PODCAST · technology
Dead Cat
by Eric Newcomer
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 and Tom Dotan. www.newcomer.co
Episodes
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newcomer + solana
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...
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Is Venture Broken? With Beezer Clarkson
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…
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My Conversation with Substack Co-Founders Chris Best & Hamish McKenzie Fresh Off Their $100 Million Funding Round
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…
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My Conversation with Roy Bahat As Bloomberg Beta Announces New $75M Fund
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...
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Dishing on Investors' Favorite Enterprise Startups with Wing’s Peter Wagner
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...
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Venture Capital and the Private Markets in 2025
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...
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Waymo’s Next Challenge: Humanity
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...
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Is the Tech IPO Window Open?
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.…
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Shake-ups at Silicon Valley's Biggest VC Firms
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…
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Has AI Hit a Wall? A Debate from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit
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...
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Listen to Anthropic's Dario Amodei from Cerebral Valley + Videos from on Stage
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.…
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Fear-Mongering & Forecasting: Assessing AI's Predictions About AI
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…
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The AI Startup Fantasy Draft
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...
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Trump & AI Policy + Overrated/Underrated on the Cerebral Valley Podcast
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…
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Silicon Valley Can't Look Away from the Election
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...
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Newcomer Turns Four
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…
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Listen: Bullish on AI, Bullish on Self-Driving, But Apprehensive About OpenAI & Tesla (with Jon McNeill)
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...
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The Ongoing Startup Downturn & More PR People Than Reporters to Answer Their Emails
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...
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Listen: OpenAI's 'Great Man,' AI Regulation & Drugs
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...
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AI + Robots, YC Preview & Why the Cool Kids Keep Picking on Tech
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...
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Why Software Is Eating The Banks | Mercury CEO Immad Akhund, Then Lead Bank CEO Jackie Reses
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...
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Lessons Learned From a Bank Run (Peter Hébert & Laurence Tosi) + SVB's Marc Cadieux
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…
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Two Titans on the Future of AI (with Reid Hoffman & Vinod Khosla)
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...
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Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi & MosaicML Founder Naveen Rao Speak at Cerebral Valley
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...
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The Artificial Intelligence Startup Draft
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...
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Chip War (with Chris Miller)
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…
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The AI Personal Stack (with Joshua Browder)
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 [email protected]. I hope you’ve been enjoying the Cerebral Valley…
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Someday That NPC Could Be More Alive Than You Are (w/ Amy Wu & Keith Kawahata)
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...
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AI Kills Us All (with Daniel H. Wilson)
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…
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The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality
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...
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Life Extension Innovations, Moonshots & Snake Oil (with Celine Halioua & James Peyer)
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...
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Fighting for Pro-Crypto Legislation in Sam Bankman-Fried's Shadow (with Chris Lehane)
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…
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He Helps Rich Tech Founders Part With Their Money (with Rey Flemings)
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...
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Hydrogen Space Balloon (with Jane Poynter & Ali Rohde)
Jane Poynter spent two years and 20 minutes in a biosphere back in the early 1990s. (There’s a documentary about it.) Later, Poynter set her sights on a mission to Mars. Wired wrote in 2014, “Meet the Couple Who Could Be the First Humans to Travel to Mars.” The story was about Poynter and her...
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Spaceman Explains to Earthman How Things Work (with Delian Asparouhov)
Last time I remember writing about Varda co-founder and Founders Fund partner Delian Asparouhov, I was giving him a hard time about his subdued impromptu Clubhouse run-in with then San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin who he’d been flaming on Twitter. But since then, Asparouhov has…
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Scaling People (with Claire Hughes Johnson)
Claire Hughes Johnson writes in her book, Scaling People, about a moment early on in her time at Stripe when an Irish journalist shouted to her, “You’re the lady! You’re the lady with the lads!” Hughes Johnson, who joined Stripe in 2014 as the payments startup’s chief operating officer, works...
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Staying Global (with Bejul Somaia)
Lightspeed Venture Partners can sometimes live in the shadow of its noisier rivals. Andreessen Horowitz has a massive war chest, sprawling payroll, and insatiable appetite for attention. Meanwhile, Sequoia Capital is, well, Sequoia. But Lightspeed has established itself as one of the top...
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Psychedelics, Micro Nuclear Reactors & Venture Turbulence (with Rebecca Kaden)
Union Square Ventures has some of the best performing funds in the venture capital industry. As I’ve reported, USV-backer UTIMCO disclosed in a recent filing that USV had delivered the public investment fund an internal rate of return of 59%. And that number will likely go up over time. (For...
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Talking Threads With the Facebook Whistleblower Frances Haugen
Elon Musk is the liberal elite’s enemy of the moment. How quickly the bad blood for Mark Zuckerberg is forgotten. When Zuckerberg’s Meta released Twitter rival Threads, reporters and left-leaning types (myself included) flocked to the new app as a potential refuge from Musk’s Twitter. The enemy…
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Musk & Zuck Go Head to Head, Vying to Rule Global Online Discussion (with Katie Notopoulos & Tom Dotan)
Former BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos spent the first few days posting on Meta’s Twitter copycat, Threads, as if she were the editor-in-chief of the new app. “As EIC, it’s a lot of work! I’m personally curating the feed for users based on all of Meta’s information on them to bring each person…
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Techstars CEO Maëlle Gavet Talks Pre-Seed Deals, YC, SoftBank & `Zombie Mode' Funds
Maëlle Gavet and I first crossed paths about a decade ago when she was the CEO of the Russian e-commerce company Ozon. Then, we met up again when she was working as the chief operating officer for the SoftBank-backed real estate tech company Compass. A couple of months ago, I ran into Gavet at a...
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Not Exactly AR And Not Exactly VR (with Lauren Goode & Anand Agarawala)
The metaverse had been left for dead. The massive hype for virtual worlds that we saw during the pandemic dissipated once we could all see our fellow humans in person again. But last week Apple finally revealed its augmented reality device, the Apple Vision Pro. The tech giant that rarely misses...
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Rug Salesman Turned Valley Insider Raises a $432 Million Seed Fund (with Pejman Nozad)
I couldn’t help but spend the first few minutes of my conversation with Pejman Nozad fishing for the story of how a rug salesman built one of Silicon Valley’s top institutional pre-seed and seed funds. Nozad has such a fascinating and inspirational story; it reflects what is possible when Silicon...
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The Gossip Economy (with Kyle Harrison)
For this week’s Newcomer podcast, I talked with Contrary general partner Kyle Harrison. We spent the first part of the episode talking about his piece VC Contagion: Is Venture Capital Killing Itself? I just published the essay exclusively in Newcomer. Then, on the podcast Harrison talked about...
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The State of Consumer Investing With Benchmark's Sarah Tavel
It’s been a sad state of affairs for consumer companies not named TikTok. Poparazzi just shut down. (At least some of the team went to Instagram.) Popshop is struggling. The venture capital firm Benchmark helped establish both companies as consumer startups to watch by leading their Series A...
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Substack's Index Fund of Culture (with Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie)
I caught up with Substack co-founders Chris Best and Hamish McKenzie at Substack’s office in San Francisco last week. They’re fresh off raising a community fundraising round and launching their social network Notes. I wrote in March about my decision to invest $5,000 in Substack’s fundraising...
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Traffic Jam (with Ben Smith)
The blitzscaling funding model failed news companies. Vice Media — which raised more than $1 billion from the likes of TPG, Technology Crossover Ventures, and Disney — is reportedly preparing to file for bankruptcy. BuzzFeed — which raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors like...
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The World After Capital (with Albert Wenger)
Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger has been successful enough to write a techno-manifesto. Wenger made early investments in companies like Twilio, MongoDB, and Etsy. Now, he’s spending much of his time on USV’s climate investing out of the firm’s $200 million climate fund. Wenger has...
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Amazon Bedrock & BabyAGI (with Jon Turow)
Before becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he’s invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers...
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Open-Source AI: Replit's Amjad Masad & Hugging Face's Clem Delangue
Today, we have a bonus double episode of the Newcomer podcast for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face Clément Delangue Together, they’re a charismatic open-source alliance. We talked about the threat posed by…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
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 and Tom Dotan.
www.newcomer.co
HOSTED BY
Eric Newcomer
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does Dead Cat have?
Dead Cat currently has 130 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Dead Cat about?
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 and Tom Dotan. www.newcomer.co
How often does Dead Cat release new episodes?
Dead Cat publishes regularly with 130 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to Dead Cat on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts Dead Cat?
Dead Cat is created and hosted by Eric Newcomer.
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