The Newcomer Podcast

In 2011, Google brought the hammer down on Demand Media. The search giant changed its search algorithm and sent Demand Media’s stock plummeting. The company had built web traffic by paying an army of independent writers — including Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan — to write low-effort posts that ranked highly on Google search results. The kneecapping of Demand Media’s content farm was a precursor to the platform wars of the next decade. Facebook became famous for building up ecosystems — whether it was social games or video news content — only to pull the rug out from the companies trying to play to the algorithm.Tom and I take a trip down memory lane with former Demand Media CEO Shawn Colo. He gives us a clear-eyed portrait of the company’s business strategy at the time and what brought it back down to Earth. Demand Media, co-founded by former Myspace executive Richard Rosenblatt, was for a brief moment more valuable than the New York Times, which had a content play of its own in About.com. Demand Media offers a case study for the challenges of media businesses: if the content is cheaply made, then it doesn’t have staying power; if the content is costly to produce, then the business will have low profit margins. It’s also a potent reminder as to how the companies that were once essential identifiers of a current moment in business can disappear from our collective memory. Colo — today the founder of investment firm 3L — identified some private companies to watch in the media business today. For his part, he has mixed feelings about the sector these days. He’s an investor in warehouse delivery company GoPuff, which we talk about toward the end of the conversation, and telehealth company Ro.Colo reveals that 3L’s second fund, which he’s already investing out of, is going to end up totaling between $400 and $500 million. Colo advises us that “if you’re making money, guys, the best strategy is to make money quietly.”Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley. Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses. So Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I were interested to see how New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s propulsive book about Uber from 2019 — Super Pumped — would be translated to our television screens.Since we can’t watch the show yet (the first episode airs Feb. 27), we spoke to Isaac — who has played an integral role in making sure that the show’s writers know the true story behind what went down in the Uber saga. We’ll soon see how closely they hewed to reality.But ears will be burning. Despite only running seven episodes, the show features a long list of tech characters. They might not be famous outside of Silicon Valley but they are the stuff of legend to Silicon Valley obsessives. That includes people like David Drummond, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, Emil Michael, Rachel Whetstone, and Jill Hazelbaker. That’s not to mention the headline conflict between Travis Kalanick and Bill Gurley. Isaac gave us a spoiler-free behind the scenes look at the making of the show. We talked about Hollywood’s obsession with tech. Isaac gave us a preview of the questions he’s asking going into his in-the-works book on Facebook — which is already slated to become the sequel to the Uber series. And we concluded our conversation with a brief discussion of Isaac and his colleagues’ latest reporting on Spotify, which revealed that Spotify had committed to paying Joe Rogan a stunning $200 million-plus. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Our regular special guest, Katie Benner, recently sunk her teeth into the intersection of an old passion and a new one: technology industry ignominy and, her current beat at the New York Times, the U.S. Justice Department. Benner talks me through the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. The duo were accused by the Justice Department of laundering money from the 2016 Bitfinex robbery. The arrest shows the federal government’s increasing sophistication when it comes to crypto currencies. But there are plenty of open questions about whether Lichtenstein and Morgan had the knowhow to pull off this historic heist. Morgan was a Forbes contributor who once wrote a column about protecting businesses from cybercriminals. She raps under the moniker Razzlekahn.Benner and I also talk about the apparent Chinese hack of the Wall Street Journal, Katie Notopoulos reporting on the identities of the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the latest technology meme — Wordcels and shape rotators. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Last March, Alex Heath interviewed Mark Zuckerberg about Facebook’s virtual reality ambitions. Then in October, Heath broke the news for The Verge that Facebook planned to change its name and interviewed Zuckerberg again. This month, he wrote that both Facebook and Snapchat’s visions are colliding. They’re both hoping to look a lot like another app: TikTok.With newly rebranded Meta’s stock plummeting and Snap’s shares spiking, we thought it would be a good time to have Heath come on Dead Cat and explain what exactly is going on. Heath is a close watcher of social media companies — a reporter who takes these companies’ visionary pronouncements seriously. He’s far more bullish about the prospect of virtual reality and augmented reality revolutionizing our digital worlds than we have been. Tom Dotan and I talked with Heath about Apple’s crackdown on advertising tracking and why that’s hurting Meta more than Snap. We talked about Snap CEO Evan Spiegel’s ambitions for his company, which is suddenly looking relevant again. We chuckled about Heath’s recent interview with Matrix stars Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss where Reeves made fun of NFTs. And we concluded our conversation with a frank discussion about how reporters should think about interviewing someone like Zuckerberg.You can listen here on Apple and Spotify. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are pulling their music from Spotify over the company’s more than $100 million exclusive deal with popular podcaster Joe Rogan. The UFC commentator likes to host vaccine skeptics and has voiced his own apprehensions about the necessity of the vaccine for young people.Meanwhile, Substack — the home to this newsletter — apparently generates more than $2.5 million a year from anti-vax newsletters. The company recently published a blog post titled, “Society has a trust problem. More censorship will only make it worse.” It reads:We will continue to take a strong stance in defense of free speech because we believe the alternatives are so much worse. We believe that when you use censorship to silence certain voices or push them to another place, you don’t make the misinformation problem disappear but you do make the mistrust problem worse.Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I discuss the two latest controversies in Covid content moderation. We also talk about the market downturn and the broader risks for the economy. I argue that I’m more worried about the effects of Tesla’s stock falling than a crypto winter.Download the episode. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Wall Street Journal reporter Kirsten Grind helped expose Activision Blizzard’s troubled corporate culture in a bombshell article in November, co-written with her colleagues Ben Fritz and Sarah Needleman. The article revealed that Activision CEO Bobby Kotick knew about the company’s sexual misconduct problems, including an alleged rape, and, in some cases, did not report the incidents to Activision’s board of directors. Then in January Microsoft moved to pay $75 billion in cash to buy the video games company — a 45% premium over Activision depressed share price. The acquisition could help Activision respond to a slew of investigations and legal challenges over its corporate culture. The deal gives Kotick a graceful exit from the gaming giant that he helped build. Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talked to Grind about her investigation into Activision for this week’s Dead Cat podcast. Then we weigh the merits of Microsoft’s bid. Spoiler: We think it’s a steal for Microsoft. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Ophelia Brown’s Blossom Capital announced Tuesday that it has raised $432 million for its third venture fund. (I told paying subscribers back in April 2021 to watch out for Blossom’s next fund.) The European Series A firm is taking a big leap from its $85 million first fund in 2019 and its $185 million second fund in 2020. Tom Dotan and I talk with Brown about her crypto investing — including Blossom’s recent investment in juggernaut MoonPay, which raised a $555 million Series A at $3.4 billion. Brown tells us that she’s buying NFTs with her venture capital fund. She appears to have purchased CryptoPunk #985 on Christmas Eve for about $400,000 (98 ETH). Now, with the falling price of Ethereum, it’s worth a little over $300,000, according to Etherscan. MoonPay isn’t the only Series A in name only that Blossom has participated in. The firm invested in Checkout.com’s $230 million Series A round that valued the company at about $2 billion. Thankfully for Blossom’s limited partners, Checkout.com just raised at a $40 billion valuation. We also talk about Brown’s early investment, with Jan Hammer, in Robinhood back when she worked at Index. And Brown tells us why she doesn’t like her friends to know her current whereabouts. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Phil Libin is as deeply rooted in the Silicon Valley ethos as you can find. He immigrated to the United States as a child from the Soviet Union and went on to found the once trendy tech word-processing software company Evernote. He took a detour as a venture capitalist at General Catalyst. Now he’s a founder again. He’s the CEO of Mmhmm, a video conferencing company that’s backed by Sequoia Capital, and runs a product studio called All Turtles. Even though he has virtual reality headsets spilling out of his closet at his new home in Bentonville, Arkansas, he thinks the metaverse is “obvious b******t.” “It is a gloss that uncreative people and companies put over — fundamentally a lack of good ideas,” he says. “There’s a part of me that hates it and a part of me that fears it. But since I think it’s so spectacularly stupid, there’s actually not that much to fear.”Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I discuss the metaverse and reminisce about the days when people used to throw eggs at tech buses. Libin explains why he was quick to tell his employees that they would never be coming back to the office and tells us how he got it wrong at Evernote by trying to build his life around work. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Deepa Seetharaman is a longtime friend, Wall Street Journal tech reporter, and — most importantly — a committed Dead Cat podcast listener. Her ears have been burning as we’ve talked about her and her colleagues reporting with former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos and as we’ve dissected her reporting on Instagram’s influence on teenage girls in our episode “The Facebook Philes.” And given the fact that we named this podcast after Mark Zuckerberg’s strange text messages with board member Marc Andreessen, we thought it was about time we brought on someone who actually regularly writes about Facebook to talk about the state of the company as it is under siege from whistleblower Frances Haugen and the media. Katie Benner, Tom Dotan, and I talk to Seetharaman about the Journal’s Facebook Files series, Mark Zuckerberg’s ever increasing control over the company he co-founded, and what Seetharaman knows about Zuckerberg’s relationship these days with Sheryl Sandberg and Peter Thiel. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Katie Benner, Tom Dotan, and Eric Newcomer look back on 2021 in Techmeme headlines for our final episode of Dead Cat for the year. We discuss some of the biggest stories of the year: * In January, Microsoft said Russian hackers accessed some of its source code and the U.S. government pinned the SolarWinds hack on Russians. * In February, Elon Musk drove Clubhouse listeners (and journalists blocked by Marc Andreessen) to YouTube as they tried to listen to the live interview on the platform. It would represent a peak moment of cultural relevance for Clubhouse. * In March, Stripe’s valuation climbed to $95 billion. (And we talked about Stripe’s critics on Y Combinator-owned Hacker News and the coverage of Stripe’s hiring practices in Protocol.) * In May, Antonio García Martínez declared that Apple had fired him over the culture war backlash to his book Chaos Monkeys. * In June, the New York Times wrote about tough working conditions at Amazon. Later this year, a tornado would rip through an Amazon facility, killing six and raising further questions about how Amazon protects its workers. * Also in June, Andreessen Horowitz launched its much-discussed Future — a publication that hasn’t yet taken Silicon Valley by storm but has put every venture firm on notice that they need to think about getting in the content business. * We talked about Robinhood’s IPO in July and the rise of meme stocks. * And we discussed how big tech executives don’t seem to want to worry about the present. Jeff Bezos stepped down as Amazon CEO in July as he spends more time on Blue Origin; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg rebranded his company to Meta in October; and Jack Dorsey left behind moderation challenges at Twitter in late November and then renamed his financial services company Square to Block, hoping to emphasize the company’s crypto ambitions. Finally, Tom, Katie, and Eric offer some predictions for what 2022 holds, though no one seems quite sure after this strange year.Techmeme!My favorite tech headline aggregator, tweet tracker, and conversation setter — Techmeme — has been generously featuring me on their home page as part of a round-up of interesting tech newsletters. So I wanted to return the favor.I check Techmeme literally every couple of hours and rely on it to do my job. And in a genuine coincidence, Techmeme served as an easy-to-navigate archive for this week’s podcast. It’s a free news aggregator for tech industry folks that’s updated constantly to show the most important tech stories of the moment and the commentary surrounding those stories. They also publish a daily newsletter with stories from the past day, which is useful if you forget to visit the site. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe