Newcomer Pod

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...

Matt Mahan is the Mayor of San Jose and a candidate for Governor of California. He is one of the only prominent Democrats in the state willing to say out loud that California's failure to fix housing, homelessness, and energy costs has handed the MAGA movement its best ammunition. It isn't a partisan argument. It's a governance one. In this conversation, Eric sits down with Matt to get...

Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures, was one of the first checks into Wiz — the Israeli cybersecurity company Google acquired for $32 billion. It wasn't luck. It was a decade-long relationship with the founders, a willingness to wire money on conviction alone, and a philosophy that treats risk calculus as a fool's errand. In this conversation, Eric sits down with Shardul to unpack how...

Barry McCardel spent years at Palantir before co-founding Hex, the AI data platform he describes as “Cursor for data.” In this conversation with Eric Newcomer, he breaks down Palantir’s business model, the truth about forward deployed engineers, how AI agents are changing data analytics and business intelligence, and why Hex is taking a different path in enterprise software. They also get into AI...

Rick Heitzmann of FirstMark joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the state of venture capital, the AI investment boom, and why the next wave of tech IPOs may be closer than many expect. Rick shares how investors are thinking about AI infrastructure, the role of data as the core advantage in the AI race, and why massive private capital has allowed companies to stay private far longer than in previ...

How does New York’s tech industry navigate AI, city politics, and a new mayor in the Trump era? Julie Samuels, President and CEO of Tech:NYC, joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the growing intersection of technology and politics. Samuels has spent years at the center of New York’s tech ecosystem, working with founders and policymakers as the industry becomes a larger force in public policy. Eri...

How does one of the most established venture capital firms in the world think about the so called “SaaS apocalypse”? Jeremy Levine of Bessemer Venture Partners joins the Newcomer Podcast to discuss the SaaS repricing, the acceleration of AI, and why venture capital remains a long game. We unpack whether SaaS is broken or simply reset after years of excess, and why AI companies are scaling faster t...

Keith Rabois joins the Newcomer Podcast for a wide-ranging conversation that moves between tech, venture capital, and politics. On the tech side, we start with Brex being acquired by Capital One and what that means for Ramp. Rabois argues that banks won’t build the “finance organization of the 21st century,” and frames Ramp’s ambition as building the CFO’s “eyes, ears, and actions” across a compan...

Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we're joined by Yoni Rechtman, a partner at Slow Ventures and one of the most outspoken voices in venture capital right now. Rechtman doesn't hold back on Trump, the tech industry's political reckoning, or where the real opportunities in AI actually are. We talk about why Slow Ventures deliberately avoided foundation models despite the massive returns, wh...

Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we’re joined by Tony Fadell, one of the most influential figures in modern hardware design. Fadell helped bring some of the most important consumer electronics to life and has shaped how people interact with technology. We talk about where the next major tech device might come from, whether it’s a pin, a pen, headphones, or the device already in your pocket, and how...

Today on the Newcomer Podcast, we’re at MongoDB.Local for a series of conversations on how enterprise AI is actually being built. MongoDB CEO CJ Desai joins the show 65 days into the role to explain why San Francisco is “back,” how MongoDB is repositioning itself for the AI era, and why unstructured data has made the company’s platform a natural foundation for AI-native applications. He shares his...