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PODCAST

Dead Cat

Where technology and venture capital intersect: A deeply reported newsletter on the inner workings of the startup industry. Helmed by Eric Newcomer with writing from Madeline Renbarger. www.newcomer.co

technology tech news

All Episodes

48:16

We Saw This Movie. Everybody Died at the End (w/Rick...

Dead Cat ·

2022/05/10

Firstmark Capital’s Rick Heitzmann is someone I turn to when I want to understand what public market activity means for private startups. Heitzmann’s got an ear to Wall Street from his offices in New York City, but he invests in private technology startups.So I invited Heitzmann on Dead Cat with Tom Dotan and Katie Benner. We tried to make sense of this sudden downturn. Everyone has seen it coming for years. We just never knew when the party would end. Building on my story “The Endgame” from last

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56:26

Adderall on Demand (w/Rolfe Winkler)

Dead Cat ·

2022/05/03

During the pandemic, the U.S. government relaxed rules that prevented doctors from prescribing controlled substances — like Adderall — over the internet. That’s created a bonanza for venture-backed companies like Cerebral and Done. Wall Street Journal reporter Rolfe Winkler has been chronicling these telemedicine companies’ prescription practices. Winkler — a friend and former bridge partner of mine — came on Dead Cat to talk to Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and me about his stories.In March, with a

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59:19

Streaming in Crisis (w/Lucas Shaw)

Dead Cat ·

2022/04/26

Netflix’s stock price has been in free fall. The company was worth more than $300 billion late last year and now the stock market values the company at just $89 billion.At the same time, CNN’s buzzy streaming service CNN+ didn’t even get the chance to spread its wings. David Zaslav, now the CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, pulled the plug on the nascent streaming service after Discovery closed its acquisition of CNN parent company WarnerMedia. On this week’s Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I talk with

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52:58

Rooting for Elon

Dead Cat ·

2022/04/19

On the latest episode of Dead Cat, we throw our weight behind Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter.Katie Benner, Tom Dotan, and I make our predictions about whether Musk is going to succeed in his mission to acquire Twitter. (I’m betting against.)Dotan offers Musk a Plan B: Musk could buy the beleaguered photo pin board company Pinterest for a measly $15 billion.I celebrate venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s recent Easter absolution: He inexplicably unblocked me on Twitter.Meanwhile, Benner, who gave up

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53:43

Imploding Fast (w/Kate Clark)

Dead Cat ·

2022/04/12

Of all the sectors, I would never have guessed that one-click checkout companies would be the nexus of startup world drama. And yet that is where we find ourselves.The industry leader Bolt was co-founded by a man who seems desperate to win some sort of commendation for his conspiratorial tweetstorms.Meanwhile, rival Fast flamed out hot and, well, fast. The startup, which raised money from Index Ventures and Stripe, generated just $600,000 in revenue from its checkout service last year. The company

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68:44

The Fictionalized Viral Uber Driver

Dead Cat ·

2022/04/05

On the Dead Cat podcast, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talk about Apple’s WeCrashed, Hulu’s The Dropout, and SHOWTIME’s Super Pumped — the TV shows about Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, and Travis Kalanick respectively. (Spoilers: If you believe that real events that have already transpired can be spoiled.)This morning, I emailed Fawzi Kamel, the Uber driver whose confrontation with then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick went viral when I published it at Bloomberg. The video captures Kalanick — at the peak

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59:09

Going Evergreen (w/Hunter Walk)

Dead Cat ·

2022/03/29

Hunter Walk, co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew, is a staple of tech Twitter. Walk worked on Second Life and at YouTube before founding his own venture fund along with Satya Patel.A month ago, the duo announced that they were dramatically changing their strategy. The firm had previously raised three funds from limited partners — $35 million in 2013, $50 million in 2015, and $90 million in 2018 — and invested in companies like Chime, Plaid, and Honor. Then, late last month, Walk and

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53:39

VC Jeopardy!

Dead Cat ·

2022/03/22

On this week’s Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I reflect on this year’s SXSW. We take stock of the Austin tech scene and ponder what storylines emerged from the mega conference.At the 19:24 mark, VC Jeopardy starts. You can listen in as I host four venture capitalists in a fierce battle of startup-world trivia. Our contestants were Deena Shakir at Lux Capital, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, Julian Eison at Next Ventures, and Steve Brotman at Alpha Partners. You can also play along yourself:Here’s a

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58:49

Brands Are Not Human Beings (w/Jack Conte)

Dead Cat ·

2022/03/15

Patreon CEO Jack Conte took the stage at my first ever SXSW event with a beer in hand. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we discussed crowdfunding, OnlyFans, Substack, NFTs, Ukraine, and whether creators are brands.Speaking from the stage at the Volley Game Room at SXSW, Conte explained why his company wouldn’t compete with the likes of Twitter and YouTube to build audiences for the creators that it works with. “Patreon set out to solve a very specific problem. The specific problem we were solving

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54:58

Keeping Tabs on the Oligarchs (w/Teddy Schleifer)

Dead Cat ·

2022/03/09

Suddenly, Silicon Valley is worried about its Russian ties. I’m getting messages from sources about potential Russian-connected venture capital firms and software companies with inordinate numbers of Russian customers. Companies like Netflix, Disney, Samsung, and TikTok are cutting at least some of their services in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is restricting access to Facebook.There were echoes of this moment, in 2018, when Silicon Valley was forced to reckon with its addiction to Saudi Arabian oil

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58:53

A Content Farming Retrospective (w/Shawn Colo)

Dead Cat ·

2022/03/01

In 2011, Google brought the hammer down on Demand Media. The search giant changed its search algorithm and sent Demand Media’s stock plummeting. The company had built web traffic by paying an army of independent writers — including Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan — to write low-effort posts that ranked highly on Google search results. The kneecapping of Demand Media’s content farm was a precursor to the platform wars of the next decade. Facebook became famous for building up ecosystems — whether it was

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63:14

Super Pumped (w/Mike Isaac)

Dead Cat ·

2022/02/22

As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses. So Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I were interested to see how New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s propulsive book about Uber from 2019 — Super Pumped — would be translated to our television

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56:57

Razzlekhan and Wordcels

Dead Cat ·

2022/02/16

Our regular special guest, Katie Benner, recently sunk her teeth into the intersection of an old passion and a new one: technology industry ignominy and, her current beat at the New York Times, the U.S. Justice Department. Benner talks me through the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. The duo were accused by the Justice Department of laundering money from the 2016 Bitfinex robbery. The arrest shows the federal government’s increasing sophistication when it comes to crypto currencies

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69:40

Meta Commentary (w/Alex Heath)

Dead Cat ·

2022/02/08

Last March, Alex Heath interviewed Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s virtual reality ambitions. Then in October, Heath broke the news for The Verge that Facebook planned to change its name and interviewed Zuckerberg again. This month, he wrote that both Facebook and Snapchat’s visions are colliding. They’re both hoping to look a lot like another app: TikTok.With newly rebranded Meta’s stock plummeting and Snap’s shares spiking, we thought it would be a good time to have Heath come on Dead Cat and

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57:20

The Dead Cat Experience

Dead Cat ·

2022/02/01

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are pulling their music from Spotify over the company’s more than $100 million exclusive deal with popular podcaster Joe Rogan. The UFC commentator likes to host vaccine skeptics and has voiced his own apprehensions about the necessity of the vaccine for young people.Meanwhile, Substack — the home to this newsletter — apparently generates more than $2.5 million a year from anti-vax newsletters. The company recently published a blog post titled, “Society has a trust

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47:48

Bobby Kotick's Call of Duty (w/Kirsten Grind)

Dead Cat ·

2022/01/25

Wall Street Journal reporter Kirsten Grind helped expose Activision Blizzard’s troubled corporate culture in a bombshell article in November, co-written with her colleagues Ben Fritz and Sarah Needleman. The article revealed that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick knew about the company’s sexual misconduct problems, including an alleged rape, and, in some cases, did not report the incidents to Activision’s board of directors. Then in January Microsoft moved to pay $75 billion in cash to buy the video games

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43:22

Across the Pond (w/Ophelia Brown)

Dead Cat ·

2022/01/18

Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital announced Tuesday that it has raised $432 million for its third venture fund. (I told paying subscribers back in April 2021 to watch out for Blossom’s next fund.) The European Series A firm is taking a big leap from its $85 million first fund in 2019 and its $185 million second fund in 2020. Tom Dotan and I talk with Brown about her crypto investing — including Blossom’s recent investment in juggernaut MoonPay, which raised a $555 million Series A at $3.4 billion

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61:13

No One Wants to Spend Any Amount of Time With a...

Dead Cat ·

2022/01/11

Phil Libin is as deeply rooted in the Silicon Valley ethos as you can find. He immigrated to the United States as a child from the Soviet Union and went on to found the once trendy tech word-processing software company Evernote. He took a detour as a venture capitalist at General Catalyst. Now he’s a founder again. He’s the CEO of Mmhmm, a video conferencing company that’s backed by Sequoia Capital, and runs a product studio called All Turtles. Even though he has virtual reality headsets spilling

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70:07

Emperor Zuck (w/Deepa Seetharaman)

Dead Cat ·

2022/01/05

Deepa Seetharaman is a longtime friend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter, and — most importantly — a committed Dead Cat podcast listener. Her ears have been burning as we’ve talked about her and her colleagues reporting with former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos and as we’ve dissected her reporting on Instagram’s influence on teenage girls in our episode “The Facebook Philes.” And given the fact that we named this podcast after Mark Zuckerberg’s strange text messages with board member

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62:15

Defogging Our 2021 Amnesia

Dead Cat ·

2021/12/29

Katie Benner, Tom Dotan, and Eric Newcomer look back on 2021 in Techmeme headlines for our final episode of Dead Cat for the year. We discuss some of the biggest stories of the year: * In January, Microsoft said Russian hackers accessed some of its source code and the U.S. government pinned the SolarWinds hack on Russians. * In February, Elon Musk drove Clubhouse listeners (and journalists blocked by Marc Andreessen) to YouTube as they tried to listen to the live interview on the platform. It would

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117 results

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