The Newcomer Podcast

Before becoming a partner at Madrona Venture Group, Jon Turow worked as the head of product for computer vision at Amazon Web Services. He spent nine years at AWS in the product organization. Since becoming a venture capitalist, he’s invested in promising AI companies like Runway and Numbers Station, along with the buzzy data company MotherDuck.So when Amazon announced a partnership, called Amazon Bedrock, with Anthropic, Stability AI, and AI21 Labs, I asked Turow to come on the show to help me break down Amazon’s effort to bring foundation models closer to its cloud customers. Turow is someone who has helped me think through everything that’s happening in artificial intelligence broadly. So we had a fun conversation about open source and the excitement around AI agents — like BabyAGI. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity.But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Today, we have a bonus double episode of the Newcomer podcast for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: Replit CEO Amjad Masad and Hugging Face Clément DelangueTogether, they’re a charismatic open-source alliance.We talked about the threat posed by OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, the questions around Replit and Hugging Face’s business models, and where they would like to see more development in artificial intelligence.Charles Hudson, at Precursor, wrote up a smart reflection on the Cerebral Valley event and one of his main takeaways was about open-source companies like Replit and Hugging Face. Hudson wrote:Open-source applications will play a big role in this early phase of experimentation. One of the more refreshing and interesting things for me to hear was the different approaches that open-source companies were taking relative to their more commercially-minded peers. It wasn’t simply about business models or go to market approaches — it felt way more fundamental and philosophical about how they wanted to see AI deployed and governed. I didn’t have a full appreciation for that difference before the event, but it was one of the things that I was most struck by at the event.The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is presented bySamsung Next invests in the boldest and most ambitious founders.Tell us about your company. We’d love to meet.Part 2: Adept CEO David Luan and Greylock partner Saam MotamediOn stage with Luan and Motamedi, a major investor in Adept, I wanted to know how Adept planned to compete with foundation models like OpenAI and Anthropic — especially now that OpenAI has introduced plugins that allow third-parties to easily connect to ChatGPT. Adept is building an AI model that mirrors humans input into computers. It’s a different approach than the language models that are getting built by other foundation model companies.I also asked Luan about his time at OpenAI and at Google. I particularly wanted to know if he trusted his old team at OpenAI to spearhead the AI revolution.Find the PodcastWe’re also posting all the on-stage conversations on our YouTube channel over the next few days. Right now, you can watch:* Stability CEO Emad Mostaque one-on-one with me (the first half of my last podcast).* Shane Orlick (President at Jasper) and Cristóbal Valenzuela (CEO of Runway) with Coatue’s Caryn Marooney.* Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw’s conversation with Quora CEO and OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo and with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.* A panel of investors (Leigh Marie Braswell at Founders Fund, Bucky Moore at Kleiner Perkins, and Amber Yang at Bloomberg Beta) moderated by me.* Volley CEO Max Child’s talk with Lisha Li (Rosebud), Caroline Zhang (Knowtex), Chun Jiang (Monterey AI), and Medha Basu (Defog).* General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar with me (also featured in Tuesday’s podcast episode) .* Volley CTO James Wilsterman’s talk with Yasmin Dunsky (Wild Moose), Emily Dorsey (Pyq), and Lydia Ding (Code Complete). Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Today, we have a double episode for you — two conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit last week. Part 1: My Conversation with Stability AI CEO Emad MostaqueI didn’t know what to make of Stability AI and its CEO Emad Mostaque heading into my conversation with Mostaque Thursday at Cerebral Valley.Mostaque’s company has wrapped its arms around the wildly successful open-source artificial intelligence project Stable Diffusion. Last year, Mostaque’s company, Stability AI, raised about $100 million from investors. Lightspeed led an investment in the company a $1 billion valuation. Coatue led the previous round. On the other hand, the company has publicly scuffled with fellow Stable Diffusion co-creator Runway. Stability AI got sued by Getty Images. And it’s hard to understand exactly how Stability AI plans to profit off its proximity to Stable Diffusion. Is it just a really hyped AI consulting company?Mostaque himself is a man of mystery. He’s a former hedge fund investor who has situated himself at the heart of generative AI. He makes big pronouncements. There are whispers that Stability AI is raising another big funding round and is in talks with a big tech company partner. On stage, Mostaque didn’t dismiss the idea that the company might partner with Apple. Mostaque also said that he intended to take Stability AI public, insisting that the public markets want to get behind the AI trend. Bloomberg wrote about it. The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is presented bySamsung Next invests in the boldest and most ambitious founders.Tell us about your company. We’d love to meet.I won’t tell you how to feel about the conversation. Some people afterward told me that they were impressed by Mostaque’s performance and conviction. Mostaque had signed the letter calling for a pause in AI development — a surprising stance for someone who helped launch the generative AI craze. He was among the most electric speakers at Cerebral Valley. At the same time, some well-connected attendees told me off the record that they don’t believe Mostaque’s pronouncements. He can be short on specifics and big on promises. I found it hard to pin him down on many of the details of his business. The AI world is watching to see what happens next. Give it a listen.Part 2: My Conversation with General Catalyst’s Deep NisharStarting at 30:33, you can listen to my interview with General Catalyst’s lead growth investor Deep Nishar. A former executive at Google and LinkedIn and then one of the top investors at the SoftBank Vision Fund, Nishar has had a front seat at the table for many of the developments in the technology industry.Human health — and how artificial intelligence can shape it — was at the heart of our conversation. It’s easy to get lost in chatbots and image generation tools but the promise of artificial intelligence is far larger.We also talked about Google’s standing in the AI race and I got his reflections on SoftBank’s AI strategy.Find the PodcastWe’ll have a bonus episode for you on Thursday so watch out for that. We’re also posting all the on-stage conversations on our YouTube channel over the next few days. Right now, you can watch:* Benchmark’s Miles Grimshaw’s conversation with Quora CEO and OpenAI board member Adam D’Angelo and with LangChain founder Harrison Chase.* Volley CEO Max Child’s talk with Lisha Li (Rosebud), Caroline Zhang (Knowtex), Chun Jiang (Monterey AI), and Medha Basu (Defog). Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Ravi Mhatre co-founded Lightspeed Venture Partners just before the technology industry unraveled in the dot-com bust. Lightspeed weathered the dot-com crash and became one of Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms, known particularly for many of its enterprise software investments. This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Over his two decades at Lightspeed, Mhatre has invested in Nutanix, MuleSoft, AppDynamics, Zscaler, and Rubrik to name a few.On the Newcomer podcast, Mhatre and I talked about Silicon Valley in the wake of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. We discussed how the gravitation physics of the startup business has changed.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Behind the headlines, Jon McNeill has been a key operator and board member across many of the companies that you read about.He was the president of Tesla. Then, in February 2018, he left to take the role of chief operating officer at ride sharing company Lyft. At Tesla, he worked desperately to get the company to sell enough cars to hit Tesla’s sales targets. With the rest of the executive team, he said, “We were arm and arm to do the impossible.”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.“For more than two years we operated the company and we just had a quarter’s worth of cash,” McNeill said, recalling a period that Elon Musk has said put the company on the brink of bankruptcy. Tesla was manufacturing vehicles out of tents.“For sure, bankruptcy was a reality,” McNeill said. “When you’re peering over the edge of death, creativity starts to happen in really unique ways.”After Tesla, McNeill helped take Lyft public. But his tenure at the company lasted less than two years. His vision conflicted with the ride sharing company’s founders.Today, McNeill sits on the board of General Motors, CrossFit, and Lululemon — to name a few. In 2020, he helped found the hatch studio DVx Ventures, which has spun up seven startups so far. I brought McNeill on the podcast because I wanted to know whether the high-cash burn, blitzscaling model embraced by ride sharing companies like Lyft could survive in the new normal with non-zero interest rates and falling tech stocks.“I think blitzscaling is appropriate when interest rates are zero, when capital is free,” McNeill told me. “If people are going to hand you free capital — then you make different decisions and there was an era,” he said, “where capital was free.” But McNeill argued the bliztscaling playbook isn’t going to work anymore. “You could go out to burn capital to acquire customers in a business that didn’t have its economics figured out yet. And ride share was a good example of that. And you could burn through a lot of investor capital because basically every time you raised it didn’t cost you much in terms of valuation.”But McNeill told me, “When interest rates are non-zero, I don’t think blitzscaling is appropriate because you can’t afford the cost of capital.”I asked him, “Can companies escape blitzscaling?”“Yeah, they can but they have to have super talented leadership to do it.”He pointed to his old rival Dara Khosrowshahi as one such leader.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Laurence Tosi had a front seat for another banking crisis: He worked as a top banking executive and then private equity executive as the financial crisis swept up Wall Street. Tosi is someone I turn to when I want to get a sophisticated investor’s account of what’s really going on in Silicon Valley.His resume straddles Wall Street and Silicon Valley. He worked as the chief operating officer at Merrill Lynch, as the chief financial officer at Blackstone, and as the chief financial officer at Airbnb. Today, Tosi runs an $8 billion investment firm called WestCap that invests in startups and venture capital funds.As Silicon Valley Bank was unraveling, Tosi guided his portfolio companies on how to move their money out of the bank. Then, over the weekend, after Silicon Valley Bank failed, he talked to top banking executives, Senators, and members of Congress, including Representative Ro Khanna.Tosi, despite his generally optimistic outlook, offered a bleak take on what this year will look like for the startup industry. He predicted a “hard landing” and that 2023 will be even tougher than last year for startups. “The worst is yet to come,” Tosi said. “They raised rates so fast, the shock to the body after so many years of such a dovish stance and zero rates, it’s going to take some time to work through the system.”On the Newcomer podcast, we discussed the bank run and what led to Silicon Valley Banks failure. Give it a listen.Find the Podcast Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

For the first episode of the Newcomer podcast, I sat down with Reid Hoffman — the PayPal mafia member, LinkedIn co-founder, Greylock partner, and Microsoft board member. Hoffman had just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. Hoffman traced his interest in artificial intelligence back to a conversation with Elon Musk.“This kicked off, actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago,” Hoffman said. Musk told Hoffman that he needed to dive into artificial intelligence during conversations about a decade ago. “This is part of how I operate,” Hoffman remembers. “Smart people from my network tell me things, and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I’m like, ‘Oh, yes, we have another wave coming.’”This episode of Newcomer is brought to you by VantaSecurity is no longer a cost center — it’s a strategic growth engine that sets your business apart. That means it’s more important than ever to prove you handle customer data with the utmost integrity. But demonstrating your security and compliance can be time-consuming, tedious, and expensive. Until you use Vanta.Vanta’s enterprise-ready Trust Management Platform empowers you to:* Centralize and scale your security program* Automate compliance for the most sought-after frameworks, including SOC 2, ISO 27001, and GDPR* Earn and maintain the trust of customers and vendors alikeWith Vanta, you can save up to 400 hours and 85% of costs. Win more deals and enable growth quickly, easily, and without breaking the bank.For a limited time, Newcomer listeners get $1,000 off Vanta. Go to vanta.com/newcomer to get started.Why I Wanted to Talk to Reid Hoffman & What I Took AwayHoffman is a social network personified. Even his journey to something as wonky as artificial intelligence is told through his connections with people. In a world of algorithms and code, Hoffman is upfront about the extent to which human connections decide Silicon Valley’s trajectory. (Of course they are paired with profound technological developments that are far larger than any one person or network.)When it comes to the rapidly developing future powered by large language models, a big question in my mind is who exactly decides how these language models work? Sydney appeared in Microsoft Bing and then disappeared. Microsoft executives can dispatch our favorite hallucinations without public input. Meanwhile, masses of images can be gobbled up without asking their creators and then the resulting image generation tools can be open-sourced to the world. It feels like AI super powers come and go with little notice. It’s a world full of contradictions. There’s constant talk of utopias and dystopias and yet startups are raising conventional venture capital financing.The most prominent player in artificial intelligence — OpenAI — is a non-profit that raised from Tiger Global. It celebrates its openness in its name and yet competes with companies whose technology is actually open-sourced. OpenAI’s governance structure and priorities largely remain a mystery. Finally, unlike tech’s conservative billionaires who throw their money into politics, in the case of Hoffman, here is a tech overlord that I seem to mostly agree with politically. I wanted to know what that would be like. Is it just good marketing? And where exactly is his heart and political head at right now?I thought he delivered. I didn’t feel like he was dodging my questions, even in a world where maintaining such a wide network requires diplomacy. Hoffman seemed eager and open — even if he started to bristle at what he called my “edgy words.”Some Favorite QuotesWe covered a lot of ground in our conversation. We talked about AI sentience and humans’ failures to identify consciousness within non-human beings. We talked about the coming rise in AI cloud compute spending and how Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are positioned in the AI race.Hoffman said he had one major condition for getting involved in OpenAI back in the early days when Musk was still on board.“My price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word “robocalypse,” Hoffman told me. “Because I thought that the problem was it’s very catchy and it evokes fear.”I asked Hoffman why he thought Musk got involved in artificial intelligence in the first place when Musk seems so worried about how it might develop. Why get the ball rolling down the hill at all, I wondered?Hoffman replied that many people in the field of artificial intelligence had “messiah complexes.”“It’s the I am the one who must bring this — Prometheus, the fire to humanity,” Hoffman said. “And you’re like, ‘Okay, I kind of think it should be us versus an individual.’” He went on, “Now, us can’t be 8 billion people — us is a small group. But I think, more or less, you see the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there? And then let’s make sure that we’re having the conversations with the right communities.”I raised the possibility that this merely suggested oligarchic control of artificial intelligence rather than dictatorial control. We also discussed Hoffman’s politics, including his thoughts on Joe Biden and “woke” politics. I asked him about the state of his friendship with fellow PayPal mafia member Peter Thiel. “I basically am sympathetic to people as long as they are legitimately and earnestly committed to the dialogue and discussion of truth between them and not committed otherwise,” Hoffman said. “There are folks from the PayPal years that I don’t really spend much time talking to. There are others that I do continue because that conversation about discovering who we are and who we should be is really important. And you can’t allow your own position to be the definer.”I suggested that Thiel’s public views sometimes seemed insincere.“Oh, that’s totally corrosive,” Hoffman said. “And as much as that’s happening, it’s terrible. And that’s one of the things that in conversations I have, I push people, including Peter, on a lot.”Give it a listen.Find the PodcastRead the TranscriptEric: Reid, thank you so much for coming on the show. I'm very excited for this conversation. You know, I'm getting ready for my own AI conference at the end of this month, so hopefully this is sort of a prep by the end of this conversation, we'll all be super smart and ready for that. I feel like there've been so many rounds of sort of AI as sort of the buzzword of the day.This clearly seems the hottest. When did you get into this moment of it? I mean, obviously you just stepped off the Open AI board. You were on that board. Like how, when did you start to see this movement that we're experiencing right now coming.Reid: Well, it's funny because my undergraduate major was artificial intelligence and cognitive science. So I've, I've been around the hoop for multiple waves for a long time and I think this kicked off actually, in fact, with a dinner with Elon Musk years ago. You know, 10-ish years ago, Elon and I would have dinner about once a quarter and he's like, well, are you paying attention to this AI stuff?And I'm like, well, I majored in it and you know, I know about this stuff. He's like, no, you need to get back involved. And I was like, all right. This is part of how I operate is smart people from my network tell me things and I go and do things. And so I dug into it and I went, oh yes, we have another wave coming.And this was probably about seven or eight years ago, when I, when I saw the beginning of the wave or the seismic event. Maybe it was a seismic event out at sea and I was like, okay, there's gonna be a tsunami here and we should start getting ready cause the tsunami is actually gonna be amazingly great and interesting.Eric: And that—is that the beginning of Open AI?Reid: Open AI is later. What I did is I went and made connections with the kind of the heads of every AI lab and major company because I concluded that I thought that the AI revolution will be primarily driven by large companies initially because of the scale compute requirements.And so, you know, talked to Demis Hassabis, met Mustafa Suleyman, talked to Yann LeCun, talked to Jeff Dean, you know, all these kind of folks and kind of, you know, built all that. And then it was later in conversations with Sam and Elon that I said, look, we need to do something that's a for pro humanity. Not just commercial effort. And my price for participation, cause I thought it was a great idea, but my price for participation was to ask Elon to stop saying the word robocalypse. Because I thought that the problem was that it's very catchy and it evokes fear. And actually, in fact, one of the things I think about this whole area is that it's so much more interesting and has so much amazing opportunity for humanity.A little bit like, I don't know if you saw the Atlantic article I wrote that we evolve ourselves through technology and I'm, you know, going to be doing some writings around describing AI as augmented intelligence versus artificial intelligence. And I wanted to kind of build that positive, optimistic case that I think is the higher probability that I think we can shape towards and so forth.So it's like, okay, I'm in, but no more Robocalypse.Eric: I appreciate the ultimate sort of network person that you tell the story through people. I always appreciate when the origin stories of technology actually come through the human beings. With Elon in particular, I'm sort of confused by his position because it seems like he's very afraid of AI.And if that's the case, why would you want to, like, do anything to sort of get the ball rolling down the hill? Like, isn't there a sort of just like, stay away from it, man, if you think it's so bad. How do you see his thinking? And I'm sure it's evolved.Reid: Well, I think his instinct for the good and the challenging of this is he tends to think AI will only be good if I'm the one who's in control.Eric: Sort of, yeah.Reid: Yeah. And this is actually somewhat replete within the modern AI field. Not everybody but this. And Elon is a public enough figure that I think, you know, making this comment of him is not talking at a school.Other people would, there's a surprising number of Messiah complexes in the field of AI, and, and it's the, I am the one who must bring this, you know, Prometheus, you know, the Fire to humanity. And you're like, okay, I kind of think it should be us, right? Versus an individual. Now us can't be 8 billion people, us as a small group, but I think more or less you see the, the folks who are steering with a moral compass try to say, how do I get at least 10 to 15 people beyond myself with their hands on the steering wheel in deep conversations in order to make sure you get there and then let, let's make sure that we're having the conversations with the right communities.Like if you say, well, is this going to, you know, institutionalize, ongoing, um, you know, power structures or racial bias, something else? Well, we're talking to the people to make sure that we're going to minimize that, especially over time and navigate it as a real issue. And so those are the, like, that's the kind of anti Messiah complex, which, which is more or less the efforts that I tend to get involved in.Eric: Right. At least sort of oligarchy, of AI control instead of just dictatorship of it.Reid: Well, yeah, and it depends a little bit, even on oligarchy, look, things are built by small numbers of people. It's just a fact, right? Like, there aren't more than, you know, a couple of founders, maybe maximum five in any, any particular thing. There is, you know, there's reasons why. When you have a construction project, you have a head of construction, right?Et cetera. The important thing is to make sure that's why you have, why you have a CEO, you have a board of directors. That's why you have, you know, you say, well, do we have the right thing where a person is accountable to a broader group? And that broader group feels their governance responsibility seriously.So oligarchy is a—Eric: a chargedReid: is a charged word. And I,Eric: There’s a logic to it. I'm not, I'm not using it to say it doesn't make sense that you want the people to really understand it around, around it. Um, I mean, specifically with Open AI, I mean, you, you just stepped off the board. You're also on the board of Microsoft, which is obviously a very significant player.In this future, I mean, it's hard to be open. I get a little frustrated with the “open” in “Open AI” because I feel like there's a lot that I don't understand. I'm like, maybe they should change the name a little bit, but is it still a charity in your mind? I mean, it's obviously raised from Tiger Global, the ultimate prophet maker.Like, how should we think about the sort of core ambitions of Open AI?Reid: Well, um, one, the board I was on was a fine one and they've been very diligent about making sure that all of the controls, including for the subsidiary company are from the 501(C)(3) and diligent to its mission, which is staffed by people on the 501(C)(3) board with the responsibilities of being on a 5 0 1 board, which is being in service of the mission, not doing, you know, private inurement and other kinds of things.And so I actually think it is fundamentally still a 501(C)(3). The challenge is if you kind of say, you look at this and say, well, in order to be a successful player in the modern sca

I’m pleased to announce that I’m introducing a new podcast and starting a YouTube channel. I’m calling it “Newcomer” — like this newsletter. What can I say? It’s a good name.The show kicks off tomorrow with an interview with LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner Reid Hoffman. Hoffman just stepped off OpenAI’s board of directors. We talk about that decision, AI sentience, the PayPal mafia, cloud compute spending, Joe Biden’s presidency, and much more. I think you’ll enjoy the episode.For the new show, I’ve got interviews lined up with investor and former top Tesla and Lyft executive Jon McNeill and with Lightspeed Venture Partners founder and managing director Ravi Mhatre.I’m also going to publish some of the conversations from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on the podcast feed and YouTube channel. In that vein, I’m happy to announce that Clem Delangue, the CEO of Hugging Face, and Amjad Masad, the CEO of Replit, are scheduled to sit down with me together at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit on March 30. (Founders and CEOs can still apply this week to attend the one-day conference in Hayes Valley. We’ve been overwhelmed with investor interest to attend.)Newcomer, the weekly podcast, will post on Tuesdays. I’ll send it to newsletter subscribers and publish it to Apple podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. Email me with guest ideas. I’ll publish summaries of the episodes here in the newsletter. Over time, I might add bonus sections for paying Newcomer subscribers. With this podcast, I’m going solo, interviewing top investors and founders. I’m bringing my sensibility as someone who understands the inside-story of Silicon Valley but who is happy to poke and prod as to why the tech world operates like it does. I want to thank automated security and compliance platform Vanta for being the launch sponsor for the Newcomer podcast. You may remember Vanta CEO Christina Cacioppo from her appearance on the second episode of my old podcast Dead Cat. She’s been an early believer in my audio efforts! Excited to have Vanta on board. If you’re interested in sponsoring the podcast, reach out. For fans of my old podcast Dead Cat, give the new podcast a try. It will be arriving via the same podcast feed. The Newcomer podcast shouldn’t be so much a revolution as an evolution. Yes, my former co-host Tom Dotan is off skewering Marc Benioff for the Wall Street Journal. I’m on my own. It will give me more time to ask the hard questions and listen to the guests’ replies. I’m going to try to talk about the media less and the business of tech more. But it will be the same probing podcast that you’ve come to love. To get new episodes, subscribe to this newsletter, sign up to receive the podcast on Apple, and subscribe to the Newcomer YouTube channel. I’d definitely appreciate some positive reviews as I get this thing going. Like, comment, subscribe, and all that.See you in your feeds tomorrow! Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

I was the first to report that Nan Li, Adam Goulburn, and Zavain Dar were setting out to create a venture capital firm back in August 2022. So when the trio finally announced their $350 million life sciences and technology-focused venture firm, called Dimension, I had to have them on the podcast. I wanted to hear why Goulburn and Dar, general partners at Lux Capital, and Li, a general partner at Obvious Ventures, decided to embark on the long, hard trek of building their own firm.The three investors have become true believers about the rapid developments happening at the intersection of life sciences and software. Software engineers have made their way into the drug development process and the laboratory wet bench. Li describes having a realization, “Wow, this seemingly small area that we used to cover when we were coming up in the industry together is now reorganizing the entire industry. And we’re seeing signs of that everywhere.” He explained how the speed of lab experiments is opening the door for a bigger role for software in laboratory research.“Experiments are getting very high throughput. They’re very cheap to run. And labs are generating data streams that look kind of like internet platform companies. There are certain biotechs that we work with, that generate more data per day than Twitter does,” Li said on the podcast. “And that’s where data science and software must come in. It’s really out of necessity. The way a modern lab works today looks nothing like 20 years ago.”So, at probably the worst time to raise a new venture capital firm in recent memory, the trio set out to build a new one. On the podcast, Li, Goulburn, and Dar tell me how they did it. I ask them what technologies they are most optimistic about in the life sciences. And I pester them about whether healthy billionaires are getting vastly better healthcare than the rest of us — or are they just driving themselves crazy with tests?Give it a listenRead the automated transcript Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Bessemer Venture Partners’ Jeremy Levine is someone who keeps his head when others are losing theirs. He’s long been wary of tech exuberance while being a long-term optimist about the transformative power of technology. A board member at Pinterest and Shopify, Levine described his investing style to me for this week’s Dead Cat podcast: “I don’t like to go where all the cool kids are, where all the popular kids are. I like to kind of go off in the corner of the playground and find someone who’s doing something over there that’s really compelling that most people are prepared to dismiss or aren’t that excited about.”I wanted to have Levine on the podcast to explain the tech downturn. Levine has been investing at Bessemer for over two decades. I wondered, how does this moment compare to the dot-com bust and the Great Recession? On the podcast, Levine traces the ebbs and flows of tech euphoria while giving concrete math to the pain of down rounds. ‘The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite’He delivered quite the diatribe when I asked him to compare the present moment to the dot-com bust:When I joined the venture industry in 2001, I looked at these entrepreneurs who built businesses and these venture capitalists who funded them from ’96 to 2000 and I was jealous. Oh my lord, they generated enormous value and enormous wealth in such a short time. And I said to myself, the world is never going to get this crazy again. The entire world smoked a giant joint and was high as a kite, and what fun it would have been to be part of that, but I missed the party. But I thought, you know, it’s really rewarding and fun and challenging to find compelling entrepreneurs and invest in startups. So even though it’s never gonna get as good as it was in 2000 again, I’m going to try to make this my career because I think I’ll find it fun. And lo and behold, 20 years later, it happened again: Someone passed the joint around the party a second time, and no one remembered what happened the first time, and things got crazy. So in that sense, it’s really similar. Enormous wealth was created, enormous companies were created. But the difference is that when that party ended — at the end of 2021 — it wasn’t three or four companies left standing. It was dozens and dozens of strong public companies, and hundreds of really interesting private companies. Now, not every unicorn and not every company that raised a lot of money will be successful. But the industry is, I would say, two orders of magnitude larger than it was in 2000.He argued that he believed there was still “another shoe to drop” in this tech downturn. He said venture firms were reserving more money to make follow-on investments for their existing portfolio companies, giving them less dry powder with which to make new investments. “I think we’re in a little bit of that spiral,” Levine said.The Anti-PortfolioBack in July 2021, amidst the final heady months of the bull market, I profiled Bessemer and Levine in an in-depth story titled, The Anti-Portfolio. (Still worth a read if you missed it.) An undercurrent in the piece was that Bessemer had smartly invested early in some of the tech industry’s most popular public stocks like Shopify and Twilio but that the firm had sold down its positions before a massive run-up in their value on the public markets. Now, with Twilio down 70% and Shopify down 52% over the past 12 months, Bessemer’s decision to cash in its winners seems more rational. I asked Levine whether he felt vindicated.“We’ve made every mistake possible,” he told me. “But we’ve also gotten some things right. And so with the benefit of hindsight, we distributed our stock in Shopify way too early. And at the same time, we held onto some stocks in 2021 a bit too long. I think we’re not all that focused on getting that exactly right. Of course, we’re always trying to do better. But the real win, if you will, and the excitement and what motivates us is to invest in a company like Shopify or Auth0 when it’s really small and to nurture it and help that company become really big. And if you manage to top tick and exit your position … all the power to you. That’s just not that interesting of a game.”Give it a listenRead the automated transcriptP.S. If you want to weigh in as to whether I should rename the podcast, you can vote on Twitter or voice your opinion in the comments. Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe