Newcomer Pod

Fresh back from London! In this episode, Eric Newcomer reunites with co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley to dive into the best moments from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit. From buzzy startup founders to incumbent innovators, the London event showcased a rapidly evolving AI landscape. But what stood out most? Eric, James, and Max break down their favorite clips and debate the key quest...

The Newcomer Podcast returns just in time to have Eric, Tom, and Madeline weigh in on Meta's audacious AI hiring spree. The tech giant has enticed researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic with huge paydays in the hopes it can bring its Llama models up to par with the competition. Next up, Ramp's report that companies have stopped purchasing AI tools made a lot of buzz this week, but...

Today on the pod, we're bringing you two of the liveliest panels from the 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit, held this week in London. Both panels — “The Autonomous Vehicle Rollout” and “Investing in 2030” — explore one of the major themes from the event: where AI is poised to show up next in our everyday lives, beyond the chatbot. Think voice, devices, and even your car. First up, we'll hear...

We’re officially one week out from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit! On today’s episode, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join host Eric Newcomer to preview what’s ahead — from standout speakers to can’t-miss panels and the big ideas that will shape the conversations next week. To kick things off, Eric poses a timely question: What themes are starting to take shape across the partici...

In this second installment of the Cerebral Valley podcast series, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join Eric Newcomer for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of AI-generated voice and video — and what it means for our sense of reality. From TikTok trends to the future of Hollywood and podcasting, the trio explores where generative video might take us over the next fi...

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is right around the corner! To help you navigate the fast-evolving AI landscape ahead of the event, Newcomer Podcast is launching a special four-part series — co-hosted by James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley . Get insider insights, expert analysis, and fresh perspectives on the trends shaping the future of artificial intelligence. In this first episode, James, Ma...

We're welcoming Bloomberg's Kate Clark to the show this week and diving into her reporting on the rough fundraising environment for any VC that isn't an a16z or GC-style megafund. The only emerging funds that can raise, it seems, are ones that are started by investors who leave these brands. If it weren't for the AI funding bonanza, the situation would look even worse. We each make our predictions...

In this special episode, we feature two interviews recorded live during Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit , a financial technology summit held this week in San Francisco. We’re including two of the most dynamic discussions here, beginning with Gabriel Stengel of Rogo and Jeff Seibert of Digits , followed by an interview with Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto. The episode kicks off with a breakdown of th...

Eric relays his dispatch from Dimension Capital’s biotech summit in Park City, where the crowd was much more academic than the conferences we usually attend. Biotech stocks aren’t doing great, meanwhile university funding cuts could spell trouble for drug research. Still, people were rosy about AI tools.  We also took a temperature check on the state of fintech, which investors tell us is mixed. E...

How does the AI gold rush look from the helm of a $40-billion software giant? Salesforce co-founder, chair, and CEO  Marc Benioff  joins Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan for a tour of the next tech boom cycle. The conversation opens with Benioff’s sweeping vision of “Agent Force 2.0,” where large language models paired with reasoning engines mint whole new classes of digital labor, and brands from Gucc...

This week, we kick off by discussing Ben Smith’s bombshell post ”The group chats that changed America,” that exposed the private chats that nudged Silicon Valley’s money crowd into Trump’s orbit.  Then we hop to DC’s Hill-and-Valley Forum, where the mantra was industrial renaissance or bust. The race with China, AI’s essential energy demands, and the need to reshore American manufacturing were the...

We’re back to opining on the state of tech media! A16z has aqui-hired Erik Torenberg and his newsletter Turpentine, while the Technology Brothers with ties to Founders Fund have created a podcasting empire. Eric and Tom reminisce about the original wave of “going direct,” why it failed, and what’s different this time around.  Later on, Madeline shares that crypto VCs are growing frustrated with Pr...

This week, Tom breaks down his scoops on how the big foundation model providers are doing.and much to the chagrin of our resident skeptic, they’re earning lots of real revenue! OpenAI is on track to crack over $12 billion in revenue this year, and Anthropic projects it will double its ARR to $4 billion by the end of the year. But have we hit the AGI moment? Eric relays his o3 experiments as eviden...

We're welcoming special guest Tom Dotan of  Dead Cat  fame  to  the show this week — just in time for the tariff market meltdown. To Silicon Valley's Trump supporters, we hate to say we told you so, but it's hard to imagine how these tariffs on our biggest trading partners will benefit tech and artificial intelligence development in the US. In the second half of the show, Eric intervie...

OpenAI has done it again. The AI giant closed $40 billion in fresh funding (kind of) led by Softbank, We debate the bull and bear case for OpenAI's $300 billion valuation. Eric sticks to his guns from his previous bear case, but Madeline is more optimistic about OpenAI's consumer revenue. We also go over the latest in the Deel/Rippling corporate espionage saga and dig into Eric's reporting on the...

This week, Eric shared the details of his vibe coding frenzy from the past few weeks, testing out Vercel and the buzziest coding assistant of moment, Lovable. We unpack the benefits and remaining headaches of these tools from a non-coder perspective. We then turn to the Studio Ghibli  memes of the week from OpenAI's new 4o image model integration and try to make sense of all the copyright risk...

We're opening in a celebratory mood this week with Wiz's big exit to Google, which if it holds will offer some much needed liquidity to venture firms and their LPs. It's a big win for several of Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, including Sequoia's Doug Leone, Index Ventures' Shardul Shah, and Greenoaks' Neil Mehta. IPOs are looking a little bit more uncertain, however. P...

We’re recording this episode on the ground from two different tech conferences, the flashy new HumanX summit in Las Vegas and the now-veteran status South By Southwest in Austin. We cover how the attendees diverge, with more consumer-tech making a showing at SXSW and the new guard of AI business leaders heading over to HumanX (with a few exceptions.) At both summits, though, coding assistants are...

In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, Eric and Madeline dissect why VCs are mad about Trump’s plans for a strategic crypto reserve. Even the biggest boosters and loudest voices for deregulation around crypto have been caught off guard by the president’s push to add other altcoins to the promised Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, calling the move a blatant enrichment scheme for coin holders and friends...

Eric and Madeline break down the week that was in AI news in this episode of  The Newcomer Podcast,  from the unnecessary panic caused by reports of Microsoft cancelling leases for data centers to Nvidia’s quarterly earnings report. Despite tech companies moving full steam ahead on AI, including OpenAI’s launch of GPT 4.5 and Softbank’s $200 billion commitment to data centers, tech stocks dropped,...

In this episode of the Newcomer Podcast, Eric and Madeline give a sendoff to the Humane and its AI Pin. The company was acquired by HP for its AI talent, in a darkly poetic ending for former Apple engineers who left to build a smart hardware startup. They debate the merits of voice AI technology as an interface and if it’s really time to move away from screens.  They break down all of OpenAI’s alu...

Eric and Madeline unpack the biggest “deal that wasn’t” story of Elon Musk’s unsolicited offer to purchase OpenAI for $97.4 billion. WIth Sam Altman flat-out rejecting the offer on X, this feels less like an offer and more of a statement about Musk’s frustration with OpenAI’s continued conversion to a for-profit company that competes with him. Pressures have been mounting on engineers to look for...

In this episode of the Newcomer podcast, Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbarger dig into all of the chaos in Washington led by Elon Musk and his team of young staffers. They push back on the attacks from the right at the press that revealing information about public employees is anything close to "doxxing," and unpack a16z's virtue signaling by hiring new right-wing cause celebrity Dan...

In this episode,  Eric Newcomer  and  Madeline Renbarger  break down DeepSeek’s impact on western AI companies. Is it really the “AI Sputnik Moment” that investors have called it, or just a CCP bluff? They also delve into new AngelList data on venture returns — unsurprisingly, they’re not looking good post-2021. They also discuss voice AI startup ElevenLabs’ new funding round.

"In this episode of  The Newcomer Podcast ,  Eric Newcomer  and  Madeline Renbarger  unpack how tech elites are reacting to the early days of the Trump presidency. They discuss  Sam Altman  and  Masayoshi Son’s  new venture to build AI data centers dubbed “Project Stargate” and make the case for business leaders to abide by important ethical norms. They also break down fresh performance data...