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 ...
Nov 19, 2024•49 min
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 sta...
Nov 13, 2024•49 min
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 “...
Nov 09, 2024•55 min
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 tran...
Oct 29, 2024•22 min
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 ye...
Oct 22, 2024•23 min
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 ...
Oct 15, 2024•24 min
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...
Oct 08, 2024•18 min
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...
Oct 01, 2024•25 min
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 o...
Sep 24, 2024•24 min
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 r...
Mar 26, 2024•48 min
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 fiel...
Mar 21, 2024•52 min
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 art...
Nov 30, 2023•44 min
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...
Nov 21, 2023•22 min
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 ...
Nov 14, 2023•1 hr 4 min
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 his...
Nov 10, 2023•1 hr 32 min
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 Al...
Nov 01, 2023•1 hr 24 min
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 th...
Oct 24, 2023•1 hr 35 min
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...
Oct 17, 2023•1 hr 15 min
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...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 2 min
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...
Sep 27, 2023•1 hr
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...
Sep 13, 2023•1 hr 6 min
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 con...
Aug 29, 2023•59 min
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, Spac...
Aug 22, 2023•1 hr 6 min
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...
Aug 15, 2023•56 min
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 Shery...
Aug 08, 2023•59 min
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 ar...
Aug 01, 2023•54 min
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 h...
Jul 25, 2023•43 min
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 Face...
Jul 18, 2023•57 min
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...
Jul 11, 2023•58 min
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 Newcome...
Jul 06, 2023•53 min
