worth more than $300 billion late last year and now the stock market values the company at just $89 billion. At the same time, CNN’s buzzy streaming service CNN+ didn’t even get the chance to spread its wings. David Zaslav , now the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, pulled the plug on the nascent streaming service after Discovery closed its acquisition of CNN parent company WarnerMedia. On this week’s Dead Cat , Tom Dotan and I talk with Bloomberg’s Hollywood whisperer, Lucas Shaw , about Netflix’s struggles and the untimely demise of CNN+. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, April 19, 2022
Rooting for Elon
On the latest episode of Dead Cat, we throw our weight behind Elon Musk ’s bid for Twitter. Katie Benner , Tom Dotan , and I make our predictions about whether Musk is going to succeed in his mission to acquire Twitter. (I’m betting against.) Dotan offers Musk a Plan B : Musk could buy the beleaguered photo pin board company Pinterest for a measly $15 billion. I celebrate venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s recent Easter absolution: He inexplicably unblocked me on Twitter. Meanwhile, Benner, who gave up Twitter for lent, brings us the good word about what life looks like post-Twitter — a reality we could all one-day face if Musk is able to bring the company crashing to the ground. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, April 12, 2022
Imploding Fast (w/Kate Clark)
Of all the sectors, I would never have guessed that one-click checkout companies would be the nexus of startup world drama. And yet that is where we find ourselves. The industry leader Bolt was co-founded by a man who seems desperate to win some sort of commendation for his conspiratorial tweetstorms . Meanwhile, rival Fast flamed out hot and, well, fast. The startup, which raised money from Index Ventures and Stripe, generated just $600,000 in revenue from its checkout service last year. The company was burning through as much as $10 million a month. Those figures come from the reporting of Kate Clark and her colleague Malique Morris at The Information . The duo have chronicled the fall of Fast, which had raised more than $100 million in funding. Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I spoke with Clark about Fast’s implosion. We also talked about Tiger Global renegotiating deal terms and Peter Thiel’s strange speech at Bitcoin 2022. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, April 05, 2022
The Fictionalized Viral Uber Driver
On the Dead Cat podcast, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I talk about Apple’s WeCrashed, Hulu’s The Dropout, and SHOWTIME’s Super Pumped — the TV shows about Adam Neumann , Elizabeth Holmes , and Travis Kalanick respectively. (Spoilers: If you believe that real events that have already transpired can be spoiled.) This morning, I emailed Fawzi Kamel , the Uber driver whose confrontation with then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick went viral when I published it at Bloomberg . The video captures Kalanick — at the peak of the scrutiny around his leadership — telling Kamel, “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own s**t. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!” I wanted to catch up with Kamel to see if he had seen himself on TV. He’s a character in the SHOWTIME television series Super Pumped, played by actor Mousa Hussein Kraish. Kamel called me back: He hadn’t watched the show. The fictional version of Kamel gets rid of his car, consults with a lawyer and his wife, and then posts the video online. The real world Fawzi Kamel was far bolder. Kamel was still driving for Uber when he sent me an email with the subject line “About uber.” He wrote me from his iPhone on Feb. 22, 2017: I started driving for uber in 2011So I know the company from the beginning and I can introduce you to drivers who started in 2010 under Ryan grave . We all know the dirty uber thief .Last Sunday , I picked up Travis and I told him that non of the drivers trust him anymore . Cause he cheated the drivers who promoted his idea at the beginning and made him who he is todayHe got mad and slammed my car doorThe point I'm trying to make is the answer of uber CEO after I told him that I Bankrupt because of him . Didn't seem as an answer of a CEOAnyway , I have all this in video , be my guest to see itI just want it to go viral , cause the CEO is an a*****e arrogant peace a shitThank youFawzi kamel I replied 13 minutes later with only four words: “Send me the video!” After some emails back and forth, Kamel sent me the video under the condition that I couldn’t publish it without his permission. (Unlike on TV, he hadn’t consulted a lawyer and wasn’t married.) I watched it and knew that the video would captivate a world obsessed with Uber’s brash CEO. I spent the next couple of days trying to convince Kamel to let me publish the video at Bloomberg , where I was covering the Uber beat. Kamel was a hard man to reach — in large part because he was still driving for Uber to earn a livi
Tue, March 29, 2022
Going Evergreen (w/Hunter Walk)
Hunter Walk , co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew, is a staple of tech Twitter. Walk worked on Second Life and at YouTube before founding his own venture fund along with Satya Patel . A month ago , the duo announced that they were dramatically changing their strategy. The firm had previously raised three funds from limited partners — $35 million in 2013, $50 million in 2015, and $90 million in 2018 — and invested in companies like Chime, Plaid, and Honor. Then, late last month, Walk and Patel announced that they had decided to change course and start investing their own money. That strategy shift will drastically reduce their pool of capital. And it will mean forgoing lucrative management fees that provide a guaranteed income as they wait around for their portfolio companies to mature. Walk came on Dead Cat to explain the decision to embrace an “evergreen” capital model. We chatted about founder archetypes and what types of founders he’s looking to invest in. In the second half of the conversation, we talked about how his views on content moderation have developed since his time at YouTube. And he bristled at the idea that I saw his brand as a “good liberal” VC. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, March 22, 2022
VC Jeopardy!
On this week’s Dead Cat , Tom Dotan and I reflect on this year’s SXSW. We take stock of the Austin tech scene and ponder what storylines emerged from the mega conference. At the 19:24 mark , VC Jeopardy starts. You can listen in as I host four venture capitalists in a fierce battle of startup-world trivia. Our contestants were Deena Shakir at Lux Capital, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, Julian Eison at Next Ventures, and Steve Brotman at Alpha Partners. You can also play along yourself: Here’s a link to the first round questions Here’s a link to the second round questions Thanks to my dear friends, Max Child and James Wilsterman at Volley for hosting the SXSW event. Wilsterman wrote the Jeopardy questions with some light oversight from yours truly. Volley is a San Francisco-based startup that creates voice-controlled games. The company just announced a partnership with Sony Pictures Television to produce a Jeopardy! game for Amazon’s Alexa and for Google smart devices. Great to see everyone who made it out to the event. Let’s do it again next year! Give the episode a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, March 15, 2022
Brands Are Not Human Beings (w/Jack Conte)
Patreon CEO Jack Conte took the stage at my first ever SXSW event with a beer in hand. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we discussed crowdfunding, OnlyFans, Substack, NFTs, Ukraine, and whether creators are brands. Speaking from the stage at the Volley Game Room at SXSW, Conte explained why his company wouldn’t compete with the likes of Twitter and YouTube to build audiences for the creators that it works with. “Patreon set out to solve a very specific problem. The specific problem we were solving was, there are creators who are getting millions of views, creators who have incredible reach, but they’re being undervalued by society,” Conte said. Conte said that he didn’t think Patreon could compete directly with large social media companies. “I actually don’t know that that’s a war that we would win. Those businesses are solid businesses. They have moats. They have network effects that make it very difficult to break into those worlds. I think Patreon’s best bet at solving this problem of creator payments is focusing very specifically on the problem of creator payments.” Conte seemed to be interested in exploring NFTs but was reticent to say that the company was specifically considering embracing them after receiving backlash on another podcast for even asking a question about NFTs. Toward the end of our conversation, Conte disagreed with journalist Taylor Lorenz’s stance that reporters should worry about their brands. Conte objected to the idea that creators of any sort should be thinking too much about their “brand.” For context, earlier this month, Insider quoted Lorenz in a much-discussed article. “When you think about the future of media, it’s much more distributed and about personalities," said Taylor Lorenz, a former Times tech reporter who recently left for The Washington Post. “Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes.” A bunch of political reporters — including the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany — seized on Lorenz’s comments to take issue with the notion that journalists should shape their “brand.” Conte seemed to agree with Lorenz that journalists can increasingly operate independently of newsrooms, but he took issue with the idea that journalists should mi
Wed, March 09, 2022
Keeping Tabs on the Oligarchs (w/Teddy Schleifer)
Suddenly, Silicon Valley is worried about its Russian ties. I’m getting messages from sources about potential Russian-connected venture capital firms and software companies with inordinate numbers of Russian customers. Companies like Netflix, Disney, Samsung, and TikTok are cutting at least some of their services in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is restricting access to Facebook. There were echoes of this moment, in 2018 , when Silicon Valley was forced to reckon with its addiction to Saudi Arabian oil money after the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi . Investors started to wonder if they should feel guilty about the transgressions of their limited partners. But then the spotlight faded and the business world moved on. This time seems different. Most importantly, the U.S. government is expressly putting pressure on wealthy Russian elites. The ethical questions are taking a back seat to the foreign policy objectives of much of the Western world. So even in cases where people can justifiably separate the individual from the country, there’s intense pressure to hurt the Russian government by cracking down on individuals and institutions tied to Russia. There’s perhaps no more prominent Russian-born investor than Yuri Milner . Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer asked this month : “What is Yuri Milner thinking? That’s the question I posed last week to Milner’s spokesman, after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then again on Monday, after Western governments responded with crippling sanctions. Milner, after all, is easily among Silicon Valley’s most prominent Russians, having made billions of dollars as the force behind DST Global, the venture firm that placed historic bets on Facebook and Twitter, among other Bay Area landmarks. But it was Milner’s embattled friends that put him on my mind: The Russian provenance of DST’s early capital was supplied in large part by Alisher Usmanov , a Russian oligarch who made his fortune in metal and mining before teaming up with Milner in 2008.” In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I talked to Schleifer about Milner’s public silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We discussed the abrupt transition from a globally interconnected financial system to one that is suddenly looking to root out Russian money. (A DST spokesperson told Schleifer
Tue, March 01, 2022
A Content Farming Retrospective (w/Shawn Colo)
In 2011, Google brought the hammer down on Demand Media. The search giant changed its search algorithm and sent Demand Media’s stock plummeting. The company had built web traffic by paying an army of independent writers — including Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan — to write low-effort posts that ranked highly on Google search results. The kneecapping of Demand Media’s content farm was a precursor to the platform wars of the next decade. Facebook became famous for building up ecosystems — whether it was social games or video news content — only to pull the rug out from the companies trying to play to the algorithm. Tom and I take a trip down memory lane with former Demand Media CEO Shawn Colo . He gives us a clear-eyed portrait of the company’s business strategy at the time and what brought it back down to Earth. Demand Media, co-founded by former Myspace executive Richard Rosenblatt, was for a brief moment more valuable than the New York Times , which had a content play of its own in About.com. Demand Media offers a case study for the challenges of media businesses: if the content is cheaply made, then it doesn’t have staying power; if the content is costly to produce, then the business will have low profit margins. It’s also a potent reminder as to how the companies that were once essential identifiers of a current moment in business can disappear from our collective memory. Colo — today the founder of investment firm 3L — identified some private companies to watch in the media business today. For his part, he has mixed feelings about the sector these days. He’s an investor in warehouse delivery company GoPuff, which we talk about toward the end of the conversation, and telehealth company Ro. Colo reveals that 3L’s second fund, which he’s already investing out of, is going to end up totaling between $400 and $500 million. Colo advises us that “if you’re making money, guys, the best strategy is to make money quietly.” Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, February 22, 2022
Super Pumped (w/Mike Isaac)
As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg . Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses. So Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I were interested to see how New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s propulsive book about Uber from 2019 — Super Pumped — would be translated to our television screens. Since we can’t watch the show yet (the first episode airs Feb. 27), we spoke to Isaac — who has played an integral role in making sure that the show’s writers know the true story behind what went down in the Uber saga. We’ll soon see how closely they hewed to reality. But ears will be burning. Despite only running seven episodes, the show features a long list of tech characters. They might not be famous outside of Silicon Valley but they are the stuff of legend to Silicon Valley obsessives. That includes people like David Drummond , Larry Page , Arianna Huffington , Emil Michael, Rachel Whetstone , and Jill Hazelbaker . That’s not to mention the headline conflict between Travis Kalanick and Bill Gurley . Isaac gave us a spoiler-free behind the scenes look at the making of the show. We talked about Hollywood’s obsession with tech. Isaac gave us a preview of the questions he’s asking going into his in-the-works book on Facebook — which is already slated to become the sequel to the Uber series . And we concluded our conversation with a brief discussion of Isaac and his colleagues’ latest reporting on Spotify , which revealed that Spotify had committed to paying Joe Rogan a stunning $200 million-plus. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, February 16, 2022
Razzlekhan and Wordcels
Our regular special guest, Katie Benner , recently sunk her teeth into the intersection of an old passion and a new one: technology industry ignominy and, her current beat at the New York Times , the U.S. Justice Department. Benner talks me through the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan . The duo were accused by the Justice Department of laundering money from the 2016 Bitfinex robbery. The arrest shows the federal government’s increasing sophistication when it comes to crypto currencies. But there are plenty of open questions about whether Lichtenstein and Morgan had the knowhow to pull off this historic heist. Morgan was a Forbes contributor who once wrote a column about protecting businesses from cybercriminals. She raps under the moniker Razzlekahn. Benner and I also talk about the apparent Chinese hack of the Wall Street Journal , Katie Notopoulos reporting on the identities of the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the latest technology meme — Wordcels and shape rotators . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, February 08, 2022
Meta Commentary (w/Alex Heath)
Last March, Alex Heath interviewed Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s virtual reality ambitions. Then in October, Heath broke the news for The Verge that Facebook planned to change its name and interviewed Zuckerberg again . This month, he wrote that both Facebook and Snapchat’s visions are colliding. They’re both hoping to look a lot like another app: TikTok. With newly rebranded Meta’s stock plummeting and Snap’s shares spiking, we thought it would be a good time to have Heath come on Dead Cat and explain what exactly is going on. Heath is a close watcher of social media companies — a reporter who takes these companies’ visionary pronouncements seriously. He’s far more bullish about the prospect of virtual reality and augmented reality revolutionizing our digital worlds than we have been. Tom Dotan and I talked with Heath about Apple’s crackdown on advertising tracking and why that’s hurting Meta more than Snap. We talked about Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s ambitions for his company, which is suddenly looking relevant again. We chuckled about Heath’s recent interview with Matrix stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss where Reeves made fun of NFTs . And we concluded our conversation with a frank discussion about how reporters should think about interviewing someone like Zuckerberg. You can listen here on Apple and Spotify . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, February 01, 2022
The Dead Cat Experience
Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are pulling their music from Spotify over the company’s more than $100 million exclusive deal with popular podcaster Joe Rogan. The UFC commentator likes to host vaccine skeptics and has voiced his own apprehensions about the necessity of the vaccine for young people . Meanwhile, Substack — the home to this newsletter — apparently generates more than $2.5 million a year from anti-vax newsletters. The company recently published a blog post titled, “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse.” It reads : We will continue to take a strong stance in defense of free speech because we believe the alternatives are so much worse. We believe that when you use censorship to silence certain voices or push them to another place, you don’t make the misinformation problem disappear but you do make the mistrust problem worse. Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I discuss the two latest controversies in Covid content moderation. We also talk about the market downturn and the broader risks for the economy. I argue that I’m more worried about the effects of Tesla’s stock falling than a crypto winter. Download the episode. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, January 25, 2022
Bobby Kotick's Call of Duty (w/Kirsten Grind)
Wall Street Journal reporter Kirsten Grind helped expose Activision Blizzard’s troubled corporate culture in a bombshell article in November , co-written with her colleagues Ben Fritz and Sarah Needleman . The article revealed that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick knew about the company’s sexual misconduct problems, including an alleged rape, and, in some cases, did not report the incidents to Activision’s board of directors. Then in January Microsoft moved to pay $75 billion in cash to buy the video games company — a 45% premium over Activision depressed share price. The acquisition could help Activision respond to a slew of investigations and legal challenges over its corporate culture. The deal gives Kotick a graceful exit from the gaming giant that he helped build. Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I talked to Grind about her investigation into Activision for this week’s Dead Cat podcast. Then we weigh the merits of Microsoft’s bid. Spoiler: We think it’s a steal for Microsoft. Give it a listen . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, January 18, 2022
Across the Pond (w/Ophelia Brown)
Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital announced Tuesday that it has raised $432 million for its third venture fund. ( I told paying subscribers back in April 2021 to watch out for Blossom’s next fund.) The European Series A firm is taking a big leap from its $85 million first fund in 2019 and its $185 million second fund in 2020. Tom Dotan and I talk with Brown about her crypto investing — including Blossom’s recent investment in juggernaut MoonPay, which raised a $555 million Series A at $3.4 billion . Brown tells us that she’s buying NFTs with her venture capital fund. She appears to have purchased CryptoPunk #985 on Christmas Eve for about $400,000 (98 ETH). Now, with the falling price of Ethereum, it’s worth a little over $300,000, according to Etherscan . MoonPay isn’t the only Series A in name only that Blossom has participated in. The firm invested in Checkout.com’s $230 million Series A round that valued the company at about $2 billion . Thankfully for Blossom’s limited partners, Checkout.com just raised at a $40 billion valuation . We also talk about Brown’s early investment, with Jan Hammer , in Robinhood back when she worked at Index. And Brown tells us why she doesn’t like her friends to know her current whereabouts. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, January 11, 2022
No One Wants to Spend Any Amount of Time With a Plastic Thing Strapped to Their Face (w/Phil Libin)
Phil Libin is as deeply rooted in the Silicon Valley ethos as you can find. He immigrated to the United States as a child from the Soviet Union and went on to found the once trendy tech word-processing software company Evernote. He took a detour as a venture capitalist at General Catalyst. Now he’s a founder again. He’s the CEO of Mmhmm, a video conferencing company that’s backed by Sequoia Capital, and runs a product studio called All Turtles. Even though he has virtual reality headsets spilling out of his closet at his new home in Bentonville, Arkansas, he thinks the metaverse is “obvious b******t.” “It is a gloss that uncreative people and companies put over — fundamentally a lack of good ideas,” he says. “There’s a part of me that hates it and a part of me that fears it. But since I think it’s so spectacularly stupid, there’s actually not that much to fear.” Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I discuss the metaverse and reminisce about the days when people used to throw eggs at tech buses. Libin explains why he was quick to tell his employees that they would never be coming back to the office and tells us how he got it wrong at Evernote by trying to build his life around work. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, January 05, 2022
Emperor Zuck (w/Deepa Seetharaman)
Deepa Seetharaman is a longtime friend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter, and — most importantly — a committed Dead Cat podcast listener. Her ears have been burning as we’ve talked about her and her colleagues reporting with former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos and as we’ve dissected her reporting on Instagram’s influence on teenage girls in our episode “ The Facebook Philes .” And given the fact that we named this podcast after Mark Zuckerberg’s strange text messages with board member Marc Andreessen , we thought it was about time we brought on someone who actually regularly writes about Facebook to talk about the state of the company as it is under siege from whistleblower Frances Haugen and the media. Katie Benner , Tom Dotan , and I talk to Seetharaman about the Journal’s Facebook Files series , Mark Zuckerberg’s ever increasing control over the company he co-founded, and what Seetharaman knows about Zuckerberg’s relationship these days with Sheryl Sandberg and Peter Thiel . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, December 29, 2021
Defogging Our 2021 Amnesia
Katie Benner , Tom Dotan , and Eric Newcomer look back on 2021 in Techmeme headlines for our final episode of Dead Cat for the year. We discuss some of the biggest stories of the year: * In January, Microsoft said Russian hackers accessed some of its source code and the U.S. government pinned the SolarWinds hack on Russians . * In February, Elon Musk drove Clubhouse listeners (and journalists blocked by Marc Andreessen ) to YouTube as they tried to listen to the live interview on the platform. It would represent a peak moment of cultural relevance for Clubhouse . * In March, Stripe’s valuation climbed to $95 billion . (And we talked about Stripe’s critics on Y Combinator-owned Hacker News and the coverage of Stripe’s hiring practices in Protocol .) * In May, Antonio García Martínez declared that Apple had fired him over the culture war backlash to his book Chaos Monkeys . * In June, the New York Times wrote about tough working conditions at Amazon . Later this year, a tornado would rip through an Amazon facility, killing six and raising further questions about how Amazon protects its workers. * Also in June, Andreessen Horowitz launched its much-discussed Future — a publication that hasn’t yet taken Silicon Valley by storm but has put every venture firm on notice that they need to <a target="_blank" href="https://www.theinformation.com/articles/redpoint-ventu
Tue, December 21, 2021
Giving Hollywood the Business (w/Richard Rushfield)
Hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer speak with longtime Hollywood reporter Richard Rushfield , who launched his newsletter The Ankler in 2017. Rushfield told readers he would be “giving Hollywood the business,” describing his unsparing newsletter as “the newsletter Hollywood loves to hate and hates to love.” Now, Rushfield has broader ambitions. A splashy New York Times piece announced that he’d teamed up with Janice Min , the media executive responsible for reinventing both The Hollywood Reporter and Us Weekly. Substack is helping to fund their growth as The Ankler joins Y Combinator. Almost immediately drama ensued. Variety , the Hollywood trade publication and Ankler rival, ran a headline on Dec. 16: Janice Min Loses First Hire at Ankler Newsletter to Rolling Stone (EXCLUSIVE) . It just so happened that Jay Penske , who was desperately trying to keep star reporter Tatiana Siegel in his media ecosystem, is the owner of Variety , Rolling Stone and Siegel’s employer The Hollywood Reporter. Meanwhile, Min insisted on Twitter that Siegel intended to join The Ankler . The blowup only seemed to firm up The Ankler ’s insurgent posture and the threat it posed to Penske’s Hollywood media empire. We spoke to Rushfield about the contentious launch. We also talked about some of the biggest stories in Hollywood right now, including Netflix employees protesting Dave Chappelle and the backlash to the Golden Globes. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, December 14, 2021
Elizabeth Holmes' Moveable Feast (with Erin Griffith)
New York Times reporter Erin Griffith returns to the show to catch us up on what’s been going on with the Elizabeth Holmes trial. To the surprise of many, Holmes took the stand to defend herself. Griffith updates us on her lunch, the politics of queuing outside of the courthouse, and Holmes’ legal strategy. At the 33:40 mark Katie Benner joins hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer . We talk about Andreessen Horowitz crypto partner Chris Dixon’s anti-media tweets and Bloomberg Businessweek’s story on Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz purportedly slowly stepping back from their eponymous firm. We touch on leadership drama at Instacart and talk about fancy restaurants, including the viral review of Bros., Lecce . Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Thu, December 09, 2021
Dipping into Miami
Tom Dotan grills me on my trip to Miami during Art Basel. We talk about 500 Global in the shadow of 2017 exposé Dave McClure . We cover a potpourri of topics. I play my best Steven Pinker while Tom harkens back to his days as a digital media reporter. We talk about Max Read’s piece “Is web3 b******t?” and discuss the BuzzFeed public listing. ( Ben Smith can finally sell his shares! ) There’s even a brief discussion of the latest episode of Succession **spoilers** toward the end of the episode. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 23, 2021
The Media's Facebook Deflection (w/Alex Stamos)
We talked to former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos about what the media got right and wrong about its coverage of Facebook’s influence on the 2016 election. Stamos — who played a key role in bringing information to Robert Mueller about Russian election interference — is someone who is willing to criticize his former employer without letting the media off the hook. Stamos argues that Facebook inadequately addressed misinformation posted onto Facebook’s platform and downplayed its discovery of Russian election interference on its platform. BUT, Stamos argues that the media played a far larger role in helping Russian election interference by gleefully publishing stolen Democratic National Committee emails. We decided to check in with Stamos as the credibility of the Steele dossier has continued to unravel. We talk about the media’s failure to soul search over its own role in the hacked election. We also discuss the Facebook Files and Stamos’ objections to some of the latest reporting on Facebook. Background reading: Opinion: Indictment of Steele dossier source is more bad news for multiple media outlets How Did So Much of the Media Get the Steele Dossier So Wrong? Collusion? Who needs it when Facebook was allowing Russians to help Trump? Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 16, 2021
Tech Workers of the World Unite. Or Don't.
A quick announcement: I’m integrating the Dead Cat podcast a little more closely with this newsletter. We’ve brought on an audio editor with Substack’s support to professionalize the podcast. Now, you’ll be able to get Dead Cat right in your email. (But you can still listen to the latest episodes on Apple and Spotify.) If you don’t want to receive Dead Cat podcast episodes, you can go to Newcomer.co/account and deselect “Dead Cat.” I hope you’ll listen along. What’s the pitch? It’s a show that gets behind the tech industry headlines. It’s hosted by me and Insider reporter Tom Dotan . Our good friend Katie Benner , a reporter at the New York Times , is a regular special guest. So far guests have included Rippling CEO Parker Conrad , Doordash VP and Obama administration alum Liz Jarvis-Shean , and Dispo CEO Daniel Liss . The podcast is meant to be a fun way to listen in on what reporters really think about the big tech stories of the day. Tom, Katie, and I have had a gossipy Signal thread for years. Dead Cat is that thread in podcast form. What’s with the name? Listen, Newcomer wasn’t the most creative name and I needed to make up lost ground. I also wanted a cute cat avatar. But we do have a rationalization for the name “Dead Cat.” Here’s the story: Thanks to a shareholder lawsuit several years ago, the public got a peek inside Marc Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg’s text messages. Andreessen was coaching Zuckerberg on how to convince the Facebook board to support Zuckerberg’s efforts to solidify his control over Facebook even if he sold shares . Andreessen texted Zuckerberg: “The cat’s in the bag and the bag’s in the river.” Zuckerberg didn’t seem to understand the language of spy craft. Zuckerberg replied: “Does that mean the cat’s dead?” Thus, the name for our podcast was born. To over intellectualize it, to me, it’s a statement about how the tech industry is already ascendant. The deed is done. The cat’s dead. We’re stuck with a culturally dominant Silicon Valley — the good and the bad. Now we’re just left making sense of it. What’s on the docket this week? Tom, Katie, and I talk about employee union organizing at tech companies and beyond. Tom argues that tech union
Tue, November 09, 2021
100 Percent Ethereum (w/ Daniel Liss)
We break the seal on crypto in this podcast in a long chat with Dispo CEO Daniel Liss about how the technology could transform social media products. He attended the big NFT conference in New York this past week and explained why the optimism in tech has been directed here. The conversation goes into what the crowd was like at the conference, how the consumer companies could embrace crypto as an alternative business model to advertising and whether it makes sense for services to jump aboard the trend even when its users don't care much about it yet. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, November 02, 2021
Fine-tuning of the Metaverse
Yes, we talk about Facebook's metaverse announcement. And yes, Eric takes the techno-optimist point of view while Katie and Tom are completely befuddled why anyone would want to spend their time there. But also, we discuss whether the announcement actually buried all the Facebook paper scandals, why Frances Haugen's turn to release her documents to multiple outlets was a jolting move for any reporter, and how whistleblowers are now just another version of influencer culture. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Mon, October 25, 2021
The Contradictarian (w/ Max Chafkin)
We dive into the wacky, wild and wildly inconsistent world of Peter Thiel with Bloomberg Businessweek editor Max Chafkin. He recently published a book, "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power" that goes through Thiel's origins in the industry, how he influenced other founders and how his right wing political project is shaping up. Max also makes the case for why Thiel is one of the most influential characters in the formation of the current culture in tech. And Eric, Tom and Max mull over why Thiel's worldview is at odds with itself and whether maybe that's the point. Max's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/609711/the-contrarian-by-max-chafkin/ Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, October 19, 2021
Blood Sport (w/ Erin Griffith)
We're joined by New York Times tech reporter Erin Griffith. She's been on the scene in San Jose covering the fraud trial against Elizabeth Holmes—tech's trial of the century, or at least the decade, or maybe of a generation. We talk about the surprisingly plodding pace of such a high profile trial, what kind of a case the prosecution appears to be building and what will be the broader reckoning for the tech industry. If there will be one at all. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, October 13, 2021
That's What the Money's For!
We discuss Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong's tweets about how the tech press' harsh coverage of CEOs is driving away talent and whether the increasingly critical stories about tech companies is the natural maturity of the industry. We also dive into last year's controversies when national politics spilled into company Slack rooms and whether banning it actually helped improve morale (as Armstrong also claimed). Finally, as top Facebook officials make the media rounds after the whistleblower's testimony in Congress, we disagree on whether getting an interview with a high ranking exec is all that valuable to a beat reporter. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Sat, October 02, 2021
Look on my Monthly Uniques, ye Mighty, and despair! (w/ Ben Smith)
Katie and Tom interview New York Times media columnist Ben Smith about his piece on the deception at Ozy. This was recorded a few hours before the digital media company announced it was shutting down, following his reporting. We discuss Ozy's appeal to investors, the courting of billionaires, the nature of the fraud, and what to make of the entire cohort of digital media companies the sprang up at the same time. Ben's initial column on Ozy https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/26/business/media/ozy-media-goldman-sachs.html Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, September 29, 2021
Three Down
With Eric on vacation, Katie and Tom take on hosting duties without adult supervision. We go over the rise of tech employees griping to reporters about company inner workings (aka "leaking") and what it says about the state of employee happiness in the industry. Also why CEOs won't be able to control it unless they address what's ailing company morale. Then we touch on the pervasiveness of gig workers around the world and what happens with a significant portion of the world's workers relies on that model. Also, the mortifying text messages between Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani. Stories we discuss in this episode: Elizabeth Holme's Texts: https://www.thedailybeast.com/theranos-elizabeth-holmes-called-business-partner-boyfriend-her-tiger-in-lovey-texts-as-company-tanked Tim Cook's Memo: https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/22/22687747/tim-cook-employee-leak-memos-do-not-belong-at-apple Global Gig Workers https://restofworld.org/2021/gig-workers-around-the-world-are-finally-organizing/ Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, September 21, 2021
The Facebook Philes
Eric, Katie and Tom talk about why the Wall Street Journal's epic series about Facebook's internal failings is so powerful. And why Facebook continues to be aggressively covered by the media in a way it didn't use to be—well into the Biden presidency. That turns into a discussion about whether comparing the company to big tobacco makes sense. We also briefly debate if Peter Thiel is as powerful as the media makes him out to be. This will not be the last time we discuss Thiel on the podcast. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Tue, September 14, 2021
If It Bleeds, It Leads
In a hosts-only episode, Katie, Eric, and Tom talk about whether the media has overplayed the Theranos story and argue about whether the public is still interested or what lessons can be learned from the verdict. That turns into a debate about other media-driven tech spectacles, like Facebook's camera glasses, and why reporters gladly play up the hype about hardware. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Wed, September 08, 2021
Episode 3: Liz Jarvis-Shean
Liz has handled communications with the media from the crucibles of both the tech and political worlds. We talked about her time with Tesla just as Elon Musk was finding his voice and going through and around the press. She reflected on her time with the Obama presidential campaigns, feeding opposition research to media about Sarah Palin and Mitt Romney. And we debated whether the media has become too critical of tech, particularly from the vantage point of her current role as the VP of comms and policy at DoorDash. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Mon, August 30, 2021
Episode 2: Christina Cacioppo
CEO and founder of security startup Vanta, Christina Cacioppo, joins to talk about how she was able to raise a huge Series A ($50m at $500m valuation). We also talk about her jump from being a VC to a founder, why Zoom-based fundraising is here to stay and whether female founders get a fair shake from the tech press. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Mon, August 23, 2021
Episode 1: Interview with Parker Conrad
Our show begins with our first ever guest, Rippling CEO Parker Conrad. He talks about why the tech press spends too much time listening to VCs who don't have nearly as much power as reporters think. He also looks back at the way he was infamously pushed out of his previous company, Zenefits, and the role A16Z played in that saga. Our thanks to @yungchomsky for our theme music. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
loading...