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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

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All Episodes

52:19

newcomer + solana

Dead Cat ·

2025/09/02

I just faced off with an old foe — Mike Solana, the founder of Pirate Wires.I’m sad to report that it was a chummy affair. We discussed whether the New York Times as an institution should continue to exist, the state of bias in tech media, tariffs, China, and our respective media businesses. I suspect that you’ll find it an enjoyable watch — our two worldviews collide and find they share plenty of common ground.Somehow, I doubt this will be my last chat with Solana. We still have plenty to disagree

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38:43

Is Venture Broken? With Beezer Clarkson

Dead Cat ·

2025/08/26

Sapphire Partners’ Beezer Clarkson — the rare limited partner brave enough to share her thoughts publicly — just joined my Substack Live to talk about her latest analysis of the state of venture capital. You can listen to the recording in the video above. Clarkson published her findings on LinkedIn — and I’m including some of the key charts and takeaways below. Clarkson asked whether megafunds are sucking up so much oxygen in venture capital that they aren’t leaving any room for smaller, boutique VC

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25:59

My Conversation with Substack Co-Founders Chris Best...

Dead Cat ·

2025/07/17

You heard it here first that Substack was trying to raise a substantial new round of funding. Today, Substack announced that it had raised $100 million at a $1.1 billion valuation in a round led by BOND and TCG. The New York Times had the story.I told you that Substack’s growing mobile application and the prospect that Substack might someday dip its toe into sponsorships were two reasons that investors were excited about what started off as a mere subscription newsletter business. This afternoon, I

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44:01

My Conversation with Roy Bahat As Bloomberg Beta...

Dead Cat ·

2025/06/09

Full transparency: I like the team at Bloomberg Beta. I worked at Bloomberg as a technology reporter for nearly six years before I started this newsletter. During my time at Bloomberg in San Francisco I got to know the team, including its leader Roy Bahat. So when Bahat came to me with the news that the firm is announcing its fifth fund — another $75 million fund from Bloomberg LP to back the earliest of early startups — I said he should talk about the decision exclusively on our Substack Live. You

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25:53

Dishing on Investors' Favorite Enterprise Startups...

Dead Cat ·

2025/03/25

I just got off a live video recording with Wing founding partner Peter Wagner. We dissected the Enterprise Tech 30 list that we published earlier today.We talked about what companies got snubbed, who made a sudden appearance this year, what we can learn from past lists, and much more.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

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33:17

Venture Capital and the Private Markets in 2025

Dead Cat ·

2025/01/31

Just wrapped up a 30-minute conversation with Sequoia’s Andrew Reed. We talked about what the DeepSeek drama means for private tech startups, his view on forever-private startups, the rise of venture capital megafunds, and some lessons from his time at Sequoia.Andrew Reed is a Partner at Sequoia Capital. He is on the boards of Figma, Klarna, Bolt, Vanta, Strava, Harmonic, and Warp, among others, and led investments in Phantom, Odoo, and Zapier. Reed was previously involved with Sequoia's investments

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24:44

Listen: OpenAI's 'Great Man,' AI Regulation & Drugs

Dead Cat ·

2024/10/01

In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger delve into the world of venture capital deals, starting with Ujet’s $76M Series D for its AI-powered call center software. Next up is the drama surrounding PearAI, whose growth-hacker tweet set the tech world buzzing. From there, they navigate through OpenAI’s own “Game of Thrones,” exploring internal power plays and high-stakes exits, before turning to California’s latest AI regulatory battles. To wrap things up,

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23:40

AI + Robots, YC Preview & Why the Cool Kids Keep...

Dead Cat ·

2024/09/24

Episode 1: AI + Robots, YC Preview, and Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on TechIn this week’s episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss three top venture capital deals, including World Labs and delivery startup Flink. They also wade into Y Combinator’s upcoming Demo Day, highlighting trends in defense tech and the implications of AI’s power consumption.The conversation touches on Runway’s licensing deal with Lionsgate and concludes with an examination of John

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52:15

Lessons Learned From a Bank Run (Peter Hébert &...

Dead Cat ·

2024/03/21

We’ve got two great sessions from the Newcomer Banking Summit for you: * First up, WestCap Group founder Laurence Tosi and Lux Capital co-founder Peter Hébert. They give an unvarnished account of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank with the benefit of hindsight. “It was like the banking equivalent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Hébert said. “It was absolute sheer terror.”* We follow that up with Silicon Valley Bank President Marc Cadieux, who talks about where SVB is today and fields

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44:28

Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman &...

Dead Cat ·

2023/11/30

Today, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit.Reid Hoffman was fresh off a meeting with President Joe Biden when Hoffman and I sat down on stage at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit Nov. 15. On stage, he told us that working to get Biden elected next year is one of his top priorities. Then, I sat down with the ever-feisty Vinod Khosla. The investor called for a TikTok ban and more welcoming immigration policies while warning against open-source artificial

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22:04

Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi & MosaicML Founder Naveen...

Dead Cat ·

2023/11/21

We were delighted to kick off the 2nd Cerebral Valley AI Summit with Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, and Naveen Rao, co-founder of MosaicML. Their encounter at our debut event in March led to Ghodsi buying Rao’s company, which had little revenue, for $1.3 billion. At our event on Nov. 15, the two discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power applications that drive their

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64:27

The Artificial Intelligence Startup Draft

Dead Cat ·

2023/11/14

If you could amass any five artificial intelligence startup bets right now, which companies would you pick? My Cerebral Valley co-hosts and I took a stab at answering that question with an artificial intelligence startup draft. Our startup draft starts at 27:35 after a discussion of some of the biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit. The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now. The goal was to amass five

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92:14

Chip War (with Chris Miller)

Dead Cat ·

2023/11/10

For this week’s episode, I spoke with Chris Miller, the author of Chip War, about the rise of Nvidia. While OpenAI gets the lion’s share of the public adulation for the sudden excitement about generative intelligence, Nvidia’s H100 chips are powering much of the generative AI frenzy. Nvidia’s stock has climbed over 200% over the past 12 months. And the company has become a key investor in generative AI startups.Miller (who comes on the show around the 41-minute mark) talks through Nvidia’s history

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83:55

The AI Personal Stack (with Joshua Browder)

Dead Cat ·

2023/11/01

I’m back from my honeymoon in Japan. Thanks for sticking with the newsletter as I celebrated my wedding this year. Expect more of my newsletter writing soon. If you have tips or story ideas for me, you can always reach out at eric@newcomer.co.I hope you’ve been enjoying the Cerebral Valley podcast series while I’ve been gone. If you missed the first three episodes, you can check them out in the links below:* The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality* AI Kills Us All (with

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94:45

Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/...

Dead Cat ·

2023/10/24

Video games often represent the frontier of any new technology. Many of the most popular applications in the initial iPhone app store were games. Today’s virtual reality devices are dominated by video games. Artificial intelligence seems poised to upend the video game business and entertainment more broadly.On the third episode of our six-part Cerebral Valley podcast series, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I game out how artificial intelligence could reshape the media we consume. It helps that Max

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75:09

AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)

Dead Cat ·

2023/10/17

What’s so crazy about this moment in artificial intelligence is that many of the most credible voices in AI think there’s a real chance that this all turns out really, really badly. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently pegged his “chance that something goes really quite catastrophically wrong on the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%. That’s comforting.Applications to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit close TODAY October 17. Apply right now to be considered for an invitation!On the

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61:41

The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence...

Dead Cat ·

2023/10/10

In the past 12 months, it has felt like “AI” transformed from a pair of letters that companies affixed to their latest product announcements to get some extra marketing luster to the shorthand for a genuine technology revolution. ChatGPT, Dall-E, Midjourney, and more showed the world what artificial intelligence is now capable of doing. Then, the funding started pouring in for every startup that had anything to do with those two letters. Every venture firm needed to bet on their own foundational

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60:05

Life Extension Innovations, Moonshots & Snake Oil...

Dead Cat ·

2023/09/27

I brought two top Silicon Valley entrepreneurs working on extending lifespans on the Newcomer podcast this week. One of them is trying to help people live longer. The other, their dogs.James Peyer, the CEO of Cambrian Bio, is acquiring majority stakes in drugs that could combat a particular illness while showing promise for broader use among healthy humans. Meanwhile, Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal, is developing drugs to make dogs live longer. Fundamentally life extension, or longevity, is about

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65:39

Fighting for Pro-Crypto Legislation in Sam...

Dead Cat ·

2023/09/13

Chris Lehane was once the consummate Democratic spin man and campaign wonk. He introduced the world to the vast right-wing conspiracy against the Clintons. In 2015, Lehane dove into the high-growth startup world. He joined Airbnb to run policy and communications. He taught the home sharing company how to fight nicely with cities, dishing out data and tax cooperation in exchange for favorable local regulations. Unlike Uber’s confrontational approach that had it going to war with Bill de Blasio in New

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59:28

He Helps Rich Tech Founders Part With Their Money...

Dead Cat ·

2023/08/29

I spend most of my time here talking about how people earn their money.Rey Flemings, the chief executive of the YC-backed startup Myria, is an expert at helping people spend it. For several years, Flemings ran a luxury services consultancy for family offices. In other words, he threw parties in Las Vegas, introduced billionaires to celebrities, rented out private mansions, and helped people acquire things money can’t usually buy. These days, Flemings is building a startup around the same concept

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