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 vide...
Jun 13, 2023•53 min
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 foun...
Jun 06, 2023•48 min
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, infor...
May 31, 2023•1 hr 4 min
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 a...
May 23, 2023•58 min
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 e...
May 17, 2023•52 min
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...
May 02, 2023•54 min
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 an...
Apr 25, 2023•58 min
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 m...
Apr 18, 2023•49 min
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,...
Apr 06, 2023•57 min
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...
Apr 04, 2023•50 min
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 ...
Mar 29, 2023•43 min
Behind the headlines, Jon McNeill has been a key operator and board member across many of the companies that you read about. He was the president of Tesla. Then, in February 2018, he left to take the role of chief operating officer at ride sharing company Lyft. At Tesla, he worked desperately to get the company to sell enough cars to hit Tesla’s sales targets. With the rest of the executive team, he said, “We were arm and arm to do the impossible.” This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by V...
Mar 21, 2023•54 min
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 Air...
Mar 14, 2023•1 hr 2 min
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 convers...
Mar 07, 2023•57 min
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 th...
Mar 06, 2023•2 min
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 ...
Feb 01, 2023•52 min
Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine is someone who keeps his head when others are losing theirs. He’s long been wary of tech exuberance while being a long-term optimist about the transformative power of technology. A board member at Pinterest and Shopify, Levine described his investing style to me for this week’s Dead Cat podcast: “I don’t like to go where all the cool kids are, where all the popular kids are. I like to kind of go off in the corner of the playground and find someone who’s d...
Jan 24, 2023•1 hr 12 min
Generative artificial intelligence is sweeping the nation. People are turning themselves into animated characters, drafting their essays with ChatGPT, and illustrating with Stable Diffusion. Or, as was the case with the tiny special effects team on the movie Everything Everywhere All at Once , they’re using it to help edit a movie . On the latest episode of Dead Cat , Cristóbal Valenzuela , the chief executive officer at generative artificial intelligence company Runway, talked about how he disc...
Jan 17, 2023•56 min
I always enjoy talking with Taylor Lorenz , a deep thinker about the internet who infuriates certain pockets of tech Twitter. Last week, she published a look at the crypto social media accounts that broke news on the fall of FTX. She wrote about how accounts like Coffeezilla and AutismCapital have become media figures in their own right. She wrote for the Washington Post : All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how “citizen journalism” is battling legacy publishe...
Jan 10, 2023•1 hr
Before the rise of crypto investing, venture capital careers seemed to be divided into two buckets: consumer and business-to-business. If the goal of venture capital investing is to pick winners, American consumer investors generally picked wrong. There just hasn’t been another Facebook. The biggest consumer startup of the moment is ByteDance, a Chinese company. While I’ve generally dedicated more time to writing about software investing since that’s where the money and exits have been, I’ve tri...
Jan 04, 2023•1 hr 15 min
Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I became friends in San Francisco back in 2014 when we all worked as technology reporters at The Information. But we didn’t achieve that core pillar of modern friendship until August 2021 when we started a podcast together. Insider generously let Tom co-host the podcast with me — and Katie, a reporter at the New York Times , came on every few episodes as a regular special guest. A year and a half ago we kicked off the show with an interview of Rippling CEO Parker C...
Dec 27, 2022•1 hr 14 min
On last week’s Dead Cat episode with ex-Facebook security chief Alex Stamos, we spent a lot of time trying to steel man the free speech moderation crowd’s argument — even though none of us seemed to hold it ourselves. The other week , we had Jason Calacanis on the show but he didn’t want to talk about Elon Musk . This week, finally we have someone on the podcast who is a defender of the so-called free speech regime and is also willing to talk to skeptical journalists about it on air. Antonio Gar...
Dec 20, 2022•1 hr 17 min
This past Thursday Elon Musk accused Alex Stamos , Facebook’s former chief security officer and the director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, of running a “propaganda platform.” That’s the sort of upside down thinking we’ve come to expect from Musk, given Stamos is one of the most fair-minded and serious thinkers about content moderation and social media platforms today. So, on Friday, we had Stamos on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Musk’s choreographed leaks about the old guard at Twit...
Dec 14, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Former NBC Entertainment chairman Paul Telegdy once lorded over Hollywood as a titan of television as the industry around him was crumbling. The Netflix menace was on the rise and Hollywood media companies were struggling to respond. Telegdy was trying to hold it together while running an increasingly imperiled broadcast network. Before he was pushed out of NBC in 2020 amidst a nation-wide fever of recriminations, exposés, and public firings, Telegdy oversaw some of the world’s most successful r...
Dec 06, 2022•1 hr 11 min
There’s no one more perfectly situated between the tech media and the tech elites who loathe them. Jason Calacanis built his reputation in Silicon Valley as a feisty tech reporter, waiting in line to ask Steve Jobs questions at the Code Conference. An extremely early investment in Uber suddenly made him one of the most famous angel investors in the world (thanks also to Calacanis’s self-promotional megaphone). Today, Calacanis co-hosts All-In, the second-most popular tech podcast and one of the ...
Nov 30, 2022•1 hr
If you’ve resolved that this Thanksgiving you won’t yield the conversation about tech entirely to your NFT-happy, crypto-pushing younger cousin, this is your moment to refresh yourself on the latest from the FTX saga. Give Dead Cat a listen. We catch you up on former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried’s latest messages with a reporter and on Elon Musk’s crusade to reform Twitter. In this hosts-only episode, Tom Dotan , Katie Benner , and I mourn my inability to get tickets to see Taylor Swift and we come...
Nov 22, 2022•57 min
On the latest episode of Dead Cat , we examine how effective altruism’s crypto benefactor took the world — and the media and the Democratic Party, in particular — for a ride. Sam Bankman-Fried escaped much of the skepticism that rival exchange Binance has faced — yet it’s SBF’s FTX that has filed for bankruptcy. With the help of Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer , Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and I try to make sense of what exactly happened and explain the saga to the non-cryptographically inclined. ...
Nov 15, 2022•54 min
While I was in Lisbon for Web Summit, Dead Cat co-hosts Tom Dotan and Katie Benner kept the podcast going without me. They brought on my old colleague Aki Ito , who is now a reporter at Insider , to talk about her reporting on coasting culture, which helped to spark the global discussion of “quiet quitting.” The trio discuss how a recession will yet again change society’s relationship with work. You can read Ito’s stories here: * How hustle culture got America addicted to work * 'My company is n...
Nov 08, 2022•56 min
This week, we invited Tim Miller — the repentant former Republican operative and author of Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell — on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and the upcoming midterm elections. Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I talk with Miller about Peter Thiel -backed Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters. ( FiveThirtyEight gives Vance a 78% chance of winning and Masters a 33% chance .) We discuss the populist future ...
Nov 01, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Nathan Benaich , the lone general partner at Air Street Capital, has long been on my radar as an artificial intelligence obsessive. And so now that the artificial intelligence is suddenly the fixation of the venture capital world , I invited Benaich on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about generative artificial intelligence. With my co-hosts, Tom Dotan and Katie Benner , we talked about the promise of generative AI and the ethics of a machines borrowing from the vast depths of human creativity. I p...
Oct 25, 2022•1 hr 14 min
