The Newcomer Podcast

On the Dead Cat podcast, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talk about Apple’s WeCrashed, Hulu’s The Dropout, and SHOWTIME’s Super Pumped — the TV shows about Adam Neumann, Elizabeth Holmes, and Travis Kalanick respectively. (Spoilers: If you believe that real events that have already transpired can be spoiled.)This morning, I emailed Fawzi Kamel, the Uber driver whose confrontation with then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick went viral when I published it at Bloomberg. The video captures Kalanick — at the peak of the scrutiny around his leadership — telling Kamel, “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own s**t. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck!”I wanted to catch up with Kamel to see if he had seen himself on TV. He’s a character in the SHOWTIME television series Super Pumped, played by actor Mousa Hussein Kraish.Kamel called me back: He hadn’t watched the show. The fictional version of Kamel gets rid of his car, consults with a lawyer and his wife, and then posts the video online. The real world Fawzi Kamel was far bolder.Kamel was still driving for Uber when he sent me an email with the subject line “About uber.” He wrote me from his iPhone on Feb. 22, 2017: I started driving for uber in 2011So I know the company from the beginning and I can introduce you to drivers who started in 2010 under Ryan grave . We all know the dirty uber thief .Last Sunday , I picked up Travis and I told him that non of the drivers trust him  anymore . Cause he  cheated the drivers who promoted his  idea at the beginning and made him  who he  is  todayHe got mad and slammed my car doorThe point I'm trying to make is the answer of uber CEO after I told him that I Bankrupt because of him  . Didn't seem as an answer of a CEOAnyway , I have all this in video , be my guest to see itI just want it to go viral , cause the CEO is an a*****e arrogant peace a shitThank youFawzi kamelI replied 13 minutes later with only four words: “Send me the video!”After some emails back and forth, Kamel sent me the video under the condition that I couldn’t publish it without his permission. (Unlike on TV, he hadn’t consulted a lawyer and wasn’t married.) I watched it and knew that the video would captivate a world obsessed with Uber’s brash CEO.I spent the next couple of days trying to convince Kamel to let me publish the video at Bloomberg, where I was covering the Uber beat. Kamel was a hard man to reach — in large part because he was still driving for Uber to earn a living. Eventually, Kamel gave me the greenlight — even though Bloomberg couldn’t pay him for the video. It went viral almost immediately. Kamel told me over the phone this morning that I was the only reporter who had replied to his message about the video. I learned this morning that the dashcam video that he’d recorded wasn’t actually stored on his camera. So he’d had to go pay a company $60 for access to the video after a friend of his convinced him that it was worth the trouble.Ultimately, Kalanick and Kamel sat down, and Kalanick paid him $200,000 as a make-good. The money helped Kamel pay off some of his debts.Kamel is clear about one thing: He’s not driving for Uber anymore. “I will never drive again,” he says.I offered to share my SHOWTIME password with him, but he didn’t seem interested.Instead, I sent Kamel a cell phone video of the Super Pumped episode, so Kamel could at least watch a recording of another man acting out a recording of himself. These days, Kamel says he’s spending his time buying and selling stocks on Robinhood. He doesn’t hold that company in particularly high regard.Kamel has actually softened his tone on Kalanick.“Travis is actually someone — if you confront him — he’s a very good guy to talk to,” Kamel says.“Firing Travis was a big mistake because if they didn’t fire him, Uber could be way more today,” Kamel says. “That’s all I know.” Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Hunter Walk, co-founder of the venture capital firm Homebrew, is a staple of tech Twitter. Walk worked on Second Life and at YouTube before founding his own venture fund along with Satya Patel.A month ago, the duo announced that they were dramatically changing their strategy. The firm had previously raised three funds from limited partners — $35 million in 2013, $50 million in 2015, and $90 million in 2018 — and invested in companies like Chime, Plaid, and Honor. Then, late last month, Walk and Patel announced that they had decided to change course and start investing their own money.That strategy shift will drastically reduce their pool of capital. And it will mean forgoing lucrative management fees that provide a guaranteed income as they wait around for their portfolio companies to mature. Walk came on Dead Cat to explain the decision to embrace an “evergreen” capital model. We chatted about founder archetypes and what types of founders he’s looking to invest in. In the second half of the conversation, we talked about how his views on content moderation have developed since his time at YouTube. And he bristled at the idea that I saw his brand as a “good liberal” VC. Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

On this week’s Dead Cat, Tom Dotan and I reflect on this year’s SXSW. We take stock of the Austin tech scene and ponder what storylines emerged from the mega conference.At the 19:24 mark, VC Jeopardy starts. You can listen in as I host four venture capitalists in a fierce battle of startup-world trivia. Our contestants were Deena Shakir at Lux Capital, Charles Hudson at Precursor Ventures, Julian Eison at Next Ventures, and Steve Brotman at Alpha Partners. You can also play along yourself:Here’s a link to the first round questionsHere’s a link to the second round questionsThanks to my dear friends, Max Child and James Wilsterman at Volley for hosting the SXSW event. Wilsterman wrote the Jeopardy questions with some light oversight from yours truly. Volley is a San Francisco-based startup that creates voice-controlled games. The company just announced a partnership with Sony Pictures Television to produce a Jeopardy! game for Amazon’s Alexa and for Google smart devices. Great to see everyone who made it out to the event. Let’s do it again next year!Give the episode a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Patreon CEO Jack Conte took the stage at my first ever SXSW event with a beer in hand. With Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan, we discussed crowdfunding, OnlyFans, Substack, NFTs, Ukraine, and whether creators are brands.Speaking from the stage at the Volley Game Room at SXSW, Conte explained why his company wouldn’t compete with the likes of Twitter and YouTube to build audiences for the creators that it works with. “Patreon set out to solve a very specific problem. The specific problem we were solving was, there are creators who are getting millions of views, creators who have incredible reach, but they’re being undervalued by society,” Conte said. Conte said that he didn’t think Patreon could compete directly with large social media companies. “I actually don’t know that that’s a war that we would win. Those businesses are solid businesses. They have moats. They have network effects that make it very difficult to break into those worlds. I think Patreon’s best bet at solving this problem of creator payments is focusing very specifically on the problem of creator payments.”Conte seemed to be interested in exploring NFTs but was reticent to say that the company was specifically considering embracing them after receiving backlash on another podcast for even asking a question about NFTs.Toward the end of our conversation, Conte disagreed with journalist Taylor Lorenz’s stance that reporters should worry about their brands. Conte objected to the idea that creators of any sort should be thinking too much about their “brand.”For context, earlier this month, Insider quoted Lorenz in a much-discussed article.“When you think about the future of media, it’s much more distributed and about personalities," said Taylor Lorenz, a former Times tech reporter who recently left for The Washington Post. “Younger people recognize the power of having their own brand and audience, and the longer you stay at a job that restricts you from outside opportunities, the less relevant your brand becomes.”A bunch of political reporters — including the New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Washington Post reporter Jacqueline Alemany — seized on Lorenz’s comments to take issue with the notion that journalists should shape their “brand.”Conte seemed to agree with Lorenz that journalists can increasingly operate independently of newsrooms, but he took issue with the idea that journalists should mind their brands.“Can journalists develop independent followings?” Conte asked rhetorically. “Of course they can.” “Do journalists need to be a part of larger institutions and leverage those institution’s historical reach?”“No, obviously, that is changing.” “But the more interesting part of what you just said is the distinguishing characteristics between this concept of a brand and the concept of a creator,” Conte said.“What I would argue is that those are very f*****g different things. Very different.” “A brand is consistent. It has brand values. It builds trust. It has decks of like its style and its voice and what it sounds like. And if it were a person, what kind of jeans would it wear?”“Like that’s what brands are.”“Brands are not human beings,” he continued. “They’re not.”“Creators are f*****g people. They’re inconsistent. They’re human. They're beautiful. They’re frail. They’re smart. They’re stupid. They’re strategic. They’re impulsive. They’re human beings.” Conte said, “We’re all trying to behave like brands today. And brands are corporations. Like we don’t have to behave like brands.”“When you watch a Prince music video — that f*****g guy is just himself, no matter what. And I don’t want him to behave like Walmart. I want him to be Prince. And my favorite creators, I want them to be themselves and I want them to feel human and I want them to not feel trapped by their brand values. I think it’s a mistake for everybody to think, ‘I need a personal brand. I need to create a brand.’” “Just be yourself.”Next week, look forward to VC Jeopardy with Deena Shakir, Julian Eison, Charles Hudson, and Steve Brotman. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Suddenly, Silicon Valley is worried about its Russian ties. I’m getting messages from sources about potential Russian-connected venture capital firms and software companies with inordinate numbers of Russian customers. Companies like Netflix, Disney, Samsung, and TikTok are cutting at least some of their services in Russia. Meanwhile, Russia is restricting access to Facebook.There were echoes of this moment, in 2018, when Silicon Valley was forced to reckon with its addiction to Saudi Arabian oil money after the brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Investors started to wonder if they should feel guilty about the transgressions of their limited partners.But then the spotlight faded and the business world moved on.This time seems different. Most importantly, the U.S. government is expressly putting pressure on wealthy Russian elites. The ethical questions are taking a back seat to the foreign policy objectives of much of the Western world. So even in cases where people can justifiably separate the individual from the country, there’s intense pressure to hurt the Russian government by cracking down on individuals and institutions tied to Russia. There’s perhaps no more prominent Russian-born investor than Yuri Milner. Puck reporter Teddy Schleifer asked this month:“What is Yuri Milner thinking? That’s the question I posed last week to Milner’s spokesman, after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and then again on Monday, after Western governments responded with crippling sanctions. Milner, after all, is easily among Silicon Valley’s most prominent Russians, having made billions of dollars as the force behind DST Global, the venture firm that placed historic bets on Facebook and Twitter, among other Bay Area landmarks. But it was Milner’s embattled friends that put him on my mind: The Russian provenance of DST’s early capital was supplied in large part by Alisher Usmanov, a Russian oligarch who made his fortune in metal and mining before teaming up with Milner in 2008.”In the latest episode of Dead Cat, Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I talked to Schleifer about Milner’s public silence on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We discussed the abrupt transition from a globally interconnected financial system to one that is suddenly looking to root out Russian money. (A DST spokesperson told Schleifer that Milner hasn’t taken money from Russian limited partners since 2012.) We also talked to Schleifer about his list of American oligarchs. He ranked Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt as the most important political donors of the moment on the left, and Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison as number one and number two on the right. Cheekily, Schleifer gave Chamath Palihapitiya the number four spot — on the right.We also delved into philanthropy. Schleifer told us about one of his favorite donors — crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried — and floated the possibility that donor MacKenzie Scott’s rapid-fire giveaway project ends in disaster.Give it a listen. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

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