The Newcomer Podcast returns just in time to have Eric, Tom, and Madeline weigh in on Meta's audacious AI hiring spree. The tech giant has enticed researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic with huge paydays in the hopes it can bring its Llama models up to par with the competition. Next up, Ramp's report that companies have stopped purchasing AI tools made a lot of buzz this week, but it's still too early to call an AI peak. Later on in the episode, Grok's offensive replies aren't e...
Jul 11, 2025•42 min
Today on the pod, we're bringing you two of the liveliest panels from the 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit, held this week in London. Both panels — “The Autonomous Vehicle Rollout” and “Investing in 2030” — explore one of the major themes from the event: where AI is poised to show up next in our everyday lives, beyond the chatbot. Think voice, devices, and even your car. First up, we'll hear from Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi , and Alex Kendall, Co-founder and CEO of Wayve , who are teaming up to br...
Jun 27, 2025•48 min
We’re officially one week out from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit! On today’s episode, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join host Eric Newcomer to preview what’s ahead — from standout speakers to can’t-miss panels and the big ideas that will shape the conversations next week. To kick things off, Eric poses a timely question: What themes are starting to take shape across the participants and topics at this year’s summit? What’s really driving the energy in AI right now? Here are a...
Jun 20, 2025•53 min
In this second installment of the Cerebral Valley podcast series, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join Eric Newcomer for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of AI-generated voice and video — and what it means for our sense of reality. From TikTok trends to the future of Hollywood and podcasting, the trio explores where generative video might take us over the next five years. Will AI content dominate our feeds? Will we even be able to tell the difference? To put th...
Jun 13, 2025•39 min
The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is right around the corner! To help you navigate the fast-evolving AI landscape ahead of the event, Newcomer Podcast is launching a special four-part series — co-hosted by James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley . Get insider insights, expert analysis, and fresh perspectives on the trends shaping the future of artificial intelligence. In this first episode, James, Max, and host Eric Newcomer dive into what it really means to be an AI agent — and explore how agentic...
Jun 06, 2025•47 min
We're welcoming Bloomberg's Kate Clark to the show this week and diving into her reporting on the rough fundraising environment for any VC that isn't an a16z or GC-style megafund. The only emerging funds that can raise, it seems, are ones that are started by investors who leave these brands. If it weren't for the AI funding bonanza, the situation would look even worse. We each make our predictions for how rosy or dreary the venture market will be 2 years from now. And, of course, take a moment t...
May 30, 2025•43 min
In this special episode, we feature two interviews recorded live during Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit , a financial technology summit held this week in San Francisco. We’re including two of the most dynamic discussions here, beginning with Gabriel Stengel of Rogo and Jeff Seibert of Digits , followed by an interview with Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto. The episode kicks off with a breakdown of the event, highlighting the key debates that emerged between Rogo and Digits around the trustworthines...
May 23, 2025•49 min
Eric relays his dispatch from Dimension Capital’s biotech summit in Park City, where the crowd was much more academic than the conferences we usually attend. Biotech stocks aren’t doing great, meanwhile university funding cuts could spell trouble for drug research. Still, people were rosy about AI tools. We also took a temperature check on the state of fintech, which investors tell us is mixed. Everyone’s hopeful about IPOs and streamlined stablecoins, but the dollar getting destabilized by the ...
May 16, 2025•24 min
How does the AI gold rush look from the helm of a $40-billion software giant? Salesforce co-founder, chair, and CEO Marc Benioff joins Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan for a tour of the next tech boom cycle. The conversation opens with Benioff’s sweeping vision of “Agent Force 2.0,” where large language models paired with reasoning engines mint whole new classes of digital labor, and brands from Gucci to Disney are already swapping call-center scripts for autonomous agents. The episode closes on poli...
May 09, 2025•57 min
This week, we kick off by discussing Ben Smith’s bombshell post ”The group chats that changed America,” that exposed the private chats that nudged Silicon Valley’s money crowd into Trump’s orbit. Then we hop to DC’s Hill-and-Valley Forum, where the mantra was industrial renaissance or bust. The race with China, AI’s essential energy demands, and the need to reshore American manufacturing were the talk of the forum. Fear of China loomed over the entire forum and only whispers of tariffs crossed t...
May 02, 2025•50 min
We’re back to opining on the state of tech media! A16z has aqui-hired Erik Torenberg and his newsletter Turpentine, while the Technology Brothers with ties to Founders Fund have created a podcasting empire. Eric and Tom reminisce about the original wave of “going direct,” why it failed, and what’s different this time around. Later on, Madeline shares that crypto VCs are growing frustrated with President Trump’s meme coin grifts, and how hosting a private dinner for top coin holders doesn’t help ...
Apr 25, 2025•24 min
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 sta...
Apr 18, 2025•55 min
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 ...
Apr 11, 2025•1 hr 7 min
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 Washing...
Apr 04, 2025•57 min
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 potent...
Mar 28, 2025•20 min
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 t...
Mar 21, 2025•44 min
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 thr...
Mar 13, 2025•22 min
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 CoreW...
Mar 07, 2025•22 min
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 P...
Feb 28, 2025•18 min
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 founder...
Feb 21, 2025•24 min
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 ...
Feb 14, 2025•19 min
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 shapeshift...
Feb 07, 2025•25 min
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.
Jan 31, 2025•25 min
"In this episode of The Newcomer Podcast , Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger unpack how tech elites are reacting to the early days of the Trump presidency. They discuss Sam Altman and Masayoshi Son’s new venture to build AI data centers dubbed “Project Stargate” and make the case for business leaders to abide by important ethical norms. They also break down fresh performance data from UTIMCO, calling out Thrive Capital’s standout returns and examining the broader struggles for many funds amid...
Jan 24, 2025•26 min
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.
Jan 17, 2025•22 min
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 th...
Jan 10, 2025•15 min
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 f...
Dec 16, 2024•23 min
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 sh...
Dec 11, 2024•21 min
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 impr...
Dec 05, 2024•43 min
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 T...
Nov 27, 2024•28 min
