Newcomer Pod

Read the full Emergent list of 29 promising startups here: https://www.newcomer.co/p/emergent-2026AI could create a world with billions of agents, millions of robots, and entirely new industries we have barely begun to imagine. Felicis founder and former Google product manager Aydin Senkut joins Eric Newcomer to break down the technologies he believes will define the next decade, from artificial i...

Mercury CEO Immad Akhund on the AI startup funding frenzy, agents that spend money, and the future of banking. Immad joins Eric Newcomer to discuss building Mercury to $1 billion in annualized revenue, competing with JPMorgan Chase, and developing financial tools for AI agents. What happens when an agent can move money, make purchases, or help run a business? They explore the controls and human ov...

OpenAI’s revenue confusion, Apple’s AI missteps, and Nvidia’s investments raise a bigger question: how much depends on the AI boom continuing? Big Technology founder Alex Kantrowitz joins Eric Newcomer to examine OpenAI and Anthropic’s businesses, the market’s sensitivity to their growth, and the competition reshaping Big Tech. They discuss Apple’s siloed culture and struggles with Apple Intellige...

Reid Hoffman on ChatGPT, the future of jobs, and why he believes the AI boom is keeping America out of a recession. The LinkedIn co-founder joins Eric Newcomer to explain why America needs to keep building AI while being careful about how powerful new systems are released. He shares why nobody can confidently predict AI’s impact on employment, how AI-native startups could disrupt established busin...

Why did Josh Elman leave Apple, and where can AI startups still win against OpenAI? The former Siri and Apple Intelligence team member explains why he’s betting on a new wave of consumer companies. Josh joins Eric Newcomer to discuss his move to Andreessen Horowitz, what held Siri back, and how Apple can rebuild users’ trust. He shares why OpenClaw changed his thinking about startups and why found...

Renee Jones on how billion-dollar startups escaped public scrutiny, why founders became more powerful than their boards, and what happens when private markets operate in secrecy. Renee Jones, Boston College Law School professor, former SEC official, and author of Untamed Unicorns, joins Eric Newcomer to examine how the startup financing system shifted from investor oversight to founder control. Re...

What does NVIDIA really get from Hugging Face—and what is Silicon Valley missing about China? Zavain Dar, co-founder of Dimension and an early Hugging Face investor during his time at Lux Capital, joins Eric Newcomer to unpack NVIDIA’s open source strategy, the competition with OpenAI and Anthropic, and why his trips to China changed how he thinks about the future of technology. They discuss China...

Sam Parr on getting fired by Airbnb the day before he started, selling The Hustle, and why $10 million in revenue changes everything. Sam Parr, founder of The Hustle and Hampton and co-host of My First Million, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about how he went from an Airbnb firing to an eight-figure media exit. Sam breaks down what 5,000 Hampton founder interviews reveal about the messy middle betwee...

How can billions of video game clips train AI to control robots? General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte explains why gaming data may be the missing ingredient for the next generation of robotics and AI agents. Pim de Witte built the world's largest RuneScape private server as a teenager before founding Medal, one of the biggest gaming clip platforms in the world. Today, Medal processes roughly one...

John Coogan, co-founder of TBPN, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about the acquisition that shocked the tech media world. John breaks down how TBPN went from two guys in suits to one of the most-watched live tech shows on the internet, why OpenAI came calling, what an editorial independence clause actually means in practice, and why he and Jordy chose to sell when they didn't have to. He also gets...

Taylor Lorenz on why the social media panic is overblown and who's actually driving it. Taylor Lorenz, journalist and author of Extremely Online, joins Eric Newcomer to push back on the moral panic around phones, social media, and screen time. Taylor argues there is no such thing as social media addiction, that age verification laws do more harm than good, and that the groups pushing child pro...

The Goldman Sachs exec who automated Wall Street on what AI agents actually do to jobs, companies, and the future of enterprise software. Marty Chavez got his AI PhD in 1991 when there were exactly zero AI jobs. So he went to Goldman Sachs and spent decades building the machines that took over Wall Street. Now at Sixth Street and on Alphabet's board, he joins Eric Newcomer at the Cerebral Vall...

Semafor's editor-in-chief on why Washington has decided Anthropic needs to pick a side. Ben Smith, co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, joins Eric Newcomer to break down the collision between the Trump administration and Anthropic, and what it reveals about the new relationship between Washington and big tech. Ben explains why the government is taking equity stakes in companies, how the...

Aidan Gomez on AGI, China, and the Biggest Risk Facing AI. Cohere co-founder and Transformer co-author Aidan Gomez joins Eric Newcomer to discuss whether we've already reached AGI, why Chinese AI models are being underestimated, the future of enterprise AI, sovereign AI, and why relying on a handful of AI companies could become the industry's biggest risk. If you're interested in artif...

The CEO of a $4 billion compliance company on how her biggest competitor was faking it, and what that means for AI startup culture. Christina Cacioppo, co-founder and CEO of Vanta, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about the scandal that shook the compliance world. Her $4 billion competitor Delve was caught pre-filling compliance reports without doing the actual security work — and customers had no idea...

Ed Zitron is back, and he's making his strongest case yet that OpenAI and Anthropic are running a deliberate con on the public. In his second appearance on the Newcomer Podcast, Ed Zitron sits down with Eric Newcomer to break down why he believes there is no real ROI in AI, how Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have hidden the true cost of their products behind subscription pricing, and why enterpri...

How San Francisco's tech culture went from countercultural idealism to right-wing power, and what it means for the rest of us. Jonathan Weber, editor at large at The New Yorker and author of City on the Edge, joins Eric Newcomer to trace the 30-year arc of how San Francisco became the center of the tech universe, and how the industry that once promised to change the world ended up changing pol...

WIRED's global editorial director on why Silicon Valley wants to control the press and what she's doing about it. Katie Drummond, global editorial director of WIRED, sits down with Eric Newcomer to talk about the simmering war between tech and media. From surviving the Gawker bankruptcy to now running one of the most scrutinized publications in tech, Katie doesn't hold back on why figu...

The man who helped bring down Gawker is back, and this time he’s coming for the media industry. Eric sits down with Aron Ping D’Souza, the Oxford law student who first pitched Peter Thiel on the idea that would eventually bankrupt Gawker. Today, Aron is building the Enhanced Games, a PED-legal sporting competition, and Objection AI, a Peter Thiel-backed platform designed to investigate news articl...

Vinod Khosla on Why AI Could End Human Labor and Change Capitalism Forever Vinod Khosla joins Newcomer to discuss AI, capitalism, freedom, education, religion, and why he believes technology will fundamentally reshape how humans live and work. The legendary venture capitalist behind Sun Microsystems and early bets on OpenAI shares his thoughts on why AI could eliminate the need for traditional job...

Silicon Valley has more power than ever, so why won't it speak up? Katie Jacobs Stanton, former Twitter executive, Obama White House alum, and founder of Moxxie Ventures, joins Eric Newcomer to talk about what's really happening inside the Valley right now. They get into why tech leaders stayed silent when ICE showed up in Minnesota, what Sam Altman's Molotov comment really exposed, an...

Amanda Askell, AI safety researcher at Anthropic, joins Eric Newcomer to break down one of the biggest and most uncomfortable questions in tech right now: could AI systems like Claude become conscious, and if they do, what do we owe them? They discuss why treating AI systems poorly might matter more than people think, how researchers are approaching questions of AI consciousness, and why some of t...

Kara Swisher has spent decades as the most feared journalist in Silicon Valley. She predicted the January 6th insurrection in 2019. She called out Zuckerberg on hate speech years before it became a mainstream conversation. She warned about techs drift toward right wing politics before anyone wanted to hear it. And she has been right about most of it. Eric sat down with Kara Swisher — CNN Contribut...

Jim Lanzone has spent his entire career betting on companies the internet forgot about and making them matter again. CEO of Ask.com, Tinder, and now Yahoo. Eric sat down with him to find out how he pulled off the turnaround nobody thought was possible, what single decision handed Google the internet, and why Yahoo is building its own AI search product for the first time in over a decade. They get...

VCs surveyed across the industry ranked their most exciting enterprise tech companies and the #1 early stage pick was a name almost nobody had heard of. Eric sits down with Han Wang, CEO of Mintlify, the knowledge infrastructure platform that quietly powers the docs for Anthropic, Lovable, and thousands of other companies and found out their servers crashed overnight because of Open Claw before Ha...