Dead Cat

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...

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...

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 in...

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 ear...

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

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,...

Waymo’s milestone — surpassing Lyft’s ride numbers in San Francisco — takes center stage in our first podcast of the new year. Still, it’s not obvious that this translates into guaranteed scale across the country. We consider the operational headaches that come with scaling driverless fleets. One way forward for Waymo could be further collaborations with legacy rideshare giants like Uber. We also...

The ServiceTitan IPO has been an unexpected bright spot as 2024 comes to a close. On this year’s final episode of the Newcomer Podcast , we discuss what other startups might follow in ServiceTitan’s footsteps next year. Eric defends the controversial ratchet provision in its last funding round. And we dig into Alphabet’s big week. We focus on startups on this show, but this week was a good reminde...

After a brief hiatus, the Newcomer podcast is back! Madeline Renbarger has rejoined me as my co-host to help break down all of the news across venture capital and startups. This week, we’re kicking off with a massive $693 million chip deal and Google’s huge quantum computing breakthroughs, in news that feels like flashes of Silicon Valley returning to its “silicon” roots. Still, some of this tech...

I’ve been spending some of the afternoon chatting with OpenAI’s now fully released o1. So far, I don’t know that it feels like the super intelligent ChatGPT 5 that we’ve all fantasized about — but it’s smart and sophisticated. The new model helped me to game out potential stories and talk through problems. And of course it wrote me a poem and told me a couple dad jokes. It looks like the biggest i...

If you get some downtime over the Thanksgiving holiday, catch up on everything that happened at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. We’ve got videos of all of the talks on stage on our YouTube channel and are sharing my conversation with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei over our podcast feeds. Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado Lessons from This Year's $14B in Gene...

Cerebral Valley is tomorrow! I’ve been listening to old interviews, brainstorming with Claude and ChatGPT, and talking to investors to prep for my conversations with Dario Amodei , Martin Casado , and Alexandr Wang . We’ll be sharing those conversations here in the newsletter. Expect video highlights on our social media feeds, a detailed rundown of the biggest moments in the newsletter Thursday, a...

This is probably my favorite episode of the year. We just updated our picks for our artificial intelligence startup fantasy draft. That means dropping startups whose star is fading and making new pickups. Last year, Max Child , James Wilsterman , and I drafted the most promising generative AI startups that had raised $100 million or more. In this latest episode, we make some hard choices: cutting...

We’re back with a couple episodes of the Cerebral Valley Podcast leading up to our summit on November 20 . I’m joined by my Cerebral Valley AI Summit co-hosts Max Child and James Wilsterman . On this episode, we started by talking about the thing on everyone’s minds — the election of Donald Trump and what it means for artificial intelligence. Then, at the 28 minute mark we debate whether Anthropic...

We’re in the home stretch. Silicon Valley’s political nightmare could hopefully soon be over. In the latest episode of the Newcomer podcast , we dig into all of the tech industry’s burning political takes. There was Josh Wolfe’s endorsement waffling. Jeff Bezos’ editorial intervention. And the general sense that everyone is losing their minds leading up to what should be Trump’s last run at the pr...

Newcomer turns four this week. On the podcast, Madeline talked with me about how it all began. When I made the decision to start Newcomer, the venture capital industry was in the beginnings of a record-breaking bull run. A lot has changed since then, for both venture and the media industry, but I’m excited about our growth at Newcomer and wanted to share a bit more about what’s next. Description E...

Description In this episode, Eric Newcomer is joined by guest host Jon McNeill , a seasoned executive with experience at Lyft and Tesla who is now leading DVx Ventures. They discuss the bear case for OpenAI. The OpenAI discussion then leads into a closer look at the contrast between founder and manager modes before concluding with a discussion on Tesla’s advancements, or lack thereof, in self-driv...

Description:  In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast , Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss two major funding rounds, the ongoing downturn in VC funding, and the growing imbalance between public relations professionals and reporters. Eric and Madeline highlight Poolside’s $500M round and Impulse Space’s $150M raise, while pointing out that even the AI mega rounds cant hide the downturn in...

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 a...

Episode 1: AI + Robots, YC Preview, and Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech In this week’s episode of the Newcomer Podcast, hosts Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger discuss three top venture capital deals, including World Labs and delivery startup Flink. They also wade into Y Combinator’s upcoming Demo Day, highlighting trends in defense tech and the implications of AI’s power consumption. Th...

Today we’re highlighting two fireside chats from the Newcomer Banking Summit on March 14. First up is Mercury CEO Immad Akhund . He talked about how the Silicon Valley Bank crisis sent customers rushing to his digital banking service. He pitched a world where software — not human bankers — solve most of customers’ problems. Akhund told me, “My experience with relationship banking was I need to sen...

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...

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 c...

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 ent...

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 s...