Insider’s anonymous first-person account of a ghostwriter for venture capitalists’ tweets captivated tech Twitter last week. Everyone wanted to know who exactly was paying $100,000 for a tweetstorm. How could anyone make $200,000 writing thought leadership. Why would anyone pay for that? So on this week’s episode of Dead Cat , hosts Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan talked with Redpoint Ventures managing director Logan Bartlett who is a bit of a VC Twitter expert. Last November, Eric wrote about Bartl...
Oct 18, 2022•1 hr 2 min
In November 2017, with Dara Khosrowshahi a few months into his job as Uber CEO, the ride-hailing company came to me with some explosive information: The company claimed that during Travis Kalanick’s time as CEO, Uber had covered up a massive data breach. Hackers had downloaded sensitive information about Uber’s riders and drivers, and the company’s chief security officer, Joe Sullivan , had kept it under wraps by paying the hackers $100,000. Uber fired Sullivan and one of the company’s lawyers. ...
Oct 12, 2022•56 min
The Twitter / Elon saga entered a new phase today. Elon Musk reversed course and agreed to buy Twitter at the previously agreed upon $44 billion. But we’re still thinking about Musk’s text messages that came out as part of discovery in the Delaware court case. On the latest episode of Dead Cat, we reveled in the many bizarre and often sycophantic texts that emerged during discovery. Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer , along with recurring guest New York Times reporter Erin Griffith , give a close read...
Oct 04, 2022•57 min
On this week’s Dead Cat, co-host Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer talk about the sputtering scooter industry. Starting at 36:00 we hear Tom tells us about his jury summons. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe
Sep 28, 2022•1 hr
This week on Dead Cat , Reed Albergotti — the technology editor for the soon-to-be launched media startup founded by Ben Smith and Justin Smith — joined the show to talk about the Biden administration’s executive orders shaping how the U.S. does business with China. Albergotti reported earlier this month that the Biden administration is looking to crack down on American investors cutting checks in China. He wrote for Semafor : Administration officials were particularly alarmed this March by a re...
Sep 21, 2022•1 hr 10 min
Dead Cat host Eric Newcomer already said his piece about Kara Swisher’s epic final Code Conference. Now you can hear directly from Swisher about what she thought. On this week’s Dead Cat podcast , Tom Dotan and Newcomer catch up with Swisher fresh off her final Code Conference. Together, we puzzle over Amazon chief Andy Jassy’s deference to his old boss and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s tough time denying that he wanted to buy Pinterest. We talked about Bob Iger’s charm and Swisher’s affection fo...
Sep 14, 2022•1 hr 7 min
Bloomberg’s Mark Bergen is the world’s top Google Kremlinologist, chronicling the rise and fall of technocrats and technologies inside Google parent company Alphabet. This week, Bergen published a book on Google subsidiary YouTube called Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination. That Bergen decided to set his sights on YouTube, Google’s massive user-generated video site, reflects YouTube’s significance inside of parent company Alphabet. The video platform is sh...
Sep 07, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Taylor Lorenz , a columnist at the Washington Post , has helped to popularize “ cheugy ,” “ OK Boomer ,” and, most recently, “ nimcels .” She wrote about “niche internet micro celebrities,” or nimcels: While influencers use their online followings to make money, “for a niche internet micro celebrity, the goal is purely to entertain, versus an influencer,” said Da. “I think this term emerged to distinguish people doing a similar thing to influencers, but for completely different motivations. Bein...
Aug 30, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Will Marc Andreessen dogfood Adam Neumann’s new real estate startup? Will Andreessen be willing to run the same playbook for Flow, Neumann’s new rental real estate company? When is the last time, Andreessen — who called “renting a soulless experience” — actually lived in a rental? Is he willing to give up his $177 million Malibu compound for the shared amenities of a Flow? Andreessen doesn’t seem willing to embrace urban density in Atherton — he and his wife wrote a letter expressing their “IMME...
Aug 23, 2022•1 hr 3 min
This week on Dead Cat , hosts Tom Dotan and Eric Newcomer dive into social media wedding bans. The evolution of authenticity on BeReal. The state of TikTok. Media self-absorption. Dimes Square. Andrew Tate. Then we delve into Sam Bankman-Fried’s case against the startup world — what he calls “the financial circle-jerk.” Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe...
Aug 17, 2022•51 min
Amazon proved that it’s willing to enter any market with its 2017 announcement that it would buy Whole Foods for $13.4 billion. What other tech giant would buy a grocery store? Now Amazon is moving into — robotic vacuums? Amazon said it wanted to buy Roomba-maker iRobot for $1.7 billion. The acquisition raised all sorts of questions about what exactly Amazon wants from the suctioning rover manufacturer. Is the company trying to make a map of your house ? Paranoia about Amazon’s data hoovering we...
Aug 09, 2022•53 min
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has been playing defense as Instagram’s product goes on offense. Mosseri released a video explaining recent changes to Instagram and defended Instagram’s pivot from a friend-oriented, social graph-sorted photo sharing app to a creator-driven, AI-powered content machine. Meanwhile, the broader Meta employee base has been feeling the pain. CEO Mark Zuckerberg is bringing down the hammer , signaling that the company is trying to manage out weak performers. The company h...
Aug 02, 2022•1 hr 11 min
This is definitely an episode you’re going to want to listen to. It’s been a long time coming. It’s a sequel of sorts to my interview with Bill Gurley that ran a few months after launching this newsletter and my conversation with Dara Khosrowshahi after that. I finally convinced Emil Michael , a central player in the Uber saga, to give me an on-the-record interview. Michael was once Travis Kalanick’s top lieutenant. He raised about $15 billion for Uber during his nearly four years at the company...
Jul 26, 2022•1 hr 27 min
I’m in Italy right now for my first extended vacation of the year. I spent yesterday bopping around Siena, taking in another beautiful Duomo, eating a sandwich with lardo, and hunting for the frescoes that provided the grist for my girlfriend’s mom’s art history thesis. After stopping in Rome and Florence, my girlfriend and I are staying in rural Tuscany for a friend’s wedding and then are headed to Cinque Terre in a few days. I’m doing my best to disconnect from the newsletter for these two wee...
Jul 14, 2022•44 min
Sam Bankman-Fried, “SBF,” is bailing out failing crypto companies. The question is whether he’s trying to stymie contagion risk from further roiling the crypto world or if he’s simply shopping for deals. Or maybe it’s both. SBF’s crypto currency exchange company FTX gave crypto lender BlockFi a $400 million credit facility and struck a deal that allows FTX to buy BlockFi for as much as $240 million . Meanwhile, SBF’s investment arm Alameda Research provided Voyager Digital $500 million in financ...
Jul 05, 2022•42 min
I got back from Collision, the 35,000-person tech conference in Toronto, Sunday night. Everyone is worried about falling valuations — but the tech world keeps on spinning. Listen to this week’s episode of Dead Cat , Tom Dotan, Katie Benner , and I catch up, talk about my conference-going experience, and argue about what tech executive we’d most like to see as president. (Katie picks Tim Cook but I’m going with Jeff Bezos .) Then, Tom and I talk with Bloomberg reporter Lauren Etter . She’s the au...
Jun 29, 2022•54 min
Are we nearing a time when we are going to get to have real, meaningful conversations with artificial intelligence? Nitasha Tiku got the world wondering just that with her story in the Washington Post about a Google engineer who believes that the company’s LaMDA artificial intelligence might be sentient. Google engineer Blake Lemoine carried out a series of seemingly personal conversations with the artificial intelligence and walked away believing that there was a sort of person behind the messa...
Jun 22, 2022•1 hr 5 min
I moved from San Francisco to New York, in February 2019, back before it was cool to turn tail on the tech mecca. Truth be told, I’ll always have a special place in my heart for San Francisco, but my girlfriend beckoned from Brooklyn. I’m writing this from my flight back to New York after over a week in SF. I spent much of it in an Airbnb next to Mr. Pickle’s on Van Ness Avenue and then a few days crashing at a fellow tech reporter’s apartment in the Outer Richmond. I ate Mission Chinese and La ...
Jun 15, 2022•53 min
Big tech executives are heading for the exits. Last week, Meta Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg announced that she would leave the Facebook parent company in the fall. Today, Dave Clark , CEO of Amazon’s worldwide consumer business, explained why he’s leaving Amazon : He’s going to become CEO of the logistics startup Flexport . With the markets on the brink, what other top tech executives will decide it’s a good time to step away? On this week’s Dead Cat , Tom Dotan, Katie Benner , and I ...
Jun 08, 2022•50 min
One of the many joys of going independent and writing on Substack is that I work at the eye of a trend piece. There’s a storm circling around me with fights about Substack’s politics and its promise as a media disruptor. But at the center of that vortex, I’m far more focused on my own business than the broader maelstrom around me. I’m very fortunate to say that my paid subscriber count has now grown beyond 1,500 and more than 22,000 people now receive my free emails. I’ve been enjoying a steeper...
May 31, 2022•54 min
As the Supreme Court moves toward repealing Roe v. Wade, access to abortion pills over the internet could become a key frontier in the fight for abortion access in the United States. On this week’s Dead Cat podcast, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I talked to Kiki Freedman, the co-founder and CEO of the digital clinic for abortion access Hey Jane. (Freedman also worked at Uber for four years as an early Uber Eats employee.) Hey Jane has raised more than $3 million in funding to provide abortion p...
May 24, 2022•36 min
I’ve been writing about Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies since 2013 . That means that I’ve seen a number of boom and bust cycles. It’s starting to feel like we’re entering another crypto winter. Bitcoin is down 37% since the start of the year. Ethereum is down 44% so far this year. Solana is down 68%. This week, Andreessen Horowitz published a piece reframing that brutal boom and bust whipsaw as the “ The Crypto Price-Innovation Cycle .” The firm has written about the cycle, “Even though crypto cycl...
May 17, 2022•57 min
Firstmark Capital’s Rick Heitzmann is someone I turn to when I want to understand what public market activity means for private startups. Heitzmann’s got an ear to Wall Street from his offices in New York City, but he invests in private technology startups. So I invited Heitzmann on Dead Cat with Tom Dotan and Katie Benner . We tried to make sense of this sudden downturn. Everyone has seen it coming for years. We just never knew when the party would end. Building on my story “The Endgame” from l...
May 10, 2022•48 min
During the pandemic, the U.S. government relaxed rules that prevented doctors from prescribing controlled substances — like Adderall — over the internet. That’s created a bonanza for venture-backed companies like Cerebral and Done. Wall Street Journal reporter Rolfe Winkler has been chronicling these telemedicine companies’ prescription practices. Winkler — a friend and former bridge partner of mine — came on Dead Cat to talk to Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and me about his stories. In March, with...
May 03, 2022•56 min
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 ...
Apr 26, 2022•59 min
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, wh...
Apr 19, 2022•53 min
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 co...
Apr 12, 2022•54 min
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 — a...
Apr 05, 2022•1 hr 9 min
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 ...
Mar 29, 2022•59 min
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: He...
Mar 22, 2022•54 min
