Katie Jacobs Stanton on Elon, Trump & Why Silicon Valley Won’t Speak Up
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 sta...
Amanda Askell on AI Consciousness, Claude & Silicon Valley’s Biggest Fear
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...
Kara Swisher — "I'd rather have Ted Cruz make decisions about AI"
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 ...
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...
Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building"
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 ri...
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 ...








