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Dive into the complete episode list for Newcomer Podcast. Each episode is cataloged with detailed descriptions, making it easy to find and explore specific topics. Keep track of all episodes from your favorite podcast and never miss a moment of insightful content.

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Pub. DateTitleDuration
21 Mar 2025The Biggest Deal of the Year!00:44:24

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

04 Apr 2025OpenAI: A $300 Billion Non-Profit?00:57:02

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

28 Mar 2025Vibecode Showdown00:19:35

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

28 Feb 2025$200 Billion for Data Centers... In This Economy?00:17:34

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.

02 Oct 2021Look on my Monthly Uniques, ye Mighty, and despair! (w/ Ben Smith)00:41:11

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



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07 Feb 2025DOGE's Twitter Firestorm00:25:24

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


13 Oct 2021That's What the Money's For!00:46:50

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.



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09 Nov 2021100 Percent Ethereum (w/ Daniel Liss)01:01:15

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.



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11 Apr 2025Walter Bloomberg at the Wheel for the Whole Stock Market01:06:56

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. 

24 Jan 2025Grit vs Grift00:25:59

"In this episode of The Newcomer PodcastEric 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."

08 Sep 2021Episode 3: Liz Jarvis-Shean00:48:14

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.



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29 Sep 2021Three Down00:40:54

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/



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14 Sep 2021If It Bleeds, It Leads00:49:08

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. 



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07 Mar 2025Best Crypto to AI Pivot Ever00:21:55

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

31 Jan 2025The DeepSeek Fire Drill00:24:42

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.

18 Apr 2025AGI, Seriously + Foundation Model Polyamory (With Kyle Harrison)00:55:05

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. 


21 Sep 2021The Facebook Philes00:42:13

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.



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30 Aug 2021Episode 2: Christina Cacioppo00:31:31

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.



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19 Oct 2021Blood Sport (w/ Erin Griffith)00:47:25

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.



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13 Mar 2025Everything's Computer00:21:33

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

21 Feb 2025Humane’s HP Exit & the Foundation Model Slugfest00:24:26

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

14 Feb 2025Elon Musk’s Boisterous OpenAI Bid 00:19:12

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

02 Nov 2021Fine-tuning of the Metaverse00:41:04

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.



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23 Aug 2021Episode 1: Interview with Parker Conrad00:39:28

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.



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25 Oct 2021The Contradictarian (w/ Max Chafkin)00:47:51

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/



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17 Jan 2025Beware the "Tech Industrial Complex"00:22:00

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.

01 Feb 2023A New Dimension (w/Nan Li, Adam Goulburn, and Zavain Dar)00:51:34

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



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06 Mar 2023Newcomer, the Podcast00:01:44

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 in my audio efforts! Excited to have Vanta on board.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out.

For fans of my old podcast Dead Cat, give the new podcast a try. It will be arriving via the same podcast feed. The Newcomer podcast shouldn’t be so much a revolution as an evolution. Yes, my former co-host Tom Dotan is off skewering Marc Benioff for the Wall Street Journal. I’m on my own. It will give me more time to ask the hard questions and listen to the guests’ replies. I’m going to try to talk about the media less and the business of tech more. But it will be the same probing podcast that you’ve come to love.

To get new episodes, subscribe to this newsletter, sign up to receive the podcast on Apple, and subscribe to the Newcomer YouTube channel. I’d definitely appreciate some positive reviews as I get this thing going. Like, comment, subscribe, and all that.

See you in your feeds tomorrow!



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07 Mar 2023This Kicked Off With a Dinner With Elon Musk Years Ago (with Reid Hoffman)00:57:26

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

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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 appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world.

It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice.

It’s a world full of contradictions. There’s constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.

The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI’s governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery.

Finally, unlike tech’s conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?

I thought he delivered. I didn’t feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”

Some Favorite Quotes

We covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans’ failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.

Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.

“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it’s very catchy and it evokes fear.”

I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop.

Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?

Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”

“It’s the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you’re like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.’”

He went on, “Now, us can’t be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let’s make sure that we’re having the conversations with the right communities.”

I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control.

We also discussed Hoffman’s politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel.

“I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don’t really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can’t allow your own position to be the definer.”

I suggested that Thiel’s public views sometimes seemed insincere.

“Oh, that’s totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that’s happening, it’s terrible. And that’s one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”

Give it a listen.

Find the Podcast

Read the Transcript

Eric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.

This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.

Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?

And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. 

This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.

And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.

Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?

Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.

And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. 

And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.

A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.

So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.

Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.

And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.

Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.

Eric: Sort of, yeah.

Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.

Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.

Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.

Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.

Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?

Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.

So oligarchy is a—

Eric: a charged

Reid: is a charged word. And I,

Eric: There’s a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.

In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.

Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?

Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.

And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern sca

21 Mar 2023Peering Over the Edge of Death (with Jon McNeill)00:53:45

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.”

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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

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“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 bliztscaling playbook isn’t going to work anymore.

“You could go out to burn capital to acquire customers in a business that didn’t have its economics figured out yet. And ride share was a good example of that. And you could burn through a lot of investor capital because basically every time you raised it didn’t cost you much in terms of valuation.”

But McNeill told me, “When interest rates are non-zero, I don’t think blitzscaling is appropriate because you can’t afford the cost of capital.”

I asked him, “Can companies escape blitzscaling?”

“Yeah, they can but they have to have super talented leadership to do it.”

He pointed to his old rival Dara Khosrowshahi as one such leader.

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14 Mar 2023A Wall Street Veteran & Investor Explains Silicon Valley Bank's Unraveling (with Laurence Tosi)01:02:10

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.

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29 Mar 2023Venture Capital Gravitational Physics (with Ravi Mhatre)00:43:14

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.

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04 Apr 2023Cerebral Valley Double Feature: Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque & General Catalyst's Deep Nishar00:49:58

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 business.

The AI world is watching to see what happens next. Give it a listen.

Part 2: My Conversation with General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar

Starting at 30:33, you can listen to my interview with General Catalyst’s lead growth investor Deep Nishar.

A former executive at Google and LinkedIn and then one of the top investors at the SoftBank Vision Fund, Nishar has had a front seat at the table for many of the developments in the technology industry.

Human health — and how artificial intelligence can shape it — was at the heart of our conversation. It’s easy to get lost in chatbots and image generation tools but the promise of artificial intelligence is far larger.

We also talked about Google’s standing in the AI race and I got his reflections on SoftBank’s AI strategy.

Find the Podcast

We’ll have a bonus episode for you on Thursday so watch out for that. We’re also posting all the on-stage conversations on our YouTube channel over the next few days.

Right now, you can watch:

* Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw’s conversation with Quora CEO and OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo and with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.

* Volley CEO Max Child’s talk with Lisha Li (Rosebud), Caroline Zhang (Knowtex), Chun Jiang (Monterey AI), and Medha Basu (Defog).



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06 Apr 2023Open-Source AI: Replit's Amjad Masad & Hugging Face's Clem Delangue00:56:56

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 my last podcast).

* Shane Orlick (President at Jasper) and Cristóbal Valenzuela (CEO of Runway) with Coatue’s Caryn Marooney.

* Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw’s conversation with Quora CEO and OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo and with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.

* A panel of investors (Leigh Marie Braswell at Founders Fund, Bucky Moore at Kleiner Perkins, and Amber Yang at Bloomberg Beta) moderated by me.

* Volley CEO Max Child’s talk with Lisha Li (Rosebud), Caroline Zhang (Knowtex), Chun Jiang (Monterey AI), and Medha Basu (Defog).

* General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar with me (also featured in Tuesday’s podcast episode) .

* Volley CTO James Wilsterman’s talk with Yasmin Dunsky (Wild Moose), Emily Dorsey (Pyq), and Lydia Ding (Code Complete).



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18 Apr 2023Amazon Bedrock & BabyAGI (with Jon Turow)00:49:05

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.

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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.

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25 Apr 2023The World After Capital (with Albert Wenger)00:58:26

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.

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02 May 2023Traffic Jam (with Ben Smith)00:54:25

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.

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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, frilly skin, and added the header “2012” for election coverage. (More traditional news verticals will be rolled out in the coming months.) It’s gone well so far, with comScore showing 10.8 million unique visitors in December, more than double that of the same month in 2010.

Its business model, in part, capitalizes on the mix of high and low content; instead of banner ads, BuzzFeed works with companies like Pillsbury to create content ideal for sharing, including “10 Things You Never Knew You Could Do With a Crescent Roll.”

If it is successful, BuzzFeed will generate the kind of traffic that will rival behemoths like, yes, The Huffington Post. Mr. Peretti says that BuzzFeed makes a profit some months, but given the level of investment and growth — there are now 78 people in its Flatiron offices — the burn rate on that new chunk of capital is significant. “It’s fun to watch them make all these hires,” said Choire Sicha, the founder of The Awl site and a veteran of the New York Web scene. “But it’s important that they don’t overspend. Web ad rates are what they are and that isn’t going to change.”

Then I turned the conversation to former Gawker editor Max Read’s review of Traffic.

Read writes:

In the end, only one character in “Traffic” can really be said to have any vision. In 2013, Disney CEO Bob Iger offered to buy BuzzFeed for $650 million. In the book’s strangest and funniest scene, a nightmare blunt rotation of Smith, Peretti, BuzzFeed video chief Ze Frank and BuzzFeed president Jon Steinberg get high on a hotel balcony in Los Angeles and discuss the offer. Frank and Smith urge an ambivalent Peretti to turn down the offer, worrying that “Disney’s corporate culture would stifle” Buzzfeed’s creativity. Not so much Steinberg, the company’s money man, who gets “down on his knees on the balcony to plead with Jonah to take the deal.”

Frank and Smith would go on to win the argument; they and Peretti saw BuzzFeed’s monster traffic as the key to their dreams of a burgeoning, independent media empire. As we now know, they were wrong. Steinberg is far from a genius — after leaving BuzzFeed, he joined the Daily Mail’s U.S. operation, and then founded the cosmically annoying CNBC-for-millennials brand “Cheddar,” whose videos can be found on gas pumps across the country — but he alone managed to see that traffic for what it really was: the “pump” phase of a pump-and-dump scheme that Peretti never had the vision to complete.

In my conversation with him, Smith, the former media columnist for the New York Times, also offered his thoughts on the upcoming presidential primary and Tucker Carlson’s departure from Fox News.

Give it a listen.

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17 May 2023Substack's Index Fund of Culture (with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie)00:51:57

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.

“I try to think about Elon as little as possible,” McKenzie said in our conversation at Substack’s office. “What we’re trying to do here is not build the anti-Twitter or build the anti-Instagram or anything like that. We’re trying to build the first Substack. The vision for what we think it can become is an amazing, beautiful thing and it’s bigger and more important than social media.”

McKenzie acknowledged that “arguably Twitter is trying to kill Substack.”

I asked about newsletter godfather Ben Thompson’s critique of Substack’s community round in his newsletter.

Thompson wrote in April:

We know that valuation because Substack asked its writers to fund a round at the same $650 million post-money valuation it achieved in 2021, despite the fact the company failed to raise money last year; the company never released its 2022 financials.

Frankly, I think this request was shameful: Substack has rightly earned the affection of a lot of writers by providing them with a new way to earn money, and of course those writers want Substack to succeed. Keeping such a lofty valuation, though, is effectively asking for a donation from an audience that almost by definition doesn’t know any better. That doesn’t seem very writer friendly! Nor, for that matter, does this fight with Twitter. Again, I think this is a product bet that makes a lot of sense: Substack needs to take big swings if it’s ever going to reach its valuation. Writers, though, who need Twitter’s distribution, didn’t sign up for this fight; they are simply stuck in the middle.

We also talked about Best’s botched podcast interview with The Verge’s Nilay Patel. In the interview (here’s a link to the key exchange), Patel hammered Best on Substack’s stance on blocking overt racism on Notes. In that interview, Best declined to say that Substack would ban particular objectionable racist comments from the platform unilaterally.

In my conversation with him, Best continued to oppose “centralized censorship” on Substack’s platform. And he doubled-down on his answer, saying that he had “basically the same answer.”

Best said, “We do have a content policy. It allows a lot of stuff we don’t like. It bans only very extreme things. If people are putting things that are against the overall content policy, they are taken down by us. However, that allows a lot of stuff that we find very objectionable. Then we try to build a system that puts people in control of what they see and who they interact with.”

As should be pretty obvious from the conversation, I think that if Substack Notes is successful, it will actually be much more curated than many other social networks. Writers want to give their readers a premium, elevated experience — not just a platform that does the bare minimum of content moderation. So I’m optimistic over time that Substack will find ways to empower writers to curate the platform. Even though Substack often finds itself talking about free speech and tough moderation decisions, in many ways what the company has built is a system where writers are given the power to moderate the platform themselves.

The last thing I’ll tease from the conversation is that the Substack founders no longer come off as diametrically opposing to supporting advertising. Judge their answer for yourself.

In the conversation we name-dropped a bunch of newsletters and Substack writers, including Gergely Orosz Jesse Singal Heather Cox Richardson Matthew Yglesias Substack Writers Andrew Sullivan The Ankler. Bulwark+ Bari Weiss The Free Press The Pillar

Give it a listen.

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23 May 2023The State of Consumer Investing With Benchmark's Sarah Tavel00:58:08

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 wrote a glowing profile of the company last month.

Tavel, who doesn’t like to announce her startup investments, revealed that she has secretly invested in an unannounced NFT company.

“Crypto is a bad word now,” Tavel told me. “It’s really hard to train consumers to trust something again — once a consumer has made a first impression. It’s much easier to teach a user a first impression than to rewrite that first impression.”

Finally, I asked Tavel to give us a peek behind the curtain at Benchmark. Fortune’s Jessica Mathews recently interviewed Benchmark’s Bill Gurley about his decision to step back.

Mathews wrote:

“The venture business, if you want to be at the top, requires insane, remarkable hustle… You have to live in fear that the next Google is going to get funded by a firm that’s not yours,” he says. “Either you’re in there rowing as hard as you can, because we’re all a team, or you’re not.”

That said, he still has strong instincts about the future of tech. “If I were still active as a venture capitalist, I’d be looking at a lot of the vertical applications of A.I. I look at the coding stuff, and it’s insane… If you’re not using it, I think you’re probably writing your own death certificate as a programmer, because people are going to be so much more efficient. And the question is: What are other applications that have that kind of productivity boost or lift, and I think people are trying to figure that out.”

But in the end, it was a book by Steve Martin, Born Standing Up, that helped convince Gurley it was time to step back. “One day, [Martin] is in Vegas and he comes out, and the top row is empty, the first time he’s ever seen the top row empty. He quits the next day—never does standup again. And then he goes off and he does his banjo and his theater and his acting.… Like I said, I don’t think I ever played the stage, so I’d rather not say I’m the same. It influenced me. That notion influenced me.”

Today, the Benchmark partnership is made up of Tavel, Peter Fenton, Eric Vishria, Chetan Puttagunta, and Miles Grimshaw.

Tavel said about the firm, “We’ve always had a pretty simple idea, which is that there’s this creative destruction.”

“Once you start — there’s no training wheels. So you’re thrown into the deep end. You’re an equal partner and you’re expected to be 100% until the minute that you retire,” Tavel said. “And when you have an equal partnership, it kind of pushes you in the direction of just recognizing — as Bill said in that interview — the hustle may not be in you anymore. And if you feel that way, then the model — as was set up by the founders — is such that it’s time to raise your hand and move on.”

Of course, my understanding is that partners like Gurley, Matt Cohler, and Mitch Lasky remain fairly heavily involved at Benchmark even so.

“It’s like an affliction. The reason they’re here in the first place was because the curiosity and competitiveness and the drive for learning and relevance, being in the mix, that never leaves you,” Tavel said. “They are a significant portion of our LP base, they’re still there on Mondays, and I’m texting all of them all the time.”

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31 May 2023The Gossip Economy (with Kyle Harrison)01:03:39

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.

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06 Jun 2023Rug Salesman Turned Valley Insider Raises a $432 Million Seed Fund (with Pejman Nozad)00:48:02

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.”

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13 Jun 2023Not Exactly AR And Not Exactly VR (with Lauren Goode & Anand Agarawala)00:53:15

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.

From what I’ve seen initially, I’d say the good news is that there’s no kind of magical solutions that they have to any of the constraints on laws of physics that our teams haven’t already explored and thought of. They went with a higher resolution display, and between that and all the technology they put in there to power it, it costs seven times more and now requires so much energy that now you need a battery and a wire attached to it to use it. They made that design trade-off and it might make sense for the cases that they’re going for.

But look, I think that their announcement really showcases the difference in the values and the vision that our companies bring to this in a way that I think is really important. We innovate to make sure that our products are as accessible and affordable to everyone as possible, and that is a core part of what we do. And we have sold tens of millions of Quests.

More importantly, our vision for the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social. It’s about people interacting in new ways and feeling closer in new ways. Our device is also about being active and doing things. By contrast, every demo that they showed was a person sitting on a couch by themself. I mean, that could be the vision of the future of computing, but like, it’s not the one that I want. There’s a real philosophical difference in terms of how we’re approaching this. And seeing what they put out there and how they’re going to compete just made me even more excited and in a lot of ways optimistic that what we’re doing matters and is going to succeed. But it’s going to be a fun journey.

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06 Jul 2023Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet Talks Pre-Seed Deals, YC, SoftBank & `Zombie Mode' Funds00:53:13

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 Techstars, people would actually know who we are and what we do. And I remember announcing that I was joining Techstars to my network, and a few people, including venture capitalists from Silicon Valley who will remain unnamed, saying: Why are you joining a nonprofit? My answer was, this is not a nonprofit, this is an investment business and a pretty good one at that. It’s just that they never really position themselves as an investment business. And so part of the work was to change internally and externally, the image of Techstars to say, we are very large pre-seed investors. And by the way, as for Crunchbase, a few months ago, we officially became the largest pre-seed investor in the world.

What has been the company with the best return for Techstars?

We have some really, really cool companies that I like very much. Companies like Chainalysis made headlines not long ago because they provide blockchain data and analysis to governments, banks and businesses around the globe. And when things like FTX happen, and it’s only the most famous but there have been multiple situations where figuring out what is happening in the blockchain, crypto world has been pretty critical for a lot of institutions. Chainalysis is usually the company that calls.

One that I liked very much is called Remitly. They’re a mobile payments service that enables users to make a person-to-person international money transfer. So that’s the tagline. What they do is that they allow to a large extent immigrants from all around the world to send money in a safe and cheap way to their families and to the people who need it. That's a $6 billion company. They went through an IPO in 2021. This is a company with a mission, which is amazing.

We’re talking about billion dollar plus companies, and we can also talk about smaller companies because we have 3,600 companies in our portfolio. We’ve got a bunch. But the one that I like a lot among our billion-dollar-plus companies is a company called Zipline. They design and manufacture these drones, and then they operate them to deliver vital medical products in Africa. It’s a $3 billion company. They did successful fundraising in April of this year. Again, what they’re doing really makes a lot of sense for the world, and the risk of using a Silicon Valley sentence: to make the world a better place. But the reason why it matters so much is because I deeply believe and so does my team that big money comes from solving big problems. Big problems usually are found in things that make the world a better place. Not always, but it does help. So that’s my $3 billion-plus favorite company, but we got quite a few others.

Are there standard terms for Techstars? If I’m an entrepreneur, what should I expect in terms of money and ownership?

We have standard terms and they’re public. So it’s $20,000 plus $100,000 convertible notes. And depending on the conversion of the note, we ended up on average about 8% of the capital in the company. Basically what we provide to founders is the capital, obviously. But there is what we call the Techstars formula. So it’s the $120k that I've just mentioned. It’s the program. Our programs are very intense. It’s a small class, very small classes — 10 to 15 companies. It’s very hands-on. You have the Techstars team, and these are Techstars employees dedicated to that particular program. These tend to be people who are former entrepreneurs themselves.

What is your read on the funding environment right now?

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.

A lot of venture firms have not yet taken the full write-down on their valuation, which compounds the problem because a lot of institutional LPs have public and private portfolios and the public portfolios have taken the write-down. Valuations has dropped quite dramatically.

We came from a period where it was not abnormal for a venture firm to raise every two years, sometimes every year. And so a lot of the firms are now out in the market fundraising. And if you take a significant write down, then suddenly your performance on paper doesn’t look great. And so it can create a problem for you. So it’s not like they are in denial. I just think that they’re trying to keep the appearances. The institutional LP knows that so there’s like a double effect. The first one is most institutional LPs are over overexposed to VC because the VC hasn’t taken the write-down that the public market has so there’s like a denominator effect. And then the second reason is the LPs know when they look at the GP they invested in that some of them have not taken the full write down, and they’re like, okay, maybe we’re going to wait to see where all of that lands. And so VC environment is very tricky at the moment, and I think what we’re observing is a complete change of the guard, a complete reorganization of the venture space. It’s not over. My guess is that it’s probably another few another couple of years. At the outcome of that change, we're most likely going to see very different players really influencing the markets.

I would assume that over time, there’s less money available.

There’s less easy money available. We have a little over 15,000 investors who have made an investment in Techstars, portfolio companies we’ve been connected with. So we talk to a lot of these people like we are deal flow to the VC industry, we’re not really a VC ourselves. And what we tell our portfolio companies is, it’s not that there is no money. There absolutely is some money, but it’s harder to get because the VC is going back to some fundamentals — you should probably do due diligence before you give a check of a few million dollars to a company. You are going to have to show a clear path to profitability — doesn’t mean that you have to be profitable, but it has to be clear and credible, not like you know, the hockey stick that makes you profitable in year 10 if all the planets align and you have no competition. And so that, by definition makes it a lot harder to create compelling cases. And then in a lot of cases, the VC will now ask, even at an early stage, to see some traction. We have companies that have raised recently very good rounds at seed and Series A levels, but they had a good track record a clear path to profitability, and a great product market fit. I think, if I had to summarize: Gone are the times where you could go and raise $5, $10, $15 million based on a napkin and a barely put together MVP [minimum viable product]. That’s not happening anymore unless you're in AI. And that's a different thing.

Some of the founders think the gloom and doom has been oversold. VCs want to get better terms, and it’s in VC’s interest to emphasize how bad things are. What do you say to that?

The valuation that we saw in 2021 and 2022 didn't make a lot of sense. We’re seeing a recalibration of the markets. We also say that to our portfolio companies: If you are being offered a down round, you probably should accept it because most likely, and obviously it's always on a case-by-case basis, but most likely, your last valuation was probably a little inflated, and the new valuation that you're getting is probably closer to reality. And so yes, it looks like you're down round. But maybe the way you should look at it is your previous round was an out of the ordinary round and this is the normal round. So it's not a down-round technically; it’s just a normal round.



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11 Jul 2023Musk & Zuck Go Head to Head, Vying to Rule Global Online Discussion (with Katie Notopoulos & Tom Dotan)00:57:55

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 many Dead Cat episodes talking about Facebook, so I thought this would be a fun episode to have him back on the show — even if the Journal has muzzled how wild he can be in his pronouncements.

We concluded the show talking about a much more Newcomer-y topic. Dotan wrote last week about how AI had stemmed tech’s downturn.

He reported:

The Nasdaq has risen 32% this year—the Dow Jones Industrial Average is up 3.4%—while Microsoft shares have climbed 41% and Nvidia shares have almost tripled on the back of optimism that AI will bolster their businesses.

Companies that had been touting their cost-cutting and apologizing for hiring too many people in recent years have been adding to the excitement by broadcasting their AI ambitions. Of the S&P 500 companies with earnings conference calls from the middle of March to late May, 110 mentioned AI, according to FactSet. That is a record high and around three times the 10-year average.  

Give it a listen

Highlighted Excerpts

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Eric: Will threads be bigger than Twitter? Will it be the Uber to Twitter’s Lyft?

Katie: I predict yes.

Tom: Twitter in its current state? Not at its peak? Yeah, such a low bar.

Katie: Twitter still has advantages over Threads, like anonymity and retaining large followings. [Instagram Head] Adam Mosseri recently mentioned that Threads won’t be a place for news.

Eric: Threads aims to be a “nice” platform, countering the mean-spiritedness associated with Elon Musk and promoting a friendlier environment. Do you think the personality and positioning of Facebook will play a significant role, or is it all about the product and Instagram’s connection?

Katie: It’s a combination. Threads’ success will come from being a product under Instagram, which many people don’t realize is owned by Facebook. On the other hand, people are leaving Twitter because of Elon Musk's presence.

Tom: Facebook has a history of copying features in response to perceived threats, such as stories. However, Twitter isn’t a threat. This opportunistic move by Facebook. To launch Threads won’t magically fix the limitations of text-based platforms. We’re in an era of niche social media experiences, and reaching a billion users with this format is unlikely. It’s unfair to hold that expectation. Nonetheless, with 70 million users already, it can be considered a success.

Katie: The Instagram account provided a dictionary where a conversation is referred to as a thread. For example, I was reading some intriguing threads that Eric was discussing. However, an individual post is still called a post, and instead of a retweet, it’s called a repost.

Eric: What are your thoughts on what was happening there? I found it very strange that they were dictating the language they want people to use. I couldn't determine if they're worried people will start using terms like “tweet” and if they wanted to discourage that.

Katie: I interpreted it similarly. People were genuinely asking, you know, what should we call them? Since they're not tweets, do we call them retweets? What should we call them? I think the worst-case scenario would be if people started jokingly referring to them as “threats,” which is probably not what they intended.

Eric: People are really enjoying wordplay, and personally, I'm not a fan of that. There are posts about your followers or your thread count. It's like a new summer camp where everyone is trying to come up with the language that will dominate the platform.

Katie: Absolutely. And it’s important to remember that there are a lot more people signing up than they expected, maybe around 70 million or something. But most of these users aren’t on Twitter and don't know anything about it. They’re not comparing it to Twitter. It’s mostly regular users, like 16-year-olds in Brazil, who are thinking, “Oh, a new platform? Where does this fit in with Instagram? Just tell me what to do.” The user base is incredibly diverse, which is why it's very straightforward in terms of understanding.

Tom: Explain to me, though, why people who have never liked Twitter would suddenly join a Twitter copycat and find it useful. Twitter has been around for a while, and its mechanics and design haven't broadly appealed to more than 200-300 million users. So why now are they expecting people in Brazil, who have ignored Twitter for the first decade of its existence, to suddenly find “thread” compelling just because they can use their Instagram handle and easily sign up?

Katie: Personally, as someone eager to test out new apps, I preordered it on iTunes so that it would be ready for download at exactly 7 pm. I was excited about it because I follow technology news and knew there was a new app coming out. But for most people, I don’t think they heard about the app and actively went to the App Store to look for it. I assume that when most people opened Instagram, they received a prompt to click and experience the new threads. They were signed up right from inside the Instagram app. So, anyone who opened Instagram yesterday was directed to join the app. They might have thought, “I’m not sure what this is, but I like Instagram, so I’ll give it a try.”

Eric: It seems like there are a couple of factors at play. There’s definitely a disdain for Elon Musk, particularly among reporters and the left, including myself. I feel like that revolt and the desire of that crowd to find a new home helped motivate this, which is amusing because those same individuals have been critical of Zuck over the past five years.

Katie: I think it’s a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” to a large extent. That seems to be the prevailing sentiment.

Eric: Indeed. It’s obviously Instagram's power to bring Instagram users to the new app. Additionally, there are people who believe in getting on a platform early and building followers. So it’s like these three groups trying to coexist—the social media managers who want to grow their accounts in case it becomes the next big thing, the Twitter rebels, and the Instagram influencers who are being told that this is part of the app.

Katie: I have another theory as well. When you sign up for the app, the feed is currently purely algorithmic, and it includes a lot of content from people you don't follow. There’s probably a lot of enthusiasm from these big celebrities who haven’t found success on TikTok and are holding onto Instagram as an essential platform for their careers. Fans and regular users are excited because they suddenly see celebrities who hadn't posted on Twitter for years.

Eric: What are people’s opinions on the algorithmic feed? I think the average person wants an algorithmic feed.

Katie: I believe so too. Instagram has continued to have an algorithmic feed for years because multiple tests have shown that it's what people actually want.

Katie: Another important factor to consider is the timing of the app’s launch. Summer is the ideal season for such apps because teenagers are out of school and have more time to use their phones. The current success can be attributed to the high number of young users who are typically in school during other times of the year. While the app’s popularity may decline in the fall, I don't think it will fade away like Clubhouse did.

Tom: Additionally, Facebook can easily maintain the app without much effort. Even if it reaches its peak user base, let’s say around 100 million, and then gradually declines to 50 or 60 million, it will still be manageable for Facebook to sustain it. The operating costs are likely low, mainly cloud computing expenses, and it might even serve as an ad platform. For Facebook, it could be a side project that requires minimal effort. If it also happens to cause some inconvenience for Elon Musk and the ongoing competition in Silicon Valley, then that's an added bonus.



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18 Jul 2023Talking Threads With the Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen00:57:03

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 social network that presented a different product to every user in the world. We— and by we, I mean parents, children, voters, legislators, businesses, consumers, terrorists, sex- traffickers, everyone— were limited by our own individual experiences in trying to assess What is Facebook, exactly? We had no way to tell how representative, how widespread or not, the user experience and harms each of us encountered was. As a result, it didn’t matter if activists came forward and reported Facebook was enabling child exploitation, terrorist recruiting, a neo-Nazi movement, and ethnic violence designed and executed to be broadcast on social media, or unleashing algorithms that created eating disorders or motivated suicides. Facebook would just deflect with versions of the same talking point: “What you are seeing is anecdotal, an anomaly. The problem you found is not representative of what Facebook is.”

To jog your memory for the episode, in September 2021, the Wall Street Journal published the first in a series of articles, called the Facebook Files, about the company’s cross check program, which gave special treatment to high-profile users when it came to the company’s moderation decisions.

The Journal followed that report with a story about how Facebook’s internal research showed that 32% of teen girls said “that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse.”

The third story in the series showed that Facebook’s decision to preference “meaningful social interactions” seemed to have the opposite effect, giving more reach to posts that instigated conflict and anger.

Perhaps most damning in my mind, was the Journal’s fourth story in the series which showed that Facebook had failed to implement internationally many of the table stakes moderation practices it applies in the U.S.

The Journal won a Polk Award for its reporting.

I have at times been skeptical of how damning these stories were.

It’s not that crazy to me that Facebook would want to provide extra attention toward moderation decisions for public figures.

Is Instagram harming teen girls more than Vogue or Cosmo?

So it was fun to finally hash out some of these issues with Haugen on the podcast.

Ultimately, I think we were mostly aligned that we both support much better disclosure requirements for Facebook. Regulators are fighting with both arms tied behind their backs.

I was disappointed, however, that Haugen seemed to bend over backward to come off as apolitical in her critique of Facebook. She didn’t really engage in the obvious political asymmetry: Republicans are clearly much more likely to post the type of content that Democrats would call misinformation.

I think that’s a fair statement whatever you think of “misinformation.”

Anyway, that should give you enough context to dig into our conversation. Enjoy!

Give it a listen

Highlighted Excerpts

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Eric: How would you see a disclosure regime working that still allows companies like Facebook to be flexible and to change?

Frances: I think a lot of people don’t sit and think about what’s the menu of options when it comes to intervening in a problem as complicated as this. I’m really glad that you brought up the idea that these companies’ grow and change, where the next one to come along might not fit the exact same mold of this one. One of the ways the European Union handles that flexibility — and to be really clear, this kind of way of doing regulation of saying disclosure and transparency is instead of something like what’s happening what’s happening in Utah, where Utah is coming in and saying, “This is how you will run your company.” If people are under 18, they have to have parent supervision, no privacy for kids, their parents can see everything — or like Montana coming out and just flat out banning TikTok. Those are kind of “building fences” type roles, where we’re like, “Oh, this is the fence you can’t cross.” And the thing about technology is it moves and changes, and they’re very good at running around fences.

So the alternative is something like what the European Union passed last year, which is called the Digital Services Act. And the Digital Services Act says, “Hey, if the core problem is a power imbalance, right, the fact that you can know what’s going on and I can’t, let’s address that core problem because a lot of other things will flow downstream from it.” So they say, “Hey, if you know there’s a risk with your product, you need to tell us about it. If you discover one, if you can imagine one and you tell us about it. You need to tell us your plan for mitigating it because it’s going to be different for every platform. We want it to unleash innovation. And you need to give us enough data that we can see that there was progress being made to meet that goal. And if we ask you a question, we deserve to get an answer,” which sounds really basic, but it’s not true today.

Eric: Some of these problems that you've identified are just human problems. If you talk about sort of the Instagram critique with it, potentially making sort of young teenage women — some segment of them unhappy. I mean, you could say, like, was that so different from Vogue? Is this really an algorithmic problem?

Haugen: There have always been teen girls that were unhappy about their bodies or how nice their clothes were. But there are a limited number of pages of Vogue every month. The second time you read Vogue, you’re going to have a different impact on you than the third time you read Vogue. Or you’re going to get bored of it? And in the case of something like Instagram, Instagram progressively pushes you towards more and more extreme content.

With a 13-year-old girl, she might start out by looking for something like healthy recipes. And just by clicking on the content get pushed over time towards more and more extreme materials.

Eric: Why did you decide to come out and reveal your identity?

Frances: I had been contemplating for quite a while would I have to come forward at some point. I had a chance to talk to my parents about it a large number of times just because what I was seeing on a day-to-day basis while I lived with them during COVID was so different from Facebook’s public narrative was on these issues. But the moment where I was like “okay, I have no other options” was right after the 2020 election — so this was in December, less than 30 days after the election — they pulled us all together on Zoom and said, You know how for the last four years, the only part of Facebook that was growing was the Civic Integrity team. So it was the team, for Facebook.com aimed to ensure Facebook was a positive social force in the world, that it wasn’t going to disrupt elections, it wasn’t going to cause any more genocides because by that point there had been two. They said, Hey, you are so important; we’re going to dissolve your team and integrate it into the rest of Facebook.

And when they did that, that was kind of the moment where I realized Facebook had given up. That the only way that Facebook was going to save itself was if the public got involved. That the public had to come and save Facebook.



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25 Jul 2023Psychedelics, Micro Nuclear Reactors & Venture Turbulence (with Rebecca Kaden)00:43:21

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: Well, this isn’t really unique to psychedelics or to mental health. Pharmaceutical companies make drugs, so the development of drugs goes with them, but the distribution and networks of access is outside of it. That’s not particularly new or unique here. That’s where business opportunity has been. So the idea is, when you talk about distribution and networks of access, that’s often where these business opportunities lie. The development of drugs is kind of a different beast, which lies in the pharmaceuticals. Why is there a business opportunity with creating access? Because the same reason technology drives business opportunity into anything. Offline access is slower, it’s more gated; it’s more piecemeal. You have to be at the right doctor at the right time, you have to find it. By creating a network, you just allow anyone anywhere to find access and education at a faster speed and with much broader supply, which brings efficiency to the market.

Eric: Do you think mushrooms are going to be on the table soon? Or how much was this a bet that the regulatory regime would change?

Rebecca: I don’t think mushrooms as we think about them in a recreational sense are just gonna get legalized, maybe they will, but that’s a separate kind of thing. I think other forms of psychedelics in formats that are right for care are very much going to get legalized. And actually, as we did our research, to us that’s a when not an if. When you dig into what’s going on clinical trials and in the clinical world, in some ways that seems pretty easy to bet on that these will continue to happen. And if not exactly the form that we’ve outlined, rapid new forms of options for care for mental health diseases are going to get approved and released. They’re going to need a network of education and distribution to go into the therapist network.

I do think there’s a regulatory risk here. There’s some amount of regulatory risk on psychedelics. We have to be honest about it. But I actually think more about regulatory risk across broader online healthcare in general. We’re at somewhat of a time of that whole market still getting worked out on not unique to mental health and not unique to psychedelics, but what you can prescribe online and to whom and to how and how to allow that really important access that we’ve come to rely on, but also do it in an appropriately controlled way.

Eric: You come from a consumer focused firm. When you were interviewing with USV, was it clear that you were shifting away from consumer, and how have you thought about consumer professionally?

Rebecca: We don’t think a lot about the divide in our portfolio if we think about our fund construction, or how we're looking at the world between consumer and B2B. What we think about is this thesis and the mechanics involved, for instance the role of building network driven businesses and the opportunity to leverage bottom up networks to create moats and scale and to broaden access by driving value and down costs systematically across categories we care about. Sometimes the right application when you pull the threads of that thesis is a consumer product or service, and sometimes it’s the enabling infrastructure of them. But most of USV’s investments had been one of those two things. They’ve either been the end application or the enabling infrastructure involved, but a common theme throughout our investments is how do you build important networks that can change industries, but rise outside of them. If you think about Journey Clinical, it’s a network of therapists. They’re stronger, and the more you add on to them, it’s a bottom up growing network of acquiring the therapist, even though it interacts with the healthcare system and can change it. But it’s growing this network outside of the infrastructure to then impact the existing structure. We really like that if you think across of our investments, and sometimes that turns out to be consumer, if you think about an Outschool in education, or a Duolingo, or a Twitter, and sometimes it turns out to be the enabling infrastructure or the B2B Marketplace application like Journey Clinical.

Eric: What are your thoughts on AI in consumer?

Rebecca: The piece of the AI craziness that I’m most excited about is the application layer. There’s still a lot of kind of complexity and uncertainty on the foundational model and on the enabling infrastructure on where equity value aggregates — how much of the stack the models own, how defensible those models are, how that shakes out — but what I feel like we can have more conviction about is that it unleashes a wave of consumer innovation that’s going to be really fun. The way this is gonna get utilized is by products that we want to use. I’m excited about unleashing this rejuvenated value around fun things to do, where the coolest thing about AI driven applications is they get better if people actually use them. So the strongest incentive of the team is to increase engagement and utility. The only way to do that is to combine utility with fun. There’s gonna be so many things in the market that if things aren’t fun to use, you’ll go to another option. But the team has a huge incentive to get you to stick because that’s how their product gets better. So if you think about something like Duolingo, which has been on this for a long time of leveraging machine learning and AI to create better consumer experiences — streaks, gamification, fun — infused with the utility of language learning is critical, because their product gets better if I use it. I’m really excited to see that apply to lots of different consumer applications. We’ve been talking a lot and everyone’s been talking a lot about whether they’re going to be moats. Is stickiness going to be possible? The barriers are so low. The moat is going to be fun and teams that can create rapid new fun things that keep you on the platform. We haven’t seen that in a while. I’m excited about it.



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01 Aug 2023Staying Global (with Bejul Somaia)00:53:38

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.



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08 Aug 2023Scaling People (with Claire Hughes Johnson)00:59:26

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, diagnose what gives and takes your energy. The easiest way to do this is to map out your good and bad days and track what activities add to and detract from your energy. An easy tactic is to keep check marks on your calendar of good days and bad days. After a month, look at all the good days and all the bad days, and then the good weeks and bad weeks, and see what trends jump out. When I did this exercise, I found that the weeks when I had more than one work event that kept me from having dinner with my kids and getting them to bed were bad weeks. I then resolved to restrict my work-related late nights to once a week—a personal guideline that I occasionally break, but not often. Your goal is to study what combination of time spent on which activities creates your best performance, then determine where you need to set boundaries to preserve your strongest self.

Coming up as a reporter, I was always resistant to “management” and “leadership” advice. Those words made me think of Dale Carnegie books and cash-grab leadership seminars. But as I’ve started to build Newcomer into more of a company (we’ve got a full-time chief of staff, three summer interns, and am looking to hire a full-time reporter), I’ve come around to the idea that being intentional about how you spend your time and how you work with people are essential skills, worthy of serious reflection.

These days, Hughes Johnson is a corporate officer and advisor at Stripe. She’s spending a lot of her time working with individual managers and offering coaching inside the company. So we got a taste of how Stripe’s management guru thinks.

I really enjoyed our conversation. Give it a listen.

Highlighted Excerpts

The transcript has been edited for clarity.

On Good Management.

Claire Hughes Johnson: One of the topics that came to mind during my interview with John and Patrick was the importance of good management and smart operating structures. I emphasized that we shouldn’t be reinventing the wheel. I believe in fundamentally sound management practices, rather than creating an entirely new way of thinking about performance feedback.

I paused and told them, “You guys have to be with me on this. We might start with a very basic version of performance feedback, but it’s better to do that than to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” What’s wrong with doing everything from first principles? At some point, it becomes exhausting, and you might not be the best at constructing the system.

I also discussed the permanence of management structures and hierarchies that have been in place for hundreds of years. There have been attempts to innovate, such as holacracy, and workers’ expectations have changed. I’m not suggesting we do things the same way we did 100 years ago, but we must pay attention to history.

Patrick became particularly interested in this topic and started reading studies on management practices. He found academic research and data that showed countries with good management education and practices tend to have better economic outcomes. He agreed, saying, “Yeah, I think you’re right. Let’s put some fundamentals in place.”

Unfortunately, some young companies want to reinvent more than they should. They may have invented a great product and feel compelled to create new ways to manage people. But I believe this can be a mistake, and it’s better to rely on proven methods and structures.

Young companies, especially, should practice giving feedback.

Claire Hughes Johnson: The book has a lot of stuff on operating structures. It’s really important to have goals and metrics that everyone recognizes as the company's most important goals, and to review them publicly with everyone. The mission should be clearly articulated, along with the direction for the next three to five years. Clear feedback structures are vital. Ideally, feedback should be continuous, but in young companies, many managers are new to this process, so they’re not giving as much feedback. Therefore, you actually have to build more structures for it, which may seem counterintuitive. Some companies might say, “Oh, we’re just running after this prize, and we can’t be distracted by that.” But I respond, “Well, actually, it’s the most important thing, because you aren’t used to doing it.”

How do you think about feedback? How direct or brutal should the feedback be?

Claire Hughes Johnson: When I first started working at Google, I was shocked at how direct the engineers were, saying things like, “That’s a terrible idea.” It was not the world I had been in working in consulting or government. At first, I got defensive, but I’ve come to love it.

However, when I talk about feedback, there’s a level of directness that I don’t think is productive. If it’s so direct that it feels like an attack, people stop listening and think about survival. It becomes a matter of adapting or dying.

I have an operating principle that I talk about in the book: “Say the thing you think you cannot say.” I try to push myself and others to be open and willing to put things on the table without creating an attack response. For example, I might say to a leadership team member at Stripe, “From my seat, 10,000-20,000 feet away, I have a couple of things I’m worried about.” Then we can have an interesting conversation, looking at the problem together.

As a leader, it’s also about reading the room, even virtually. What’s the body language? Are people making eye contact? Are there weird comments in the doc? My job is to get everyone else’s opinion on the table first. Sometimes I'll say, “It feels like there's something we’re not saying. It feels tense in here.” Then I might call on someone to break through to the real thing.

There are different dynamics at play, such as power dynamics and layering issues. Sometimes you can tell the team isn’t behind their leader. Other times, there’s friction within the team or with another team. And sometimes, it's a matter of seeing the forest for the trees, stepping back to look at the bigger picture. Is this actually a good product? Why are we not seeing more user adoption? Why have we only grown 10% when the rest of the products are growing 40%? As a leader, your job is to have that bigger picture in mind and to ask, “Is this the right strategy?” Sometimes, you have to zoom out and say, “We’re having the wrong conversation, folks.”



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15 Aug 2023Spaceman Explains to Earthman How Things Work (with Delian Asparouhov)00:56:25

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 superconductors and what we do in the pharma world, you’re taking things that start as very fine grain powders or liquids and making solid state crystalline versions of them. In the pharma world that ends up looking like a little bit of table salt that you take, and it turns out that thing actually has drug cancer molecules and mRNA molecules. In the world of superconductors, it turns into these things that look like, I mean you’ve seen them on Twitter, they look like these kind of weird half ceramic, half metal objects. So solid state is just the form of the matter. Solid state in particular typically means a larger crystalline lattice structure, not just individual small molecules.

Eric: The whole story of milestones you’re talking about, what would be viable, reminds me of the SpaceX experience. Where a few months ago one of their rockets blew up. It’s so hard as a layperson, even when cheering these things on, to know as an external observer what signs show the company’s on track. What was your reaction to media like The New York Times framing the SpaceX explosion super negatively?

Delian: I think the layman’s view, particularly The New York Times, was clueless and off base. In aerospace, it’s easier to publicly verify traction, unlike software where companies just claim things. You can see did the rocket launch? Did the spacecraft enter orbit? Those are physical facts. SpaceX is developing an extremely ambitious new rocket alongside their workhorse Falcon 9 that has flown over 200 times without exploding. This new rocket is riskier but more capable. It’s interesting because even though Falcon 9 lands part of itself, it still loses the top section on every flight. So travel is expensive if you had to rebuild the cockpit after every plane flight. This new rocket Elon’s making aims to be fully reusable to lower costs.

Because it’s so ambitious, SpaceX’s approach is to test and fly rapidly rather than get stuck analyzing indefinitely. Their early Falcon rockets blew up but they learned. Nobody expected this new rocket to even get off the pad, but it went way further than expected before failing around stage separation. Calling it a failure seems crazy to me given this is the most ambitious project ever. It did way better than anyone thought, proving out concepts. Failures are part of pushing forward ambitiously. The NYT calling it a Space Shuttle-type failure shows cluelessness - this explicitly developmental rocket had no people aboard. To get to safe, you have to start unsafe and prove it out over time.

Eric: How much does Varda depend on SpaceX’s continued success in bringing down the cost curve? Could Varda work with today’s cost of satellite deployment? Or are you counting on further reductions in deployment costs?

Delian: At today’s launch costs, where we’re spending $1.5 to $2 million per flight, that is low enough for us to build a strong business around what we’re doing now. So I’d say none of our models or thinking depends on future cost drops. Obviously I’d be thrilled if something like Starship came online, though I think that’ll take time. I’d be excited for more players to start landing rockets - no one has really done that yet, even though it’s been eight and a half years since SpaceX’s first landing. So I’m not counting on it happening soon. We’ve architected our business so it doesn’t depend on further cost reductions.

.



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22 Aug 2023Hydrogen Space Balloon (with Jane Poynter & Ali Rohde)01:06:26

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 the industry to have that accountability and transparency. That was the main takeaway: We welcome reasonable regulations and oversight.

Space tourism more akin to safaris than Virgin Galactic

Jane: It’s interesting that you talk about Blue Origin and Virgin not being competition because the experience is so differentiated from what we offer. Our experience is more akin to incredible safaris, trips to Antarctica, and other wonder travel that deeply transforms people. That’s why we priced our tickets at $125,000. It’s in line with those kinds of life-changing experiences. When Antarctica tourism opened up, there was a huge demand from people willing to pay high prices for a once-in-a-lifetime trip. We’re seeing incredible excitement and demand from customers wanting to go to space with us. We have an event coming up soon with over 100 of our explorers gathering here, and they all want to connect with each other too. We’re building a real community around spaceflight and this experience. It’s going to be such an extraordinary, bonding experience for people. I truly believe it will bring people together in a deep way.

You mentioned Blue Origin, Virgin, and SpaceX — obviously some of the first names people think of when space is mentioned like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They are controversial figures, likely quite different from our target customer base. But I'm curious. What do you think about them? Are you grateful for how they've helped popularize and mainstream space travel?

Jane: Taber and I worked with Elon before he started SpaceX, so we have an interesting perspective. In the early days of SpaceX, space tourism was considered a joke and the idea that commercial companies could enable space travel or moon/Mars missions was insane. It was assumed that only governments could do that. Elon deserves a lot of credit; Gwynne Shotwell too. She's done an incredible job revolutionizing the space industry by lowering costs, improving efficiency and effectiveness, and showing us what's possible. SpaceX paved the way for the over 100 small rocket companies operating now, which never would have happened without that trailblazing. So while there are likely narrative or cultural elements we wouldn't fully align with, overall we are absolutely grateful for the pivotal role SpaceX played in advancing commercial space and making it seem achievable.

What excites you about exploring space?

Jane: When I think about space exploration, I don’t view it as leaving Earth never to return. I actually quite like this planet! To me, space exploration is more of an extension of the perspective-broadening we do now. When people look down on Planet Earth from space, it’s a mind-blowing experience. Now imagine yourself standing on the moon or Mars and seeing Earth. It’s that exponentially more impactful. It will give people a wildly different perspective on what it means for all of us to live together. We should think of ourselves as one human family living on Spaceship Earth. As we venture farther out, it will become increasingly clear that we’re holding up a mirror to humanity, seeing ourselves somewhere other than Earth for the first time. It’s a wild concept. So that’s how I view space, not as leaving the planet but expanding our perspective to appreciate that we’re all in this together.

How do you prevent accidents in the air?

Jane: A common question we get is what happens if something goes wrong with the balloon? The balloon technology is incredibly well understood with a long legacy. Hundreds have been flown in the last 20 years without a single in-flight incident. However, we obviously need backup systems. We have a series of parachutes, similar to those used on SpaceX’s Dragon capsules or other space vehicles. They are robust, proven parachutes. We have four total, with only two needed for a safe landing. The parachutes are only used in an emergency scenario because normally the ship ascends under the balloon and descends back onto the balloon, keeping the flight system consistent. This is a very safe approach, never transitioning between flight systems. We’ve focused on simplicity everywhere possible because simpler systems tend to be safer overall.



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29 Aug 2023He Helps Rich Tech Founders Part With Their Money (with Rey Flemings)00:59:27

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 people who are operating a business and/or they’re doing something presently to amass that wealth. I’ve worked with probably 100-125 folks in that category. I hear the same things over and over, so often that we have even coined a name for it — we call it the Success Condition.

It goes something like this: 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.”

What ends up happening is we chase the American Dream only to realize it and then we’re like “Wait, why am I not happy? What’s missing here?”

Rich people get sad, depressed and commit suicide just like anyone else. Studies show that beyond about $100,000 a year, any more money doesn’t actually contribute to human happiness. The wealthier and more successful you become, the harder it is to form close interpersonal relationships with people that aren’t in your network.

Break down what was the motivation to do Y Combinator and build more of a tech platform for Myria?

Rey: Fantastic question, Eric. I’d love to sound like I had this all planned out and was so smart with so much foresight. I knew I wanted to build a scalable business with my background. But when I started The Blue, I ran it for 5-6 years before we could start Myria. It was complicated. How do you scale services? Many say you can’t scale services. If so, what do you scale and how? How do you keep customers happy who want white glove service and personalization? How do you provide that special touch at scale? These are really hard problems to solve.

I grew that business bootstrapped to about $60 million GMV annually. If you do that, you stay busy. I didn’t know my kids, family, or myself. I was always on a plane, just work, work, work. That’s not sustainable.

At least you get to go to parties sometimes?

Rey: Yeah, almost always in that business. I just celebrated my 50th birthday. I don’t have to tell you I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life on a plane in a suit. That’s no way to live.

It turns out that when we started Myria, we asked clients what they wanted. Ninety-two percent of requests fell into just three categories.

People wanted our global travel product — not just booking a flight or kayak to Toledo. Really crazy, experiential travel beyond a private jet. When you get off the private jet, what happens? The best things in the world you can’t find on Google. If you can’t search for them, how do you know what’s on the menu? There’s a whole universe of off-market awesomeness in every category, but no one tells you about them because they aren’t online.

Travel experiences, people, and assets. When you’re running a big company, you have an amazing team. When you hit $300 million net worth, you probably move to a single family office with teams managing your wealth. But for your personal life, even with household employees, you want to relax at home. A person worth $3 billion wouldn’t run their company with one person, but their personal life becomes a multi-billion dollar enterprise with homes, kids, divorce, assets everywhere. Assistants work hard but can’t be experts in everything billionaires need help in.

We asked clients what they wanted and 92% of requests were in three categories. Also, there are about 20 markets ultra wealthy care about. If we have great coverage in those categories in those markets, we’ve covered nearly all use cases.

I’ve always wondered — if I’m at Bezos’ level of wealth, do I try to get everybody who interacts with me to sign an NDA? Especially if I’m out partying on a yacht, is everybody at that party signing something to keep things confidential?

Rey: On the Myria platform, everyone who sells to our members is automatically under binding arbitration. The wealthy are targets for frivolous litigation. We try to prevent that.

In real life, if you’re hosting a party, many will request or demand NDAs and lock up phones, like Dave Chappelle style with magnetically locked bags. I think that’s good considering phone addiction. You’ve thrown a million dollar party for people’s enjoyment but they just look at their phones. But there are gaps. I can share a horror story.

We did an expensive, innocent party at an incredible estate with famous people relaxing and having fun — nothing unprintable. But no one wanted cameras in their face while relaxing Someone who signed the NDA went to the press implying we discriminated by only having women sign NDAs, not the men. The men were dear friends of the client, so they didn't have to sign. Sometimes NDAs can backfire.

Do you require NDAs for everything?

Rey: We try to on the platform but nothing substitutes for having a good group of trustworthy people, which is harder as you become more successful. It’s become a sport to vilify the rich, making it harder to form close relationships outside your network.



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13 Sep 2023Fighting for Pro-Crypto Legislation in Sam Bankman-Fried's Shadow (with Chris Lehane)01:05:38

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 believed that America needed to embrace a “common sector” that served as a hybrid between government regulation and corporate self-regulation. Think Airbnb data sharing with cities or Facebook’s oversight board. We also commiserated over co-existing with Silicon Valley Republicans in the MAGA era.



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27 Sep 2023Life Extension Innovations, Moonshots & Snake Oil (with Celine Halioua & James Peyer)01:00:05

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 subject of serious research.”

Many in mainstream science and medicine look at all this slightly askance. That is understandable. It is an area which attracts chancers and charlatans as well as those with more decent motives, and its history is littered with “breakthroughs” that have led more or less nowhere. America’s Food and Drug Administration does not recognise “old age” as a disease state, and thus as a suitable target for therapy. Nevertheless, evidence has been accumulating that such research might have something to offer.

Some established drugs really do seem to extend life, at least in mice. That offers both the possibility that they might do so in people and some insight into the processes involved. The ever-greater ease with which genes can be edited helps such investigations, as does access to large amounts of gene-sequence data. The ability to produce personalised stem cells, which stay forever young, has opened up new therapeutic options. And new diagnostic tools are now offering scientists means to calculate the “biological ages” of bodies and organs and compare them with actual calendar ages. In principle this allows longevity studies to achieve convincing results in less than a lifetime.

I dug in with Halioua and Peyer about where they saw the most opportunities, how their own companies were progressing, and why they thought Johnson’s publicity campaign was doing a disservice to companies working on longevity.

The duo helped break down the space, discussing which types of companies they think are innovators, which efforts are more speculative moonshots, and which ones are simply snake oil.

Give it a listen.



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10 Oct 2023The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality01:01:40

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 the conference in person, but there will be a virtual conference in this newsletter. We will publish recordings from the summit on our YouTube channel and send out some of our favorites over the podcast feed. So this is your lively refresher on all the crazy stuff that happened in Silicon Valley artificial intelligence startups this year.

Give it a listen.

Apply to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit here. Applications close Oct. 16.

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 two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.



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17 Oct 2023AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)01:15:08

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 a fretful temperament, was unconvinced of the wisdom of the endeavor. Quoth he: “This will surely be our undoing. Should we not give some thought to the art of owl-domestication and owl-taming first, before we bring such a creature into our midst?”

Replied Pastus: “Taming an owl sounds like an exceedingly difficult thing to do. It will be difficult enough to find an owl egg. So let us start there. After we have succeeded in raising an owl, then we can think about taking on this other challenge.”

“There is a flaw in that plan!” squeaked Scronkfinkle; but his protests were in vain as the flock had already lifted off to start implementing the directives set out by Pastus.

Just two or three sparrows remained behind. Together they began to try to work out how owls might be tamed or domesticated. They soon realized that Pastus had been right: this was an exceedingly difficult challenge, especially in the absence of an actual owl to practice on. Nevertheless they pressed on as best they could, constantly fearing that the flock might return with an owl egg before a solution to the control problem had been found.

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 two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.



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24 Oct 2023Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata)01:34:45

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 two weeks so that I come back hungrier than ever.



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01 Nov 2023The AI Personal Stack (with Joshua Browder)01:23:55

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



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10 Nov 2023Chip War (with Chris Miller)01:32:14

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



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14 Nov 2023The Artificial Intelligence Startup Draft01:04:26

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



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21 Nov 2023Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi & MosaicML Founder Naveen Rao Speak at Cerebral Valley00:22:04

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



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30 Nov 2023Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman & Vinod Khosla)00:44:28

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 there can’t be negative side effects,” he said, noting that all his AI projects have safety teams. “Tech can be amazing. Let’s be intentional about building.”

Khosla Wins Cheers from the Cerebral Valley Audience

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla confirmed that his firm, boosted by an early stake in OpenAI, was about to close on $3 billion in commitments for a new fund. Valuations are high, he said, “but just because valuations are high doesn’t mean it isn’t a good time to invest.”

He’s not buying existential risk, calling it “nonsensical” talk from academics who had nothing better to do. But he’s long on China risk, saying the U.S. is in a “techno-economic war” with China and needs to fight hard. “I would ban TikTok in a nano-second,” he said, unlike his predecessor on stage, Hoffman, who Khosla said he very much admired. Khosla is firmly against open-source AI models as well due to the China risk.

Bio-risk and cyber risk are real concerns too, he noted.

But if China or rogue viruses don’t kill us, Khosla thinks the near-future is very bright: “I do think in 10 years we’ll have free doctors, free tutors, free lawyers” all powered by AI. 

Khosla also gave a grudging endorsement of the Biden Executive Order, saying it was “okay.” 

But like most Silicon Valley moguls, he has no time for antitrust issues. “We have to get people like Khan out of there,” he said, referring to the chair of the FTC (though misstating her name), calling her “crazy, left-wing.”   

Khosla said he’s long believed that AI would force us to “redefine what it is to me human.”

Meantime he himself plans another 25 years of VC investing, and if all goes well, maybe more. 

Give it a listen



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21 Mar 2024Lessons Learned From a Bank Run (Peter Hébert & Laurence Tosi) + SVB's Marc Cadieux00:52:15

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:



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26 Mar 2024Why Software Is Eating The Banks | Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Then Lead Bank CEO Jackie Reses00:48:07

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.



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24 Sep 2024AI + Robots, YC Preview & Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech00:23:40

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



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01 Oct 2024Listen: OpenAI's 'Great Man,' AI Regulation & Drugs00:24:43

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



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08 Oct 2024The Ongoing Startup Downturn & More PR People Than Reporters to Answer Their Emails00:17:50

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



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15 Oct 2024Listen: Bullish on AI, Bullish on Self-Driving, But Apprehensive About OpenAI & Tesla (with Jon McNeill)00:24:28

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



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22 Oct 2024Newcomer Turns Four00:23:26

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



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29 Oct 2024Silicon Valley Can't Look Away from the Election00:21:30

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.



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09 Nov 2024Trump & AI Policy + Overrated/Underrated on the Cerebral Valley Podcast00:55:16

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.



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13 Nov 2024The AI Startup Fantasy Draft00:48:44

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.



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19 Nov 2024Fear-Mongering & Forecasting: Assessing AI's Predictions About AI00:49:07

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



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27 Nov 2024Listen to Anthropic's Dario Amodei from Cerebral Valley + Videos from on Stage00:27:46

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



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05 Dec 2024Has AI Hit a Wall? A Debate from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit00:42:56

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



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11 Dec 2024Shake-ups at Silicon Valley's Biggest VC Firms00:20:44

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



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16 Dec 2024Is the Tech IPO Window Open?00:23:01

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



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10 Jan 2025Waymo’s Next Challenge: Humanity00:15:16

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



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16 Nov 2021Tech Workers of the World Unite. Or Don't.00:45:22

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 unions haven’t caught on like you might have expected from the cheerleading media coverage. We reflect on our conversation last week with Dispo CEO Daniel Liss and talk about reporter skepticism around cryptocurrencies. Finally, we touch on The Verge’s decision to resist background sourcing from corporate public relations.



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23 Nov 2021The Media's Facebook Deflection (w/Alex Stamos)00:48:17

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?



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09 Dec 2021Dipping into Miami00:51:56

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.



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14 Dec 2021Elizabeth Holmes' Moveable Feast (with Erin Griffith)01:02:34

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.



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21 Dec 2021Giving Hollywood the Business (w/Richard Rushfield)01:02:47

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.



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29 Dec 2021Defogging Our 2021 Amnesia01:02:14

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 Futurea publication that hasn’t yet taken Silicon Valley by storm but has put every venture firm on notice that they need to think about getting in the content business.

* We talked about Robinhood’s IPO in July and the rise of meme stocks.

* And we discussed how big tech executives don’t seem to want to worry about the present. Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July as he spends more time on Blue Origin; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company to Meta in October; and Jack Dorsey left behind moderation challenges at Twitter in late November and then renamed his financial services company Square to Block, hoping to emphasize the company’s crypto ambitions.

Finally, Tom, Katie, and Eric offer some predictions for what 2022 holds, though no one seems quite sure after this strange year.

Techmeme!

My favorite tech headline aggregator, tweet tracker, and conversation setter — Techmeme — has been generously featuring me on their home page as part of a round-up of interesting tech newsletters. So I wanted to return the favor.

I check Techmeme literally every couple of hours and rely on it to do my job. And in a genuine coincidence, Techmeme served as an easy-to-navigate archive for this week’s podcast.

It’s a free news aggregator for tech industry folks that’s updated constantly to show the most important tech stories of the moment and the commentary surrounding those stories. They also publish a daily newsletter with stories from the past day, which is useful if you forget to visit the site.



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05 Jan 2022Emperor Zuck (w/Deepa Seetharaman)01:10:06

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.



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11 Jan 2022No One Wants to Spend Any Amount of Time With a Plastic Thing Strapped to Their Face (w/Phil Libin)01:01:13

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.



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18 Jan 2022Across the Pond (w/Ophelia Brown)00:43:22

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.



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25 Jan 2022Bobby Kotick's Call of Duty (w/Kirsten Grind)00:47:48

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.



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01 Feb 2022The Dead Cat Experience00:57:20

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.



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08 Feb 2022Meta Commentary (w/Alex Heath)01:09:40

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.



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16 Feb 2022Razzlekhan and Wordcels00:56:57

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.



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22 Feb 2022Super Pumped (w/Mike Isaac)01:03:14

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.



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01 Mar 2022A Content Farming Retrospective (w/Shawn Colo)00:58:52

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.



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09 Mar 2022Keeping Tabs on the Oligarchs (w/Teddy Schleifer)00:54:57

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 that Milner hasn’t taken money from Russian limited partners since 2012.)

We also talked to Schleifer about his list of American oligarchs. He ranked Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt as the most important political donors of the moment on the left, and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison as number one and number two on the right.

Cheekily, Schleifer gave Chamath Palihapitiya the number four spot — on the right.

We also delved into philanthropy. Schleifer told us about one of his favorite donors — crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — and floated the possibility that donor MacKenzie Scott’s rapid-fire giveaway project ends in disaster.

Give it a listen.



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15 Mar 2022Brands Are Not Human Beings (w/Jack Conte)00:58:49

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 mind their brands.

“Can journalists develop independent followings?” Conte asked rhetorically.

“Of course they can.”

“Do journalists need to be a part of larger institutions and leverage those institution’s historical reach?”

“No, obviously, that is changing.”

“But the more interesting part of what you just said is the distinguishing characteristics between this concept of a brand and the concept of a creator,” Conte said.

“What I would argue is that those are very f*****g different things. Very different.”

“A brand is consistent. It has brand values. It builds trust. It has decks of like its style and its voice and what it sounds like. And if it were a person, what kind of jeans would it wear?”

“Like that’s what brands are.”

“Brands are not human beings,” he continued. “They’re not.”

“Creators are f*****g people. They’re inconsistent. They’re human. They're beautiful. They’re frail. They’re smart. They’re stupid. They’re strategic. They’re impulsive. They’re human beings.”

Conte said, “We’re all trying to behave like brands today. And brands are corporations. Like we don’t have to behave like brands.”

“When you watch a Prince music video — that f*****g guy is just himself, no matter what. And I don’t want him to behave like Walmart. I want him to be Prince. And my favorite creators, I want them to be themselves and I want them to feel human and I want them to not feel trapped by their brand values. I think it’s a mistake for everybody to think, ‘I need a personal brand. I need to create a brand.’”

“Just be yourself.”

Next week, look forward to VC Jeopardy with Deena Shakir, Julian Eison, Charles Hudson, and Steve Brotman.



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22 Mar 2022VC Jeopardy!00:53:39

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.



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29 Mar 2022Going Evergreen (w/Hunter Walk)00:59:08

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.



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05 Apr 2022The Fictionalized Viral Uber Driver01:08:43

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 living.

Eventually, Kamel gave me the greenlight — even though Bloomberg couldn’t pay him for the video.

It went viral almost immediately.

Kamel told me over the phone this morning that I was the only reporter who had replied to his message about the video.

I learned this morning that the dashcam video that he’d recorded wasn’t actually stored on his camera. So he’d had to go pay a company $60 for access to the video after a friend of his convinced him that it was worth the trouble.

Ultimately, Kalanick and Kamel sat down, and Kalanick paid him $200,000 as a make-good. The money helped Kamel pay off some of his debts.

Kamel is clear about one thing: He’s not driving for Uber anymore. “I will never drive again,” he says.

I offered to share my SHOWTIME password with him, but he didn’t seem interested.

Instead, I sent Kamel a cell phone video of the Super Pumped episode, so Kamel could at least watch a recording of another man acting out a recording of himself.

These days, Kamel says he’s spending his time buying and selling stocks on Robinhood. He doesn’t hold that company in particularly high regard.

Kamel has actually softened his tone on Kalanick.

“Travis is actually someone — if you confront him — he’s a very good guy to talk to,” Kamel says.

“Firing Travis was a big mistake because if they didn’t fire him, Uber could be way more today,” Kamel says. “That’s all I know.”



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12 Apr 2022Imploding Fast (w/Kate Clark)00:53:43

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.



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19 Apr 2022Rooting for Elon00:52:58

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.



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26 Apr 2022Streaming in Crisis (w/Lucas Shaw)00:59:19

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.



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