DOGE's Twitter Firestorm
February 07, 202500:25:2423.26 MB

DOGE's Twitter Firestorm

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 &qu...

The DeepSeek Fire Drill
January 31, 202500:24:4222.62 MB

The DeepSeek Fire Drill

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 g...

Grit vs Grift
January 24, 202500:25:5923.79 MB

Grit vs Grift

"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 f...

Beware the "Tech Industrial Complex"
January 17, 202500:22:0020.14 MB

Beware the "Tech Industrial Complex"

In this jam-packed episode, Eric and Madeline break down Biden’s surprise crackdown on the “Tech Industrial Complex,” explore Trump’s tight ties with Silicon Valley oligarchs, and unpack the behind-the-scenes drama of a Canadian startup that ousted its visionary founder. They also spotlight a mega ...

Waymo’s Next Challenge: Humanity
January 10, 202500:15:1614.25 MB

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 w...

Is the Tech IPO Window Open?
December 16, 202400:23:0121.62 MB

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. And...

Shake-ups at Silicon Valley's Biggest VC Firms
December 11, 202400:20:4419.76 MB

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 news ...

Has AI Hit a Wall? A Debate from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit
December 05, 202400:42:5640.77 MB

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 p...

Listen to Anthropic's Dario Amodei from Cerebral Valley + Videos from on Stage
November 27, 202400:27:4625.45 MB

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. Scale...