Newcomer
Jim Lanzone — "They Had a Chance to Sell for $44 Billion. They Didn't."
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...
The Startup That Crashed Its Own Servers Because of Open Claw
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 thous...
Matt Mahan — "California's Failure Is the Best Ammunition Trump Has Ever Had"
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 partisa...
Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building"
Shardul Shah on the $32B Wiz Sale, Founder Chemistry & VC Conviction 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 t...
Barry McCardel on Why Everyone Is Copying Palantir’s Playbook (And Getting It Wrong)
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...
Rick Heitzmann: The AI Boom Is Forcing a New IPO Wave
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 ...
Can Tech Work With Zohran Mamdani? | Julie Samuels
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,...
AI Is Making SaaS Look Small
Jeremy Levine explains what really happened after the 2021 SaaS boom, and why AI companies are now growing at a completely different speed. The venture cycle didn’t end. It shifted. 🎙️ Watch the full episode here: https://youtu.be/wOUskWl6XzY #AI #SaaS #VentureCapital #StartupInvesting