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 startups that had raised $100 million or more. In this latest episode, we make some hard choices: cutting loose startups who have lost our favor, cashing in on early acquisitions, and pickup up some new...

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 and what it means for artificial intelligence. Then, at the 28 minute mark we debate whether Anthropic, Suno, Perplexity, Midjourney, and a bunch of other AI companies live up to the hype in a game...

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 general sense that everyone is losing their minds leading up to what should be Trump’s last run at the presidency. Later in the episode, we break down General Catalyst’s massive fundraise haul and its...

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 I’m excited about our growth at Newcomer and wanted to share a bit more about what’s next. Description Eric and Madeline discuss Newcomer’s revenue milestones, the growth of Newcomer over the past...

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 manager modes before concluding with a discussion on Tesla’s advancements, or lack thereof, in self-driving technology.  Produced by Christopher Gates Chapters:  00:00 — Introduction 03:27 — Bear case...

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 Impulse Space’s $150M raise, while pointing out that even the AI mega rounds cant hide the downturn in VC funding. Produced by Christopher Gates Audio Chapters:  00:00:18 — Poolside’s $500M...

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 buzzing. From there, they navigate through OpenAI’s own “Game of Thrones,” exploring internal power plays and high-stakes exits, before turning to California’s latest AI regulatory battles. To wrap things...

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 upcoming Demo Day, highlighting trends in defense tech and the implications of AI’s power consumption. The conversation touches on Runway’s licensing deal with Lionsgate and concludes with an...

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 most of customers’ problems. Akhund told me, “My experience with relationship banking was I need to send a wire and I literally cannot figure out to do it, please help me. Which to me never felt like...

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 equivalent of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan,” Hébert said. “It was absolute sheer terror.” * We follow that up with Silicon Valley Bank President Marc Cadieux, who talks about where SVB is today and...

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 year is one of his top priorities. Then, I sat down with the ever-feisty Vinod Khosla. The investor called for a TikTok ban and more welcoming immigration policies while warning against open-source...

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 discussed how the deal came together quickly after meeting at the conference dinner. Thousands of enterprises around the world rely on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to power applications that...

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 biggest themes going into this week’s Cerebral Valley AI Summit. The draft gave us a chance to dissect some of the most promising startups in artificial intelligence right now. The goal was to...

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 stock has climbed over 200% over the past 12 months. And the company has become a key investor in generative AI startups. Miller (who comes on the show around the 41-minute mark) talks through Nvidia’s...

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 podcast series while I’ve been gone. If you missed the first three episodes, you can check them out in the links below: * The Cerebral Valley Podcast: Artificial Intelligence Becomes Reality * AI Kills Us...

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 more broadly. On the third episode of our six-part Cerebral Valley podcast series, Max Child, James Wilsterman, and I game out how artificial intelligence could reshape the media we consume. It helps...

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 the scale of human civilization” between 10% and 25%. That’s comforting. Applications to attend the Cerebral Valley AI Summit close TODAY October 17. Apply right now to be considered for an...

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 artificial intelligence is now capable of doing. Then, the funding started pouring in for every startup that had anything to do with those two letters. Every venture firm needed to bet on their own...

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 illness while showing promise for broader use among healthy humans. Meanwhile, Celine Halioua, the CEO of Loyal, is developing drugs to make dogs live longer. Fundamentally life extension, or...

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 company how to fight nicely with cities, dishing out data and tax cooperation in exchange for favorable local regulations. Unlike Uber’s confrontational approach that had it going to war with Bill de...

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 Las Vegas, introduced billionaires to celebrities, rented out private mansions, and helped people acquire things money can’t usually buy. These days, Flemings is building a startup around the same...

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 husband, Taber MacCallum. These days, the duo is working together on building a hydrogen balloon that will take tourists to space for $125,000. Poytner came on the podcast to talk about her startup,...

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 mellowed out online. When I texted him after our podcast recording session and mentioned that his Founders Fund colleague Mike Solana was sassing me on Elon Musk’s social networking platform, Asparouhov...

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 closely with two of the most iconic Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Patrick and John Collison. During her tenure as COO, she helped bring her management know-how from Google and experience working for...