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Newcomer Pod

Eric Newcomer | newcomer.co

Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. With this podcast, I dive straight into the heart of the tech industry, 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.

If you want first-person and insider information delivered to your newsletter, subscribe to my podcast at newcomer.co on Substack.

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  • 23 episodes
  • weekly
  • Avg 56 min
  • English
Counted on this page — what you have heard stays on this device, so it is not something the list can be paged by.
  • March 24 · 1 hr 5 min

    Matt Mahan — "California's Failure Is the Best Ammunition Trump Has Ever Had"

    Matt Mahan is the Mayor of San Jose and a candidate for Governor of California. He is one of the only prominent Democrats in the state willing to say out loud that California's failure to fix housing, homelessness, and energy costs has handed the MAGA movement its best ammunition. It isn't a partisan argument. It's a governance one. In this conversation, Eric sits down with Matt to get into why California has spent $20 billion on high speed rail and delivered nothing, why the billionaire wealth tax will backfire, and how San Jose reduced homelessness by a third without raising taxes. They also get into his break with Gavin Newsom, the tech industry's growing political power, and what a competence first Democratic message actually looks like in practice. They also talk about what's next — the jungle primary on June 2nd, what Matt thinks California needs from its next governor, and why he believes fixing the state is the most powerful counter to what's happening in Washington right now.

    • Transcript
  • March 20 · 56 min

    Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building"

    Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures, was one of the first checks into Wiz — the Israeli cybersecurity company Google acquired for $32 billion. It wasn't luck. It was a decade-long relationship with the founders, a willingness to wire money on conviction alone, and a philosophy that treats risk calculus as a fool's errand.In this conversation, Eric sits down with Shardul to unpack how the Wiz deal actually came together, what Google really bought for $32 billion, and why mid-sized acquisitions almost always fail. They get into how Index thinks about doubling down across funds, why Shardul refuses to invest in a founder he's only met over Zoom, and what he saw in the Wiz founders a decade before anyone else was paying attention.They also talk about what's next — the categories Shardul is hunting, the founders he's already betting on, and why he thinks everything that happened with Wiz should stretch every entrepreneur's sense of what's possible.Eric Newcomer covers the inner workings of startups and venture capital. Subscribe for interviews with the people building and funding the next generation of tech.

    • Transcript
  • March 16 · 1 hr 2 min

    Barry McCardel on Why Everyone Is Copying Palantir’s Playbook (And Getting It Wrong)

    Barry McCardel spent years at Palantir before co-founding Hex, the AI data platform he describes as “Cursor for data.” In this conversation with Eric Newcomer, he breaks down Palantir’s business model, the truth about forward deployed engineers, how AI agents are changing data analytics and business intelligence, and why Hex is taking a different path in enterprise software.They also get into AI agents, the future of data work, the reinvention of business intelligence, whether white-collar jobs are really at risk, and the fight over Anthropic, defense tech, surveillance, and government power.

    • Transcript
Showing 21–23 of 23 episodes