The a16z Podcast discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future – especially as ‘software eats the world’. It features industry experts, business leaders, and other interesting thinkers and voices from around the world. This podcast is produced by Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every week; visit a16z.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletters and other content as well!

A show on optimistic conversations with people building and creating new products and technologies, hosted by veteran technologists Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan.

Every company has a story. Learn the playbooks that built the world’s greatest companies — and how you can apply them as a founder, operator, or investor.

Industry veterans, degenerate gamblers & besties Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg cover all things economic, tech, political, social & poker.

Learn all the hacks to optimize and upgrade every aspect of your life while spending less and saving more. Chris is a life hacker who has saved millions by breaking down every aspect of life, looking to maximize happiness at the lowest cost.

Each week, Logan Bartlett, partially known for his work as a partner at Redpoint Ventures, but maybe even better known for his and his cartoon avatar’s posting on Twitter sits down with giants of the tech industry to give you the inside scoop you won’t hear anywhere else. They’re covering the biggest stories in tech, but the side nobody talks about. From the memes and Twitter beefs to the idiot billionaires, and basically, all the things real people in the tech world actually talk about, but secretly in their group chats! Subscribe now because you won’t want to miss an episode!

Conversations with Coleman is home to honest conversations with leading intellectuals on polarised issues in the realm of race, politics and culture in the West.

Culpable explores unsettled cases where those deserving of blame have somehow eluded justice. On August 28, 2013, 22 year old Brittany Stykes was shot and killed while driving down Highway 68 in Brown County, Ohio. It’s been nearly a decade Host Dennis Cooper returns to unearth the truth around this story of a young mother whose life was cut short. Season 1 explored the case of Christian Andreacchio, whose death was ruled his death a suicide, despite substantial evidence that points to murder.

Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.

Execs is a show for founders, operators & pioneers who want to understand the playbooks, frameworks and tactics that leading technology companies today have used to scale. Our guests are experienced, non-founding tech executives in key roles at top companies with firsthand experience solving hard and rare problems for a fast-growing business. On Execs, they share their hard-won ‘earned secrets’ to pass on their knowledge and help leaders at high-growth companies scale faster. Execs is hosted by Erik Torenberg and produced by On Deck - where top talent goes to start companies, find their next roles, or invest in their careers

A podcast about tech and society, hosted by Ben Thompson and James Allworth

Discover the hidden side of everything with Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Freakonomics Radio tells you things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to how to become great at just about anything. Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers.

The Future of StoryTelling (FoST) podcast is a series of conversations between FoST founder and CEO Charlie Melcher and some of the world’s brightest storytellers across a range of disciplines, focusing on how stories can help provoke positive and lasting change in the world. The Future of StoryTelling is a passionate community of people from the worlds of media, technology, and communications who explore how storytelling is evolving in the digital age.

![CDATA[Gamecraft is a limited series about the modern history of the video game business. Beginning in the early 1990's, the video game business began a radical transformation from a console and PC packaged goods business into the highly complex, online, multi-platform business it is today. Game industry legend Mitch Lasky and game investor Blake Robbins go on a thematic tour of the last 30 years of gaming, exploring the origins of free-to-play, platform-based publishing, casual & mobile gaming, forever games, user-generated content, consoles, virtual reality, and in-game economies across this eight episode series.]]

Get WIRED is a new podcast about how the future is realized. Each week, we burrow down new rabbit holes to investigate the ways technology is changing our lives—from culture to business, science to design. Through hard-hitting reporting, intimate storytelling, and audio you won’t hear anywhere else, Get WIRED is the must-listen-to tech podcast that sets the agenda for the week. Hosted by WIRED Senior Writer Lauren Goode.

Greymatter offers perspectives and stories from some of the world’s top technology entrepreneurs and business leaders. The featured company builders share personal and insightful lessons while shedding light on common, relatable challenges in the entrepreneurial journey. Greymatter is produced by Greylock Partners.

Guy Raz interviews the world’s best-known entrepreneurs to learn how they built their iconic brands. In each episode, founders reveal deep, intimate moments of doubt and failure, and share insights on their eventual success. How I Built This is a master-class on innovation, creativity, leadership and how to navigate challenges of all kinds. 
New episodes on Mondays and Thursdays for free. Listen 1-week early and to all episodes ad-free with Wondery+ or Amazon Music with a Prime membership or Ama

Huberman Lab discusses neuroscience: how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body control our perceptions, our behaviors, and our health. We also discuss existing and emerging tools for measuring and changing how our nervous system works. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a tenured Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. His laboratory studies neural regeneration, neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. For

Join Rachelle Hampton twice a week as we gaze deep into the online abyss—and tell you what’s gazing back.

Host Jennifer Strong thoughtfully examines the far-reaching impact of artificial intelligence on our daily lives. Produced by MIT Technology Review, the podcast explores the rise of AI through the voices of people reckoning with the power of the technology, and by taking listeners up close with the inventors and founders whose ambitions are fueling the development of new forms of AI.

![CDATA[Conversations with the best investors and business leaders in the world. We explore their ideas, methods, and stories to help you better invest your time and money. Hear stock market and boardroom insights you can't find anywhere else. If you're a professional investor, CEO, entrepreneur, or business strategist, this is for you. Explore all our episodes and learn more at https://www.joincolossus.com]]

This podcast is like the News is for current events but for the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast. I report, review and analyze each episode with my good friend Garrett in an 45 minute breakdown. It helps us get the most out of Joe's world class show. This is for any Rogan fan..

Big tech is transforming every aspect of our world. But how? And at what cost? In the latest season of Land of the Giants: The Facebook/ Meta Disruption, Recode senior reporter Shirin Ghaffary and The Verge deputy editor Alex Heath bring us inside the company that’s determined how the world interacts and communicates online. How has Meta shaped our relationships, and what’s in store for us as the company undergoes an unprecedented transition? New episodes every Wednesday starting July 13th. From

Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover concrete, actionable, and tactical advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product. www.lennysnewsletter.com [https://www.lennysnewsletter.com?utm_medium=podcast]

Conversations about science, technology, history, philosophy and the nature of intelligence, consciousness, love, and power. Lex is an AI researcher at MIT and beyond.

Join neuroscientist, philosopher, and best-selling author Sam Harris as he explores important and controversial questions about the human mind, society, and current events.
Sam Harris is the author of five New York Times bestsellers. His books include The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, The Moral Landscape, Free Will, Lying, Waking Up, and Islam and the Future of Tolerance (with Maajid Nawaz). The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. His writing and public lectures cover a wide range of topics—neuroscience, moral philosophy, religion, meditation practice, human violence, rationality—but generally focus on how a growing understanding of ourselves and the world is changing our sense of how we should live.
Harris's work has been published in more than 20 languages and has been discussed in The New York Times, Time, Scientific American, Nature, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, and many other journals. He has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Economist, The Times (London), The Boston Globe, The Atlantic, The Annals of Neurology, and elsewhere.
Sam Harris received a degree in philosophy from Stanford University and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from UCLA.

Award-winning business advice from Silicon Valley and beyond. Iconic CEOs, from Nike to Netflix, Starbucks to Slack, share the strategies that helped them grow from startups into global brands — and to weather crisis when it strikes. 
Our two formats help tell the complete story of how a business grows, survives and thrives, and the mindsets of growth that keep leaders in the game. 
On each episode of our classic format, host Reid Hoffman — LinkedIn cofounder, Greylock partner and legendary Sil

Life lessons from the smartest people on the planet.
Including guests like Dr Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, Dr Andrew Huberman, Ryan Holiday, James Clear, Robert Greene, Balaji Srinivasan, Steven Pinker, Alex Hormozi, Douglas Murray, Michael Malice, James Smith, Dr David Sinclair, Mark Manson and more.

Erik Torenberg, Dan Romero, and Antonio Garcia Martinez discuss what's happening in technology, business, politics, and beyond.

It’s a lighthearted nightmare in here, weirdos! Morbid is a true crime, creepy history and all things spooky podcast hosted by an autopsy technician and a hairstylist. Join us for a heavy dose of research with a dash of comedy thrown in for flavor.

The Hustle presents - My First Million. A podcast where we brainstorm new business ideas based on trends & opportunities we see in the market. Sometimes we have famous guests, and they do it with us.<

A podcast about Silicon Valley, hosted by newsletter writer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer. Listen in for interviews with the dealmakers and builders who matter. Subscribe to newcomer.co for summaries of the episodes plus tech industry news, scoops, and analysis.

Jack Butcher, Bilal Zaidi & Trung Phan discuss what they're finding on the edges of the internet + the latest in business, technology and memes.
Let us know what you think on Twitter:
@bzaidi [https://www.twitter.com/bzaidi]
@trungtphan [https://www.twitter.com/trungtphan]
@jackbutcher [https://www.twitter.com/jackbutcher]
@nia [https://twitter.com/niapodcast]podcast [https://twitter.com/niapodcast]
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Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway analyze the weird patterns, the complex issues and the newest market crazes. Join the conversation every Monday and Thursday for interviews with the most interesting minds in finance, economics and markets.

Direct questions, real answers. On with Kara Swisher is where “Silicon Valley’s most feared and well-liked journalist” gets to the heart of what makes powerful people tick. Kara makes sense of tech, business and politics through tough conversations with the newsmakers who matter. So why do they show up? “Smart people,” says Kara, “like difficult questions.” Plus, it’s fun. Every Monday and Thursday. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Proof is a new investigative true crime podcast from Susan Simpson of Undisclosed and the producers of Evil Lives Here. On an October night in 1996, a gunshot rattles the walls of a double-wide trailer on the outskirts of Rome, Georgia. 15-year-old Brian Bowling is laying on the floor of his room, head bleeding from a gunshot wound. By the next morning, Brian is dead. Investigators quickly conclude that Brian’s wound was self-inflicted, the tragic result of teenage bravado. And yet within six month

'A podcast about the internet' that is actually an unfailingly original exploration of modern life and how to survive it.' - The Guardian. Hosted by Alex Goldman and Emmanuel Dzotsi from Gimlet.

Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell's journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every episode re-examines something from the past—an event, a person, an idea, even a song—and asks whether we got it right the first time. From Pushkin Industries. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance. 
To get early access to ad-free episodes and extra content, subscribe to Pushkin+ in Apple Podcasts are pushkin.fm/pus. 
iHeartMedia is the exclusive podcast partner of Pushkin Industrie

Serial Productions makes narrative podcasts whose quality and innovation transformed the medium. “Serial” began in 2014 as a spinoff of the public radio show “This American Life.” In 2020, we joined the New York Times Company. Our shows have reached many millions of listeners and have won nearly every major journalism award for audio, including the first-ever Peabody Award given to a podcast. Subscribe to our newsletter for the latest Serial Productions news: https://bit.ly/3FIOJj9 Have thoughts

In the early 1970s, the future of abortion in America was far from settled. Roe v. Wade would change everything, though few knew it at the time. For the seventh season of Slate’s Slow Burn, host Susan Matthews explores the path to Roe—a time when more Republicans than Democrats supported abortion rights. You’ll hear the forgotten story of the first woman ever to be convicted of manslaughter for having an abortion, the unlikely Catholic power couple who helped ignite the pro-life movement, and a

Each week, StrictlyVC Editor-in Chief Connie Loizos and Alex Gove, a former journalist, VC, and operating exec, review the top stories in StrictlyVC and interview a mover and shaker in the world of tech.

Subversive is a podcast by Alex Kaschuta about ideas that may not fit neatly into the Overton window and could use a nudge, or a sledgehammer. Alex chats to thinkers across the spectrum from iconoclast philosophers, rogue scientists, *real* journalists, and our true intellectual elite, Twitter anons. If you want to support the show or my work in general, head to my Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/aksubversive

Exploring the biggest questions of our time with the help of the world's greatest thinkers. Host Manoush Zomorodi inspires us to learn more about the world, our communities, and most importantly, ourselves.
Get more brainy miscellany with TED Radio Hour+. Your subscription supports the show and unlocks a sponsor-free feed. Learn more at plus.npr.org/ted

Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses, how to build an audience, and how to build in public.

Official Podcast of the Boys - If you're a chick keep cruising sister. Hosted By the CEO of the Boys: Ryan Long @ryanlongcomedy and the man the legend Danny Polishchuk @dannyjokes. Ryan and Danny go through the wildest articles and more.

>Here on the Compound Growth Marketing Show, we tackle all of the challenges of B2B marketers looking to build systems that scale, generate demand, and make a significant impact on business revenue. Whether it’s from hiring practices, emerging tech or measurement and tactics, we help you to understand what it all really means in practice based off of real life experiences.

Founders, friends and fellow builders Alex Lieberman and Jesse Pujji know what it is to be a founder. The irrational confidence, relentless grind and creative ecstacy needed to build something. In this show, they dole out unfiltered opinions and advice on how to build businesses, and how the current state of the world helps or hurts founders.

A founder podcast that isn't boring, maybe. Made possible by Founders, Inc.

*** Named a best podcast of 2021 by Time, Vulture, Esquire and The Atlantic. *** Each Tuesday and Friday, Ezra Klein invites you into a conversation on something that matters. How do we address climate change if the political system fails to act? Has the logic of markets infiltrated too many aspects of our lives? What is the future of the Republican Party? What do psychedelics teach us about consciousness? What does sci-fi understand about our present that we miss? Can our food system be just to humans and animals alike?

A daily dose of irreverent, offbeat, and informative takes on business & tech news. Hosted by Zachary Crockett, Juliet Bennett Rylah, Jacob Cohen, and Rob Litterst from The Hustle.

Crisp conversations with critical thinkers at the leading edge of science, technology, politics, and social systems.

Join intellectual phenomenon Dr. Jordan Peterson for enlightening discourse that will change the way you think. This podcast breaks down the dichotomy of life through interviews and lectures that explain how individuals and culture are shaped by values, music, religion, and beyond. It will give you a new perspective and a modern understanding of your creativity, competence, and personality.

What comes after Google, Facebook, Bitcoin, and Ethereum? Perhaps it's the startup country — the network state. Balaji interviews tech founders and policymakers from around the world on managing billions of dollars and millions of people, as well as what it might take to start a new kind of state.

![CDATA[The Official SaaStr Podcast is the latest and greatest from the world of SaaStr, interviewing the most prominent operators and investors to discover their tips, tactics and strategies to attain success in the fiercely competitive world of SaaS. On the side of the operators, we center around getting from $0 to $100m ARR faster, what it takes to scale successfully and what are the core elements of hiring. As for the investors, we learn what metrics they hone in on when examining SaaS business, what type of metrics excites them and what they look for in SaaS founders.]]

We live in a winner-take-all economy that’s bifurcating into those who are part of the innovation economy and those who aren’t. Every week best-selling author, professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway answers questions from you (his listeners) on who’s winning and losing, and how you can get ahead. Other professors, practitioners, and entrepreneurs join Scott to contribute ideas, alternate opinions, and insights to help you thrive at work. Tune in for a no mercy, no malice take on how you can l

The United States is in the midst of a dramatic political realignment with shifting views on national security, economics, technology, and the role of government in our lives. Saagar Enjeti and Marshall Kosloff explore this with thinkers, policymakers, and more.

The director’s commentary track for Daring Fireball. Long digressions on Apple, technology, design, movies, and more.

Tim Ferriss is a self-experimenter and bestselling author, best known for The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been translated into 40+ languages. Newsweek calls him 'the world's best human guinea pig,' and The New York Times calls him 'a cross between Jack Welch and a Buddhist monk.' In this show, he deconstructs world-class performers from eclectic areas (investing, chess, pro sports, etc.), digging deep to find the tools, tactics, and tricks that listeners can use.

The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) interviews the world's greatest venture capitalists with prior guests including Sequoia's Doug Leone and Benchmark's Bill Gurley. Once per week, 20VC Host, Harry Stebbings is also joined by one of the great founders of our time with prior founder episodes from Spotify's Daniel Ek, Linkedin's Reid Hoffman, and Snowflake's Frank Slootman. If you would like to see more of The Twenty Minute VC (20VC), head to www.20vc.com for more information on the podcast, show notes, r

The Vergecast is the flagship podcast from The Verge about small gadgets, Big Tech, and everything in between. Every Friday, hosts Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz hang out and make sense of the week’s most important technology news. And every Wednesday, David leads a selection of The Verge’s expert staffers in an exploration of how gadgets and software affect our lives – and which ones you should bring into yours.

This American Life is a weekly public radio show, heard by 2.2 million people on more than 500 stations. Another 2.5 million people download the weekly podcast. It is hosted by Ira Glass, produced in collaboration with Chicago Public Media, delivered to stations by PRX The Public Radio Exchange, and has won all of the major broadcasting awards.

Jason Calacanis and Molly Wood cover startups, tech, markets, media, crypto, and all the hottest topics in business and technology. They also interview the world’s greatest founders, operators, investors, and innovators. Join our community on Twitter to discuss the show: https://twitter.com/i/communities/1496977694747209728

Crypto assets and blockchain technology are about to transform every trust-based interaction of our lives, from financial services to identity to the Internet of Things. In this podcast, host Laura Shin, an independent journalist covering all things crypto, talks with industry pioneers about how crypto assets and blockchains will change the way we earn, spend and invest our money. Tune in to find out how Web 3.0, the decentralized web, will revolutionize our world. Disclosure: I'm a nocoiner.

Join Cobie and Ledger as as they chat with the most interesting people in crypto.

Village Global's Venture Stories takes you inside the world of venture capital and technology, featuring enlightening interviews with entrepreneurs, investors and tech industry leaders. The podcast is hosted by Village Global partner and co-founder Erik Torenberg. Check us out on the web at villageglobal.vc/podcast for more.

Join ‪Connor Shorten for the Weaviate Podcast Series.

web3 with a16z' is a show about the next generation of the internet, and about how builders and users -- whether artists, coders, creators, developers, companies, organizations, or communities -- now have the ability to not just 'read' (web1) + 'write' (web2) but 'own' (web3) pieces of the internet, unlocking a new wave of creativity and entrepreneurship. Brought to you by a16z crypto, this show is the definitive resource for understanding and going deeper on all things crypto and web3. From di

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 [https://cerebralvalleysummit.com/] on the podcast [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/newcomer-podcast/id1582647825] feed and YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/@newcomertech].

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 [https://cerebralvalleysummit.com/] 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 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/newcomer-podcast/id1582647825] Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/34NxWrRHHAU5uWG5RfnZIP?si=fea1740b515b45bb] and YouTube [https://www.youtube.com/@newcomertech]. Email me [eric@newcomer.co] 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 [http://vanta.com/newcomer] for being the launch sponsor for the Newcomer podcast. You may remember Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo from her appearance [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/episode-2-christina-cacioppo/id1582647825?i=1000533626861] on the second episode of my old podcast Dead Cat. She’s been an early believer in my audio efforts! Excited to have Vanta [https://www.vanta.com/landing/newcomer] on board.

If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast reach out [newcomer@newcomer.co].

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 [https://www.newcomer.co/p/does-that-mean-the-cats-dead#details] co-host Tom Dotan is off skewering [https://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-layoffs-marc-benioff-ohana-culture-8b3e82c] 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 [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/newcomer-podcast/id1582647825] and subscribe to the Newcomer YouTube channel [https://www.youtube.com/@newcomertech]. 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!



Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe [https://www.newcomer.co/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 [https://www.newcomer.co/p/venture-funds-out-of-the-darkness]. So when the trio finally announced their $350 million life sciences and technology-focused venture firm called Dimension [http://dimensioncap.com] 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



Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe [https://www.newcomer.co/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 doing something over there that’s really compelling that most people are prepared to dismiss or aren’t that excited about.”

I wanted to have Levine on the podcast to explain the tech downturn. Levine has been investing at Bessemer for over two decades. I wondered how does this moment compare to the dot-com bust and the Great Recession? On the podcast Levine traces the ebbs and flows of tech euphoria while giving concrete math to the pain of down rounds.

‘The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite’

He delivered quite the diatribe when I asked him to compare the present moment to the dot-com bust:

When I joined the venture industry in 2001 I looked at these entrepreneurs who built businesses and these venture capitalists who funded them from ’96 to 2000 and I was jealous. Oh my lord they generated enormous value and enormous wealth in such a short time. And I said to myself the world is never going to get this crazy again. The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite and what fun it would have been to be part of that but I missed the party. But I thought you know it’s really rewarding and fun and challenging to find compelling entrepreneurs and invest in startups. So even though it’s never gonna get as good as it was in 2000 again I’m going to try to make this my career because I think I’ll find it fun.

And lo and behold 20 years later it happened again: Someone passed the joint around the party a second time and no one remembered what happened the first time and things got crazy. So in that sense it’s really similar. Enormous wealth was created enormous companies were created. But the difference is that when that party ended — at the end of 2021 — it wasn’t three or four companies left standing. It was dozens and dozens of strong public companies and hundreds of really interesting private companies. Now not every unicorn and not every company that raised a lot of money will be successful. But the industry is I would say two orders of magnitude larger than it was in 2000.

He argued that he believed there was still “another shoe to drop” in this tech downturn. He said venture firms were reserving more money to make follow-on investments for their existing portfolio companies giving them less dry powder with which to make new investments. “I think we’re in a little bit of that spiral” Levine said.

The Anti-Portfolio

Back in July 2021 amidst the final heady months of the bull market I profiled Bessemer and Levine in an in-depth story titled The Anti-Portfolio. (Still worth a read [https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-anti-portfolio] if you missed it.) An undercurrent in the piece was that Bessemer had smartly invested early in some of the tech industry’s most popular public stocks like Shopify and Twilio but that the firm had sold down its positions before a massive run-up in their value on the public markets. Now with Twilio down 70% and Shopify down 52% over the past 12 months Bessemer’s decision to cash in its winners seems more rational.

I asked Levine whether he felt vindicated.

“We’ve made every mistake possible” he told me. “But we’ve also gotten some things right. And so with the benefit of hindsight we distributed our stock in Shopify way too early. And at the same time we held onto some stocks in 2021 a bit too long. I think we’re not all that focused on getting that exactly right. Of course we’re always trying to do better. But the real win if you will and the excitement and what motivates us is to invest in a company like Shopify or Auth0 when it’s really small and to nurture it and help that company become really big. And if you manage to top tick and exit your position … all the power to you. That’s just not that interesting of a game.”

Give it a listen

Read the automated transcript

P.S. If you want to weigh in as to whether I should rename the podcast you can vote on Twitter or voice your opinion in the comments.



Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe [https://www.newcomer.co/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

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 [https://runwayml.com/customers/how-director-and-editor-evan-halleck-uses-runway-for-films-music-videos-and-commercials/].

On the latest episode of Dead Cat Cristóbal Valenzuela the chief executive officer at generative artificial intelligence company Runway talked about how he discovered that his AI-powered video editing software was used to help make the award winning film.

When I wrote about generative AI burning white hot [https://www.newcomer.co/p/generative-ai-startups-are-burning] back in October I talked to Valenzuela for that story and called him “among the most compelling founders that I’ve come across while reporting on artificial intelligence.” So I thought it would be fun to have him on the podcast and discuss some of the most pressing issues facing generative artificial intelligence.

To help me interview Valenzuela I invited Non-Technical podcast host and viral comedian Alexis Gay to guest host the episode. You’ll probably recognize her from some of her viral tech parody videos [https://twitter.com/yayalexisgay/status/1369346460911734784?lang=en]. (Listen to my guest appearance [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/83-eric-newcomer-author-newcomer-understands-the/id1542532605?i=1000576341087] on Non-Technical if you want to learn more than you ever thought you wanted to know about the man behind the newsletter.)

On the podcast Valenzuela predicts that “very soon” in “a couple of years” artificial intelligence software will be able to create the sort of TikTok videos that people flip through online. “We’re heading towards a world — where a lot of the content that you consume online will be generated [by artificial intelligence]” Valenzuela said.

“There’s definitely an exponential progress rate that you can see and perceive more clearly now” Valenzuela said. “What took years of progress is now taking months. And what used to take months is now taking weeks.”

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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 [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/05/ftx-citizen-journalism/] at the crypto social media accounts that broke news on the fall of FTX. She wrote about how accounts like Coffeezilla [https://twitter.com/coffeebreak_YT] and AutismCapital [https://twitter.com/AutismCapital?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor] have become media figures in their own right.

She wrote [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/01/05/ftx-citizen-journalism/] for the Washington Post:

All this coverage of the FTX implosion is the most prominent example of how “citizen journalism” is battling legacy publishers for online attention catapulting a fresh class of independent journalists into the mainstream while also giving rise to a group of social media influencers who optimize for attention rather than accuracy.

For years drama channels and tea accounts — so called because the word “tea” is slang for juicy information — have been first to break news related to pop culture and influencers. Business news is late to undergo this trend.

So in classic fashion I broke one of my only New Year’s resolutions — to pay less attention to “the media” — and invited Lorenz on the Dead Cat podcast to talk about how these accounts are changing how information reaches the public.

In my mind our conversation was really about reputations — and how they’re built and maintained online. Later in the episode we talk about how Twitter and rightwing media has shaped Lorenz’s own reputation online. Some of her critics might be surprised to hear her speak out against Instagram’s harsh content moderation policies.

At the 27:30 mark we shift gears and talk about the downturn in the creator economy.

At 40:10 Lorenz and I debate whether we should be worried about Chinese influence over TikTok.

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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 tried to chronicle consumer investing to the extent that it exists. I was the first to report BeReal’s seed and Series A [https://www.newcomer.co/p/scoop-a16z-accel-back-french-founders] funding round. I’ve scooped [https://www.newcomer.co/p/sources-discord-raising-at-roughly] some of Discord’s valuation ascent. In December 2020 I wrote about investors’ effort to will a consumer renaissance [https://www.newcomer.co/p/after-the-fallout] into being. Sure there weren’t any obvious new platforms but consumer investors weren’t going to let that get in their way.

I invited my good friends Max Child and James Wilsterman onto the Dead Cat podcast. They’re the co-founders of voice games company Volley [https://www.volleythat.com/]. The NFX Y Combinator and Lightspeed-backed startup — which they tell me is the largest voice game company — started off as a chatbot games company. So Child [https://twitter.com/mlchild] and Wilsterman [https://twitter.com/jameswilsterman] know consumer trends. Chatbots once burned red hot before evaporating only to be revived with the rise of generative artificial intelligence. Meanwhile few VCs have been bullish on voice as a platform.

Child Wilsterman and I dig into the struggles of the QVC for startups trend. Popshop looks to be on the rocks and Whatnot may be peaking. We interrogate whether marketplaces [https://future.com/marketplace-100/] were ever really a thing. And we wonder if AirPods as the next platform [https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2019/11/19/airpods-are-becoming-a-platform] was really just a statement about Clubhouse.

Then we look to 2023 and consider the pockets of hope for consumer investing: the rise of generative AI startups and the possibility [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/inside-the-tech-powering-apples-envelope-pushing-risky-mixed-reality-headset?rc=iatd7y] that Apple announces an augmented reality device. And we ponder whether this crypto winter will ever thaw.

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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 [https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode-1-interview-with-parker-conrad/id1582647825?i=1000532985626] of Rippling CEO Parker Conrad. Since then publishing most Tuesdays we’ve pumped out 69 episodes and have built up a loyal following of listeners for our niche tech media podcast. With our intense focus on how the media covers technology stories we’ve become a must-listen for newsrooms tech public relations shops startup world movers and shakers and tech industry onlookers.

We’ve had a variety of guests on the show. We’ve featured venture capitalists [https://www.newcomer.co/p/we-saw-this-movie-everybody-died#details] startup founders [https://www.newcomer.co/p/no-one-wants-to-spend-any-amount#details] political operatives [https://www.newcomer.co/p/blue-checks-and-semi-fascism-wtim#details] and security experts [https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-musk-bubble-in-tech-is-going#details]. In our most popular episode [https://www.newcomer.co/p/travis-kalanicks-right-hand-man-tells#details] we took a look at the media’s coverage of the rise and fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick with the old Uber CEO’s former top deputy Emil Michael.

Reporters especially our reporter friends have been a regular fixture of the show. We’ve talked with reporters like the New York Times’ Erin Griffith and Mike Isaac the Wall Street Journal’s Deepa Seetharaman Rolfe Winkler and Kirsten Grind Semafor’s Ben Smith and Reed Albergotti Insider’s Aki Ito Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz and Puck’s Teddy Schleifer.

Now the show — at least as we’ve come to know it — is coming to an end.

Tom is taking a job at the Wall Street Journal and he’s stepping back from his co-hosting duties. Today’s episode is our last together. The episode is a fun look back at some of the themes that we’ve explored over the past year and a half.

I’d encourage you to DM Tom on Twitter [https://twitter.com/cityofthetown] with your Microsoft story ideas and tips. Hopefully Tom will come back on the show as a guest and this memoriam will look overblown.

This iteration of the [https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-tech-news-podcasts-6e902e97-576f-429f-8322-372aad6c8de0]Dead Cat show is going out on a high [https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-tech-news-podcasts-6e902e97-576f-429f-8322-372aad6c8de0] apparently ranking number two among tech news shows at this moment.

Going forward I plan to continue podcasting and would love to get your input on the future of the show. I might keep the name “Dead Cat” or I might not. I’m rather fond of it. (By the way I explain the origins of the show’s name here [https://www.newcomer.co/i/44137550/whats-with-the-name].)

Leave a comment or send me an email [eric@newcomer.co] with your thoughts on what the future of the podcast should be. I’m open to suggestions for co-hosts interview subjects topics show names etc.

As I talk about on this week’s episode I’m inclined to align the show more closely with Newcomer newsletter content meaning going forward it will probably be more focused on the business of technology and less about how it’s covered.

In January I hope to experiment with different formats and see what works. I think the podcast will continue to be free meant to draw people into the newsletter and to attract a broader audience. I might pause the show in February for a relaunch or might decide that I can keep my stride. We’ll see!

Anyway this was a really enjoyable last episode to record. I hope you’ll give it a listen and help us wish Tom farewell.

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On last week’s [https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-musk-bubble-in-tech-is-going#details]Dead Cat episode [https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-musk-bubble-in-tech-is-going#details] 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 [https://www.newcomer.co/p/going-all-in-on-the-techmedia-war#details] 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 García Martínez the author of Chaos Monkeys and startup CEO came on the show. On his Substack The Pull Request he defended the free speech argument [https://www.thepullrequest.com/p/freeze-peach-and-the-internet] in April — before Musk acquired Twitter. (I’ve written [https://www.newcomer.co/p/why-are-reporters-so-opposed-to-free] that no one Musk included was plausibly going to govern social media under a free speech standard so invoking free speech is a pure marketing ploy. I think that position has been vindicated by Musk’s recent actions.)

More broadly García Martínez or AGM as he is widely known is someone who has pushed back against the tech media and leftwing employees. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan we set out to make sense of the culture war between tech “builders” and reporters.

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This past Thursday Elon Musk accused [https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1601062745079619584] 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 Twitter.

Last time Stamos came on the Dead Cat podcast he explained [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-medias-facebook-deflection-w-alex-stamos/id1582647825?i=1000542864355] why the media had underplayed its own culpability in enabling Russian disinformation while playing up Facebook’s failures.

This time Stamos helped Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I do our best to steel man Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss’s purported exposés on Jack Dorsey’s Twitter though none of us were particularly impressed by the seriousness of their reporting.

Taibbi documented [https://twitter.com/mtaibbi/status/1598822959866683394] Twitter’s handling of the Hunter Biden laptop story. And Weiss reported [https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1601007575633305600?s=20&t=Ogz_37WJfxOyVjHOwWQdFA] on Twitter’s decision to ban Trump after the January 6 insurrection attempt. (Since we recorded on Friday the gang has continued to pump out new iterations of the Twitter Files.)

Stamos argued that the real essence of the critique that emerged from Taibbi’s reporting was the reality that governments across the world are actively trying to shape social media companies’ content moderation decisions.

“Government interference on platforms is a real deal” Stamos said.

However Taibbi didn’t show that in his tweetstorm. Joe Biden wasn’t in office let alone the White House when Twitter decided to briefly censor the New York Post’s story about the Hunter Biden laptop.

“Musk giving very selective data to a couple of very politically biased journalists is not the kind of transparency we would need if we wanted to be confident that there was no interference on this platform by government” Stamos said.

“The kernel of truth is that every government on the planet including ours in the United States of America is trying to manipulate Twitter and all of the other major platforms. And so I proposed — here are things you can do if you’re Musk: You can have an open database of moderation decisions” Stamos said. “You can commit to releasing — instead of just releasing emails from the Biden team the DNC not government actors — you could release all communications from all government actors globally. So the Modi campaign the Indian government. I think it’s really important for somebody whose net worth is tied up in China like Musk. Communications with the Chinese Communist Party is the kind of thing that if you really cared about this you could release. But Musk apparently doesn’t like that idea.”

On the podcast we talked about Musk’s extreme exposure to China and Musk’s unwillingness to criticize the Chinese government. (Even as Musk has been vocally critical of the United States’ response to the pandemic he hasn’t said anything about China’s far more restrictive Covid lockdowns.)

“Tesla has a massive giga factory in Shanghai from which they will be producing cars to be shipped around the world” Stamos said. “China is already 25% of the revenue. Clearly if you look at discounted cash flows for the future China’s going to be more than 50% of their stock price. And so yes the [People’s Republic of China] has huge leverage over him. It’s like if Mark Zuckerberg instead of having all his money in Facebook stock his money was in a Chinese pharmaceutical company.”

Ultimately Stamos predicted that the Musk fever in Silicon Valley would break. But for the time being he said Musk was playing the same role that Trump did at many Thanksgivings across America — dividing friends and families.

“I’m putting down a marker now. The Musk bubble in tech is going to pop” Stamos told us. “Right now it has become trendy to be seen as counterculture to be seen on Team Musk. And there’s a bunch of people who I used to work with people who I’ve interacted with socially who are smart serious people who are now kind of waving the Musk flag. And just like with Trump. Just like with FTX. That bubble is going to pop. And you’re going to see all these people all of a sudden try to rewrite history.”

Stamos argued that Musk is unraveling before our very eyes. Tesla’s stock is down 60% this year while most of the media attention has been focused on Twitter.

“Musk is accelerating his breakdown here” Stamos said. “If you end up with Twitter going out of business. Him having to give up Twitter to the bondholders or the debt holders. If you see him having to step down as CEO of Tesla. If you see some kind of massive moment — or you know if there’s a horrible violent act that happens publicly. If there is God forbid something of the level of a Christchurch shooting or something that gets attached back to Musk’s moderation decisions — all of a sudden all these people who thought it was real cool to be on Team Musk are going to reverse themselves. And so I hope people are taking screenshots because it’s just a very scary. There’s a scary impulse in the Valley right now.”

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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 reality television programming including The Voice American Ninja Warrior and while at BBC Worldwide Dancing with the Stars. He also had the pleasure of overseeing Donald Trump’s The Apprentice. Telegdy regularly fielded calls from the future president. Trump always wanted to brag to Telegdy about the show’s ratings success Telegdy told us.

By the late 2010s streaming had upended the television business dislodging NBC from its prized perch and creating new media titans like Netflix Hulu Amazon and Apple. Disney proved most successful at answering the streaming industry’s money-burning onslaught — only for investors to suddenly change their tune this year and insist on profits rather than growth.

We invited Telegdy — who Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan got to know covering Hollywood — on the show to talk about the state of Hollywood today.

We start off the episode discussing Telegdy’s rise from his perch at the BBC and then his ascent to the top rungs of Hollywood at NBC. We talk about how the era of Hollywood “Jeffs” gave way to the reign of “Bobs.”

Telegdy dissects Bob Chapek’s short tenure as the chief executive officer of Disney before his old boss Bob Iger returned to the role.

Finally we ask Telegdy about The Hollywood Reporter article that helped tank his job at NBC. The Hollywood Reporter accused [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/nbc-insiders-say-entertainment-boss-fostered-toxic-culture-under-investigation-1305307/] Telegedy of “racist sexist and homophobic behavior.” The story’s headline read [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-features/nbc-insiders-say-entertainment-boss-fostered-toxic-culture-under-investigation-1305307/] “NBC Insiders Say Entertainment Boss Fostered Toxic Culture Under Investigation.” He was ousted from NBC in a reorganization as the company investigated the allegations.

We wanted to know what was it like being on the other side of a media exposé.

We reached out to NBC and the reporters at the Hollywood Reporter for comment. NBC declined to comment and the reporters did not reply.

In 2021 eager to make a quick comeback Telegdy co-founded the entertainment company The Whole Spiel with his cousin. Telegdy has prodigious knowledge about the entertainment business and a sharp British sensibility just the kind that might get someone in trouble with American office politics under a microscope.

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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 [https://chartable.com/charts/itunes/us-technology-podcasts] tech podcast and one of the most popular podcasts in the world. The show is a must-listen in Silicon Valley and the envy of many wannabe thought leaders.

We invited Calacanis on our much much smaller tech podcast Dead Cat to interrogate what has made All-In so successful and where Silicon Valley’s roiling war with the media is headed. Calacanis who is reportedly part of Elon Musk’s war room at Twitter warned us that he absolutely would not talk about Musk’s Twitter. (We tried.)

This was a fun episode that we recorded right before Thanksgiving with co-host Tom Dotan and regular special guest Katie Benner. I’m going to publish a companion article with my reflections on the conversation shortly. Enjoy!

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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 [https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23462333/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-cryptocurrency-effective-altruism-crypto-bahamas-philanthropy] 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 up with some better strategies for making sure tickets only get in the hands of the Swifties with truest of hearts.

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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.

Schleifer tells us what the midterm elections will mean for tech and Peter Thiel. Dotan confesses his deficiencies as a political forecaster.

On this week’s episode of the podcast I’m pretty open that I think the media had a blindspot for Bankman-Fried because of his effective altruism pedigree crypto skepticism and Democratic politics. Yesterday Stratechery quoted [https://stratechery.com/2022/narratives/] my tweets declaring as much. I assume my tweets caught the newsletter’s attention because I was willing to say something that most reporters won’t really admit publicly.

I agree with the subtext of Marc Andreessen’s latest tweets. Bankman-Fried’s performative virtue now appears to have been an obvious cover for his private transgressions. And the left was more susceptible to Bankman-Fried because it shares many of his professed values.

But I tweeted last Tuesday and recorded the podcast on Friday — and already the narrative is moving so fast. Republicans are clearly starting to spin up the Bankman-Fried criticism as an anti-Democratic talking point.

I think it’s ridiculous to expect that the federal government should have suspected anything in particular was amiss at FTX relative to the other exchanges when the company’s own investors didn’t seem to know anything was going on. Yes I think that the Securities and Exchange Commission should have been more aggressive about regulating crypto broadly and not just waited for things to come undone on their own. But I don’t think Republicans were exactly cheering them on there.

And while the media could have been more skeptical you can’t expect reporters to ferret out every scandal (though CoinDesk certainly played a role in bringing FTX down). Ultimately the company and major shareholders are responsible for the company’s behavior.

So while I think that the mainstream media would have been more skeptical of Bankman-Fried if not for his persona and politics I don’t think it was a corrupt or conscious act. Here’s a case where the left is guilty of the sort of implicit bias that it’s always talking about.

It’s too easy to overlook someone’s shortcomings when he wraps himself in the very things that you believe in.

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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 [https://www.businessinsider.com/hustle-culture-got-america-addicted-to-work]

* 'My company is not my family': Fed up with long hours many employees have quietly decided to take it easy at work rather than quit their jobs [https://www.businessinsider.com/overachievers-leaning-back-hustle-culture-coasting-employees-work]

* Everyone's talking about “quiet quitting.” Here's what it means — and how the term got its start. [https://www.businessinsider.com/quiet-quitting-coasting-nickelodeon-dan-schneider-shopify-slack-2022-9]

And here’s her latest on how the trend is reversing: RIP quiet quitting — layoff fears have workers back to the grind [https://www.businessinsider.com/quiet-quitting-already-over-layoffs-jobs-recession-economy-2022-10]

She writes

One of the first documented cases of quiet quitting was a recruiter I'll call Justin. Deep into the coronavirus pandemic after working 10- to 12-hour days for much of his career Justin had decided to dial it back on the job. When I spoke with him in February he had whittled his workweek down to 40 hours. In the ensuing months he went even further working as little as 30. Every week he worked a little bit less freeing him up to spend more time with his wife and their newborn baby.

It was Justin in fact who helped spark the national debate that's been raging over quiet quitting. After speaking with him and other recovering overachievers I wrote about [https://www.businessinsider.com/overachievers-leaning-back-hustle-culture-coasting-employees-work] how hustle culture thanks to the job security granted by the roaring economy was giving way to coasting culture. When a popular career coach on TikTok riffed [https://www.tiktok.com/@alifeafterlayoff/video/7071415799247949099?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&item_id=7071415799247949099&lang=en] on my story the phrase 'quiet quitting' became something of a new cultural dividing line. You either loved the Justins of the world for striking a reasonable work-life balance or condemned them as slackers and cheats.

But by the time the US was furiously debating his new approach to work Justin was already shifting gears. Over the summer as the economy began to slow he noticed his clients were scaling back their hiring plans. Performance reviews seemed to be getting tougher. Some of his colleagues were let go. 'It made me nervous' he told me. 'It hit me that I'm the only one who works in my family.' So he decided to 'play it a little more safe.' Today Justin the OG Quiet Quitter is back to going above and beyond. He's working 50 hours a week.

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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% [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/ohio/] chance of winning and Masters a 33% chance [https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/senate/arizona/].)

We discuss the populist future of the Republican Party and mourn the languishing low-taxes-at-any-cost wing of the Republican Party.

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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 [https://www.newcomer.co/p/generative-ai-startups-are-burning] 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 pay homage to the AI overlords cheering for the triumph of generalized artificial intelligence while Benaich warns us that the conversation about generalized artificial intelligence is a bit of a distraction.

Benaich is the co-author of the State of AI Report [https://www.stateof.ai/] that came out this month. It’s worth a read.

At the 42:40 mark Nathan departs and Katie Tom and I change topics dramatically.

Tom reads from the former Mailchimp CEO’s email to the email marketing company discouraging employees from stating their pronouns at the beginning of a meeting.

The article in [https://www.platformer.news/p/did-this-email-cost-mailchimps-billionaire]Platformer which first published the email carries the headline Did this email cost Mailchimp's billionaire CEO his job?

Here’s an excerpt of Mailchimp’s then CEO Ben Chestnut’s message to the company:

I am noticing that whenever new employees introduce themselves in Zoom before asking their question they’re also announcing their pronouns. This is completely unnecessary when a woman (who is clearly a woman) to tell us that her pronouns are “she/her” and a man (who is clearly a man) to tell us that his pronouns are “he/him.”

Tom Katie and I weigh in on the conversation around pronouns in the workplace heavy-handed HR policies and embarrassing CEO emails.

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Insider’s anonymous first-person account [https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-ghostwriter-silicon-valley-vc-venture-founder-san-francisco-2022-10] of a ghostwriter for venture capitalists’ tweets captivated tech Twitter last week. Everyone wanted to know who exactly was paying $100000 for a tweetstorm.

How could anyone make $200000 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 Bartlett's analysis of VC media output in a piece called A Twitter Troll’s Take on the Future of Investing.

Since then Redpoint hired a TikTok creator [https://www.tiktok.com/@redpoint?lang=en] to help bolster the firm’s brand and Bartlett launched a podcast called Cartoon Avatars.

On this week’s episode of Dead Cat Bartlett insists he’s writing his own tweets but he explains why VCs are so interested in building a Twitter following. Also Bartlett cast doubt on whether there’s a real market for people ghostwriting tweets for VCs.

Later in the episode we spitballed a ranking of some of the most important accounts on VC Twitter.

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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 $100000. Uber fired Sullivan and one of the company’s lawyers.

I published the exclusive story with the headline Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People.

Cyber security reporters [https://twitter.com/nicoleperlroth/status/1567171290867597312?s=20&t=NBwe82HX6Xkbwd2ABL9DHw] have — for years — raised questions [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/uber-hacker-payment-100000.html] about the Khosrowshahi regime’s story. Sullivan tried to frame the $100000 payout as part of the company’s white hat bug bounty program. And Sullivan’s defenders argued that Kalanick era Uber’s effort to conceal the payout — at a time when it was under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission over a prior data breach — looks even less anomalous today in a world where companies pay ransoms to hackers [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/06/technology/joe-sullivan-uber-security-trial-ciso.html] all the time.

So I’ve watched the case closely over the years to see whether I’d been had.

Had Khosrowshahi and crew whipped up a fake scandal? (I never quite understood why they would need to — Kalanick era Uber already had so many.)

Over the years the legal system has consistently validated Khosrowshahi era Uber’s account.

* In 2018 Uber reached a $148 million settlement with 50 states and the District of Columbia over its handling of the data breach.

* In 2019 two men pleaded guilty [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/30/technology/uber-lyndacom-hacks-guilty-plea.html] to the Uber hack.

* In 2020 the Justice Department indicted Sullivan a former federal prosecutor for his handling of the hack.

* Finally last week a jury found Sullivan guilty of both counts that prosecutors brought against him [https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-chief-security-officer-uber-convicted-federal-charges-covering-data-breach]. (Those charges were obstruction of the Federal Trade Commission and misprision of a felony.)

Still parts of the cyber security world defended Sullivan’s actions.

Joseph Menn the well-respected cyber security reporter for the Washington Post and author of Cult of the Dead Cow recently quoted security experts [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/05/uber-obstruction-sullivan-hacking/] raising concerns about the potential ramifications of the guilty verdict.

Menn wrote [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/10/05/uber-obstruction-sullivan-hacking/]

Most security professionals had been anticipating Sullivan’s acquittal noting that he had kept the CEO and others who were not charged informed of what was happening.

“Personal liability for corporate decisions with executive stakeholder input is a new territory that’s somewhat uncharted for security executives” said Dave Shackleford owner of Voodoo Security. “I fear it will lead to a lack of interest in our field and increased skepticism about infosec overall.”

John Johnson a “virtual” chief information security officer for multiple companies agreed. “Your company leadership could make choices that can have very personal repercussions to you and your lifestyle” he said. “Not saying everything Joe did was right or perfect but we can’t bury our head and say it will never happen to us.”

So Tom Dotan and I invited Menn onto the Dead Cat podcast to get his perspective on Sullivan’s conviction. We also asked Menn about crypto currency hacks Cult of the Dead Cow and Twitter’s whistleblower.

Give it a listen.

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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 reading to the private messages of the Silicon Valley glitterati.

We dish on texts from All-In hosts Jason Calacanis and David Sacks Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Salesforce co-CEO Marc Benioff. Would Emil Michael or Bill Gurley make for a better Twitter CEO?

Fellow Substacker Alex Kantrowitz did a great job compiling some of the greatest hits. So you can read along [https://bigtechnology.substack.com/p/elon-musks-text-exchanges-show-twitter].

We mourn our shattered reality that Musk’s texts aren’t full of Grade A genius ideas for reforming Twitter.

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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.

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This week on Dead Cat Reed Albergotti — the technology editor for the soon-to-be launched media [https://www.semafor.com/] 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 [https://medium.com/semafor-media/semafor-exclusive-biden-will-crack-down-on-chinese-tech-with-a-new-executive-order-da466c263a8a] that the Biden administration is looking to crack down on American investors cutting checks in China.

He wrote [https://medium.com/semafor-media/semafor-exclusive-biden-will-crack-down-on-chinese-tech-with-a-new-executive-order-da466c263a8a] for Semafor:

Administration officials were particularly alarmed this March by a report in The Information [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/sequoia-capitals-china-arm-seeks-8-billion-in-new-funds-defying-tech-rout?rc=nocdws] that the Chinese arm of the Silicon Valley venture firm Sequoia Capital has begun raising a new $8 billion fund for investments in Chinese technology according to people close to the administration. A Sequoia spokeswoman declined to comment.

…

The details of the order could still change but the administration has considered at least two ways of dealing with U.S. investments in China. One approach would be to require disclosures for any investments in semiconductors artificial intelligence quantum computing and potentially other industries like rare earth minerals and electric cars. The other would be to set up a system that would give the government the ability to block investments outright in the way that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States can block inbound investments from China and other countries.

A third option being discussed by those involved is to do both. Biden could require disclosure and then if something problematic arises take further action to block it. That option is more appealing to U.S. companies and could be just as effective.

Relatedly the New York Times reported on another executive order [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/us/politics/biden-china-tech-executive-order.html] that would expand the power of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to block Chinese investments in the United States. The Times reported that the executive order “directs the committee to consider whether a pending deal involves the purchase of a business with access to Americans’ sensitive data and whether a foreign company or government could exploit that information.”

Albergotti helped make sense of the Biden administration’s various executive orders — both planned and announced.

Albergotti with co-hosts Tom Dotan Katie Benner and Eric Newcomer speculated about whether [https://www.platformer.news/p/is-tiktoks-time-running-out] a TikTok ban was forthcoming and reflected on Senator Josh Hawley’s TikTok grandstanding [https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/platform-data-security-homeland-security].

In the latter half of the episode we turned our attention to Patagonia owner Yvon Chouinard’s donation of the outdoor clothing retailer. We discussed the New York Times’ glowing coverage [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html] of Chouinard’s donation.

Or was the media being unnecessarily dour? Was the media being too skeptical by declaring that Chouinard had avoided $700 million in taxes [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-15/patagonia-billionaire-who-gave-up-company-skirts-700-million-tax-hit?leadSource=uverify%20wall] by giving his company away and by comparing him to the shadowy donor [https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/republican-dark-money.html] Barre Seid who donated his device manufacturing company to support conservative causes?

Give it a listen.

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Dead Cat host Eric Newcomer already said his piece [https://www.newcomer.co/p/an-ode-to-code-a-dispatch-from-kara] 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 [https://www.newcomer.co/s/dead-cat] 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 for Mark Cuban.

We dug into Swisher’s interview strategy.

We asked her whether her media publication Recode has been a success. Were they aggressive enough ahead of #MeToo? And what’s next for Swisher? Will Pivot replace Code?

And we quiz Swisher on some of her favorite Code interviews. Why did she tell Mark Zuckerberg to take off his sweatshirt? How did Steve Jobs keep Bill Gates on his toes?

Then we end the episode with a discussion of her final Code main stage panel — Tim Cook Laurene Powell Jobs and Jony Ive.

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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 [https://www.amazon.com/Like-Comment-Subscribe-YouTubes-Domination/dp/0593296346] 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 shaping culture worldwide without receiving Facebook-level scrutiny.

Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan and I talked with Bergen on this week’s Dead Cat about his new book and YouTube’s ascendancy.

We asked:

* Why does YouTube's early legal battle with Viacom explain how YouTube evolved?

* What does it mean that YouTube star PewDiePiew has been displaced by a ubiquitous Mr. Beast?

* Why has YouTube been so weak willed about punishing the worst actors on its platform?

Give it a listen.





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Taylor Lorenz a columnist at the Washington Post has helped to popularize “cheugy [https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/29/style/cheugy.html]” “OK Boomer [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/29/style/ok-boomer.html]” and most recently “nimcels [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/24/nimcel-influencers-tiktok-youtube/].”

She wrote [https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/08/24/nimcel-influencers-tiktok-youtube/] 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. Being a niche internet micro celebrity feels less capitalist less ‘I’m a brand.’ ”

On this week’s Dead Cat we used Lorenz’s latest story as a jumping off point to talk about the evolution of the terms “creators” and “influencers” the rise of podcasting and Lorenz’s various Twitter scrapes.

Lorenz is a language obsessive and is writing a book [https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58818667-extremely-online] called Extremely Online. She doesn’t like the name [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/all-rippers-and-no-skippers-how-taylor-lorenz-became-part-of-the-story?rc=iatd7y] for the beat most people associate her with — internet culture reporter — since she doesn’t see a sharp line separating the real world and digital life.

We covered a lot of ground in this week’s episode. We talked about Lorenz’s recent tweet dismissing Dimes Square and her online beef with Marc Andreessen.

“All these billionaires are so fragile” Lorenz told us.

“I love debating tech. I love it” Lorenz said. “Andreessen had me on their podcast twice and didn’t release either of the episodes.”

We also discussed Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan’s latest story [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-youtube-became-a-podcasting-powerhouse-without-trying-2022-8] on YouTube’s accidental podcast ascendancy.

He wrote [https://www.businessinsider.com/how-youtube-became-a-podcasting-powerhouse-without-trying-2022-8] over the weekend:

Two recent surveys one by Cumulus Media [https://westwoodone.com/blog/2022/05/17/cumulus-media-and-signal-hill-insights-podcast-download-spring-2022-report-watching-podcasts-soars-as-youtube-edges-out-spotify-to-become-the-most-used-u-s-podcast-platform-and-li/] and one by Voices [https://www.insideradio.com/free/listeners-like-what-they-bought-from-podcast-ads-but-they-have-ad-complaints-too/article_be82cd46-d0fa-11ec-bc97-77abb319ae47.html] showed that YouTube was the most frequently used podcasting platform edging out Spotify and Apple's podcasting apps.

…

Last year the entire podcasting industry made $1.4 billion in ad revenue and is set to surpass $2 billion this year according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau [https://www.iab.com/insights/u-s-podcast-advertising-revenue-report-fy-2021-results-2022-2024-growth-projections/]. It’s a quickly growing industry but still a drop in the bucket compared to the $29 billion that YouTube made in ad revenue in 2021 or the $209 billion that Google ads made.

So befitting the provincial self-referential nature of the podcast industry — we talked about a tiny industry on an insider-y podcast with a guest who herself says she’s looking to get into the podcast game.

Give it a listen.

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Newcomer Podcast

A podcast about Silicon Valley, hosted by newsletter writer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer. Listen in for interviews with the dealmakers and builders who matter. Subscribe to newcomer.co for summaries of the episodes plus tech industry news, scoops, and analysis.

This Kicked Off With a Dinner With Elon Musk Years Ago (with Reid Hoffman)

2 years ago