In the Know with Amol Sarva

By Amol SarvaBusiness Science Technology

In the Know with Amol Sarva episodes

February 07 PJ Parson, Northzone and Spotify
🎙️ Episode Guide — PJ Parson (Northzone)
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech Celebrating 30 years of the New York tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
PJ Parson is a partner at Northzone, best known for backing Spotify when it expanded to New York in 2012. But his path to venture capital wasn’t linear—it ran through small-town Sweden, jazz musicianship, tour guiding in Italy, ski resorts in France, McKinsey, fish farming, and eventually private equity. His story is about how unconventional experiences shaped his ability to see opportunity, manage chaos, and eventually help build New York’s second wave of tech.
This conversation is about the hidden arcs behind venture capital: not just finance, but music, culture, resilience, and the willingness to reinvent yourself.
SECTION I — Origins and Early Adventures
00:00 – Small town Sweden to Dayton, Ohio PJ describes growing up in Sweden, then spending a formative exchange year in Dayton, Ohio. The contrast opened his eyes to the wider world.
00:42 – Three gap years of adventure Instead of rushing to university, PJ spent three years as a tour guide in Italy and ski guide in France. What began as playing music for tourists turned into managing excursions and eventually running large resorts with hundreds of guests per week.
03:00 – Learning history by necessity Thrown into leading tours of Rome, Florence, and Pisa, PJ immersed himself in Renaissance and Roman history—discovering a love of learning outside the classroom.
SECTION II — University and Discipline
07:30 – Stockholm School of Economics After years of adventure, PJ enrolled at Sweden’s top business school. His vision deficiency exempted him from military service, but the maturity gained from his gap years helped him thrive academically.
09:00 – Trial by fire in microeconomics A professor failed him twice before finally passing him on the third attempt, teaching him the value of rigor and persistence.
SECTION III — McKinsey: Survival and Structure
11:00 – Entering consulting almost by accident PJ applied for a McKinsey internship with little knowledge of consulting. His charisma and conceptual thinking got him in, despite average grades.
17:00 – “You’re a mis-hire” After just one project, McKinsey tried to fire him. PJ pushed back, arguing for another chance—and survived. He stayed five years, learning the discipline of structure, detail, and execution.
SECTION IV — Private Equity and Fish Farming
20:00 – Leaving McKinsey for private equity In 1993, PJ joined one of Sweden’s early private equity firms. But he quickly found the work too removed from real operations.
22:00 – Becoming a fish CEO Sent to fix a struggling fish distribution company, PJ became CEO. He turned around the business by slashing working capital, introducing just-in-time methods, and building simple internet-based systems in the mid-1990s.
25:00 – Buying the company for $1 When the firm gave up, PJ took over the company himself—proving his ability to lead a turnaround.
SECTION V — Lessons Before Venture
27:00 – From chaos to clarity Running ski resorts, surviving McKinsey, and saving a fish company all taught PJ the same lesson: leadership is about managing complexity, staying calm in chaos, and finding leverage in systems.
29:00 – Toward venture capital These experiences set the stage for his later career in private equity and eventually Northzone—where he would back Spotify and help shape New York’s tech scene.
Closing — The Arc of PJ Parson
PJ’s story shows that venture capital isn’t just about finance. It’s about lived experience: music, travel, management under pressure, and the ability to reinvent yourself. From Swedish jazz roots to Spotify in New York, his path reflects the eclectic, global, and resilient spirit that defines the New York tech ecosystem.
1 hr 29 min
January 30Kevin Ryan, Alleycorp + MongoDB ++ Doubleclick, Dilbert
>updated with vibier sound!<
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech
Celebrating 30 years of the New York tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Kevin Ryan joined DoubleClick in 1996, just months after it was founded—and helped turn it into the most important New York technology company of the internet era. From there, he went on to co-found or incubate a generation of defining NYC companies: MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, and dozens more through AlleyCorp.
This conversation is about how New York tech actually formed: not in garages, not via hype cycles, but through media, advertising, distribution, discipline—and people who stayed when it got ugly.
🎙️ Episode Chapters — Kevin Ryan
DoubleClick, the Internet Crash, and Building New York’s Second Tech Act
SECTION I — Before “New York Tech” Existed
00:00 – Books, tapes, and recording everything
The conversation opens not with startups, but with New York itself—books about the city, recording devices, and the instinct to document moments that don’t yet feel historic. A fitting entry point for someone who repeatedly found himself early to structural change.
03:00 – From Europe to Yale to Wall Street
A childhood split between Rome, Geneva, and Ohio. Yale economics and art history. Investment banking. Business school at INSEAD. Disney Paris during the launch of Euro Disney—scaling from 1,000 to 20,000 employees in under two years. Operations before tech. Execution before mythology.
SECTION II — Media, Cartoons, and the Pre-Browser Internet
07:30 – Running Dilbert… before browsers existed
At United Media (a division of E.W. Scripps), Kevin builds one of the earliest commercial websites—for Dilbert and other syndicated content—before Netscape, before Mosaic adoption, before “the web” meant anything to most people.
09:30 – Why this mattered
Syndication economics are collapsing. Newspapers are consolidating. The internet quietly offers a way to bypass gatekeepers and go direct to audiences—if anyone can figure out how to monetize it.
11:30 – The first banner ads
Ads are hard-coded. Prices are invented on the spot. Netscape and IBM buy week-long placements. Measurement barely exists. But something clicks: distribution plus software beats content alone.
SECTION III — 1995–1996: Silicon Alley, Barely
15:30 – How small it really was
In 1995 New York internet events fit in a room. Everyone knows everyone. Media companies flirt with AOL, Prodigy, and Pathfinder. Most incumbents wait for “the next internet.”
16:30 – The innovator’s dilemma, live
Kevin proposes building a real internet division inside United Media. Leadership declines—too small, too uncertain, too reminiscent of the CD-ROM bust. A textbook example, unfolding in real time.
SECTION IV — DoubleClick: The Right Abstraction
18:00 – Meeting the founders
Kevin meets Dwight Merriman and Kevin O’Connor—recent arrivals from Atlanta with a radical idea: dynamic ad serving. Smarter, measurable, programmable advertising.
19:30 – Knowing what you don’t know
Kevin immediately understands the business importance—and immediately knows he can’t build it himself. The partnership works because the abstraction is right and the roles are clear.
21:00 – From CFO to President to CEO
Joined in mid-1996 as CFO. Becomes President within months. Later CEO. The company grows from 10 people to 2,000 in four years. IPO in 1998—just 24 months after founding.
SECTION V — The Boom, Then the Collapse
24:30 – 1998–2000: Peak Silicon Alley
DoubleClick becomes New York’s most valuable tech company. Tens of billions in valuation. The center of gravity for online advertising globally.
25:30 – The crash everyone misremembers
In 2000–2001, 70% of DoubleClick’s customers go bankrupt. Competitors give away product to survive. Markets panic.
Kevin’s contrarian take:
The market wasn’t wrong in 2000—it was wrong in 2001. Buying the leaders at the peak would still have paid off long-term.
28:30 – Survival math
Half the staff is laid off. Businesses are sold. But ad volume keeps doubling. Product quality compounds. Competitors die. The “fat get thin; the thin die.”
SECTION VI — Why He Stayed
31:00 – The CEO decision
Kevin becomes CEO as conditions worsen—not improve. Morale is low. The job is brutal. But the fundamentals are undeniable: internet advertising isn’t going away.
33:00 – Looking past the stock price
If you ignore the ticker and look only at usage, share, and technical advantage, the outcome is obvious. That conviction carries the company through.
SECTION VII — Leaving, Then Starting Again
35:00 – Exiting DoubleClick
After nine years, DoubleClick is sold to private equity (and later to Google). Kevin leaves—not out of failure, but boredom. Ad tech is solved.
36:00 – AlleyCorp: Incubation as craft
From 2005 to 2008, Kevin and Dwight incubate six companies at once, investing their own capital, acting as chair and technical backstop.
37:30 – The hits
MongoDB — open source, enterprise software, ten-year overnight success
Business Insider — hiring Henry Blodget, betting on redemption and velocity
Gilt Groupe — fashion, logistics, and scale at internet speed
Also: Panther, ShopWiki, Music Nation—some wins, some misses. The math still works.
SECTION VIII — MongoDB and the New York Enterprise Myth
44:00 – “You can’t build enterprise software in NYC”
MongoDB disproves it. Slowly. Painfully. No revenue for years. Then compounding takes over.
46:00 – The long curve
After 10+ years, MongoDB goes public at ~$100M revenue. The vast majority of value is created after year eleven.
47:30 – What people get wrong
New York doesn’t lack technical talent. It lacks patience myths. Enterprise outcomes reward persistence more than hype.
SECTION IX — From Builder to Platform
50:00 – After 2013
AlleyCorp evolves from pure incubation to investing at scale. One LP becomes many. Fifteen to twenty investments per year. Fewer incubations. More pattern recognition.
52:00 – Having good ideas
Good ideas aren’t brainstorms. They’re friction noticed repeatedly:
Business news that doesn’t update. Wedding registries that sell plates instead of experiences. Databases that don’t match modern data.
CLOSING — The Actual Arc of New York Tech
54:00 – What this story really shows
New York tech didn’t emerge from imitation. It emerged from media, ads, logistics, finance, and people willing to stay through down cycles.
55:00 – The hidden continuity
From Dilbert on pre-browser internet to MongoDB at $30B+, this is one continuous story—not reinvention, but accumulation.
1 hr 16 min
January 08 Flaming Lips play Madonna
0 min
December 28, 2025 Howard Morgan, First Round and BCap
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Howard Morgan started as an engineer and professor in the early computing days, and ended up building three (four? five?) huge and import investment groups. Renaissance... Idealab... and listen for more on the early computing gods through to Bitcoin and AI.
🎙️ Episode Chapters — Howard Morgan
Computers Before PCs, Venture Before “Venture,” and the Hidden Origins of Quant Finance
SECTION I — The Long Arc: From Mainframes to the Internet
00:00 – Recording everything
Louis Armstrong’s house in Queens, tape recorders running 24/7, and the idea that capturing everything matters—an unexpected entry point into a life spent documenting and building the future.
02:00 – Why keep doing this?
Why founders and investors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s keep starting new firms: curiosity, youth by proximity, and the refusal to stop building.
04:00 – 1995 is arbitrary (but useful)
Why the mid-1990s are a convenient marker for New York tech—even though the real story starts decades earlier.
06:30 – Browsers before browsers
Early web commercialization: Mosaic, Spyglass, Quarterdeck, browser history, and the moment when the web quietly crossed from research to product.
SECTION II — Becoming a Computer Scientist (1960s–1970s)
07:30 – City College, 1962
Discovering computers via a desk-sized machine with punch tape—and deciding, very early, to go all-in.
09:00 – Dick Hamming’s intervention
A Bell Labs legend redirects a physics student toward computers, operations research, and what would become modern computing.
10:30 – Speedrunning academia
Three years of high school, three years of college, three years to a PhD—becoming the youngest assistant professor at Cornell.
11:30 – The first computer-printed PhD thesis
Punch cards, justified text, and convincing the university that this was the future.
12:30 – Making computers less stupid
Early spell-checking, syntax correction, semantic error handling—and the belief that computers should fix mistakes, not punish users.
SECTION III — The Office of the Future (Before It Was Obvious)
14:00 – Databases, UX, and email (1970s)
Large databases measured by the ton, early email, and building user-friendly systems long before “UX” was a term.
16:00 – Windows before Windows
Multi-window systems, color vs. black-and-white debates with Alan Kay, and building what Xerox PARC would later popularize.
18:00 – Personal computers as an experiment
DARPA hands out minicomputers to see what researchers will do—and accidentally invents networked personal computing.
19:00 – The wine list incident
Creating one of the earliest online interest groups—and being told to shut it down before Congress notices.
SECTION IV — From Research to Venture (Late 1970s–1980s)
21:00 – First taste of company-building
Commercializing Unix, meeting Jim Simons, and realizing that investing—not academia—might be the real lever.
23:00 – Jim Simons before Renaissance
How a math professor accumulates capital, discovers computing’s power in markets, and dreams of a money-making machine.
25:00 – Founding Renaissance (1982)
Splitting time between quant trading and venture investing—before either category really existed.
27:00 – Early deep tech investing
Encryption hardware, LCD panels, Unix tools, QA software—companies that look like modern “deep tech” decades early.
SECTION V — Quant Changes Everything
31:00 – The great split
Venture returns at ~25% IRR, quant at ~38%—and the decision to spin venture out of Renaissance.
33:00 – Medallion Fund mythology
Capacity limits, extreme fees, internal-only capital, and quietly becoming the most successful hedge fund in history.
35:00 – The quant ecosystem forms
D.E. Shaw, Two Sigma, AQR—time series, statistics, and data replace “market intuition.”
38:00 – Alternative data before it had a name
Clickstream analysis, URL bars, and predicting Amazon revenue before earnings calls.
SECTION VI — Idealab and the Internet Boom
42:00 – Why Idealab mattered
Company-creation as a system: projects before companies, cheap experimentation, and speed as advantage.
44:00 – The 2000 peak
Raising $1B+ at a $9B valuation, surviving the crash, and why Idealab outlasted its peers.
46:00 – Citysearch, GoTo, Overture
Search, local discovery, and the foundations of modern internet advertising.
SECTION VII — New York Tech Comes Into Focus
48:00 – Returning to New York
From Philly and California back to NYC—just as New York tech finally coheres as a scene.
49:00 – New York New Media Association
Meetups, early angels, and the connective tissue that becomes the New York startup ecosystem.
50:00 – Deals you miss, deals you hit
DoubleClick envy, Half.com’s sale to eBay, and why timing always beats intelligence.
CLOSING — Perspective from the Long View
52:00 – Seeing it all (except the iPhone)
Why most of the future was visible decades early—and why consumer mobile computing still surprised everyone.
54:00 – The hidden history of New York tech
Before startups were cool, before venture had a name, before quant was dominant—New York was already shaping the future.
1 hr 29 min
December 28, 2025 *Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures
>updated with vibier sound!<
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Fred Wilson's USV is kind of a 'nuff said, to borrow NYC comic book language. Hear the very early days and listen past through into the epilogue to hear Fred on music scenes and the process of discovery.
🎙️ Episode Chapters
SECTION I — The Core Interview: Building New York Tech (1990s → Now)
00:00 – Opening & framing OG New York tech
Why this conversation exists: 30 years of New York tech, the OGNY moment, and why Fred Wilson’s career offers a uniquely New York lens on venture, media, and culture.
03:00 – Fred’s origin story (engineering → venture)
Growing up everywhere, landing in New York, fleeing engineering, and discovering venture capital as the overlap between money and technology.
07:30 – Venture capital before the internet
What 1980s venture actually looked like: PCs, networking, and a financial world that barely knew what to do with software.
10:30 – The 1995 New York “New Media” scene
Journalists, artists, media kids, and early internet builders collide—AOL, CD-ROMs, web artists, and why New York’s tech scene grew out of culture, not semiconductors.
13:00 – Starting Flatiron Partners
Leaving Euclid, early internet bets, and the unlikely move that gave Flatiron real firepower: institutional backing from Chase and SoftBank before the bubble mentality fully arrived.
18:00 – “You’re investing in a website?”
A defining venture lesson: the best investments often sound ridiculous at first. Why laughter and disbelief are leading indicators of outsized returns.
21:00 – Three core investing principles
Contrarian ideas people hate, founders driven by obsession rather than business plans, and why it’s often a mistake to monetize too early.
26:00 – Missionary founders (Etsy, Duolingo)
Accidental entrepreneurs, aesthetic conviction, and building scale before business models—why belief comes before revenue.
30:00 – New York culture as an investing advantage
Why art, music, and creative subcultures shaped investments like Etsy, Kickstarter, and SoundCloud—and why Silicon Valley logic didn’t fully apply.
34:00 – Blogging, influence, and burnout
The rise of AVC: daily writing, community, learning in public—and why politics and online toxicity eventually broke the spell.
47:00 – Big funds vs. artisanal venture
A candid reassessment: mega-funds may have “won,” even if small, craft-driven venture remains more personally meaningful.
52:00 – Cult classic vs. blockbuster
Impact, legacy, and why some investors (and companies) choose influence over maximum scale.
SECTION II — Epilogue: Music, Taste, and Discovery (Pre-Game Chat)
55:00 – Music as a life pattern
Classic rock, indie, and the joy of discovering what’s next rather than replaying the canon.
57:00 – Being early, not right
Why showing up to small shows, supporting emerging artists, and sharing discoveries mirrors great investing behavior.
59:00 – Taste as practice
Curiosity, openness, and cultural participation—not optimization—as the quiet through-line connecting music fandom, blogging, and venture capital.
1 hr 38 min
December 28, 2025 Alan Patricof, APAX, Greycroft and Primetime
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Alan Patricof's been at it since he graduated from Columbia Business School just a couple years apart from Warren Buffett. And you might as well think of him in that same legend league, in Alan's case for Venture Capital. We start from the very early days and go right through today.
🎙️ Episode Chapters — Alan Patricof
Inventing Venture Capital in New York, Then Walking Away (Repeatedly)
SECTION I — The Core Interview: A 70-Year View of Venture
00:00 – A living timeline
Setting the frame: Alan Patricof at 91, still working, still curious—why this is less an interview than an oral history of American venture capital.
03:00 – Pounding the pavement (1950s Wall Street)
No recruiters, no security desks: walking every building on Wall Street, floor by floor, asking for a job. How finance careers started before finance careers existed.
05:30 – Learning investing the slow way
Investment counseling, portfolio construction, and why balanced, family-office style investing shaped everything that came later.
07:30 – Development capital before “venture”
Real estate, bridges, electronics, finance companies—proto-venture investing before the word venture capital meant anything.
10:30 – Family offices and private deals
Discovering the overlooked power of private company investing while everyone else focused on public stocks—and why this felt more human.
13:00 – Becoming a board member at 34
New York Magazine, Datascope, Lin Broadcasting: early board roles, founder relationships, and the addictive pull of building instead of trading.
15:30 – What separates great founders
The pivot instinct: knowing when to abandon the original market and redirect a product without abandoning conviction.
18:00 – “You invest in the jockey”
Why founder psychology matters more than ideas, and why you can’t actually diagnose this until you’re already in business together.
SECTION II — Inventing Venture Capital (1968–1980s)
20:00 – Starting Patricof & Co.
Nine family offices, a tiny first fund, and the realization that venture could be a service business as much as a capital business.
22:00 – Warburg, Pincus, and the early peers
The handful of firms inventing venture in parallel—and how indistinct the lines were between VC, merchant banking, and private equity.
24:00 – Surviving the 1970s
Why venture almost died: inflation, stagnation, and the need to do M&A work just to keep the lights on.
26:00 – Going international before it was fashionable
London, Paris, New York—building venture infrastructure in Europe when the concept barely translated (literally “capital risk”).
27:30 – The birth of Apax
Unifying global activities under one name and accidentally creating one of the world’s largest private equity platforms.
SECTION III — Iconic Deals Before Tech Was “Tech”
29:00 – Apple, almost casually
A phone call, a small allocation, a $315k check—and a reminder that early venture often felt mundane in the moment.
31:30 – Why nobody held forever
Ten-year funds, capital recycling, and why paper fortunes usually stayed theoretical.
33:00 – Beating the bushes for deals
Fifteen deals a year, maybe one investment—finding companies meant showing up physically, not scrolling inboxes.
35:00 – Office Depot and firm-building
Delegation, partnership, and why building institutions matters more than personal deal mythology.
37:00 – AOL’s forgotten origin
Online games, modems, bankruptcy, and the pivot from play to communication that reshaped the internet.
40:00 – Doing the messy work
Hands-on restructuring, capital engineering, and why early venture often looked more like salvage than storytelling.
SECTION IV — Walking Away (and Starting Again)
44:00 – Why Apax stopped feeling like venture
Scale, later-stage gravity, and the quiet moment when a firm becomes something else.
46:00 – A detour into global development
World Bank, IFC, Trickle Up, and applying venture logic to poverty, SMEs, and economic development.
48:00 – Founding Greycroft
Writing “no private equity” into the mission, timing the internet perfectly, and building another major platform from scratch.
50:00 – Venmo, Huffington Post, and the Web 2.0 wave
Media, payments, identity, and why New York finally started producing global tech brands.
52:00 – PrimeTime Partners
Aging, longevity, and investing with personal urgency—spotting demographic inevitability before it became fashionable.
SECTION V — New York, Finally
54:00 – Why New York couldn’t win earlier
Crime, cost, culture, and why founders simply didn’t want to live here in the 70s and 80s.
56:00 – Media as New York’s wedge
Audible, publishing, advertising, and why content and distribution cracked the door before infrastructure followed.
58:00 – The tipping point
From DoubleClick to Datadog: why everyone now needs a New York presence—and why this time feels durable.
CLOSING — Perspective from Repetition
01:00:00 – The rare skill
Not spotting waves once, but having the courage to leave institutions when they stop matching your values—and doing it again.
1 hr 11 min
November 12, 2025 Ben Lerer, Thrillist and Lerer Hippeau
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Ben Lerer tells us what ideas led to the creation of a whole new type of media company in the 2000s -- Thrillist -- and the age of newsletters and bloggers in New York, and how the powerhouse seed-stage venture firm Lerer Hippeau came from it all.
55 min
October 28, 2025Dennis Crowley, Foursquare and Dodgeball
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Dennis Crowley tells us how he got to New York and the early internet culture in the media/Wall Street world: and how it all led to Foursquare -- the art of the game
🎙️ Episode Chapters — Dennis Crowley
From Punk Zines to Foursquare: How New York Taught the Internet to Find Itself
SECTION I — The Core Interview: Growing Up Inside the Internet
00:00 – Setting the frame: OG New York tech
Why Dennis Crowley belongs in the canon of New York founders, and why 1995 feels like a plausible “Year Zero” for the consumer internet.
03:00 – Suburban modems and early online culture
Dial-up life, BBS culture, AOL, Prodigy, and discovering the thrill of connecting machines to people before the web had pictures.
05:30 – Punk zines, skating, and DIY publishing
Photocopied fanzines about video games and skate culture; disposable cameras as “screenshots”; learning layout, editing, and distribution before the word “creator economy” existed.
09:00 – Music as an operating system
Native Tongues hip-hop, skating culture, and the aesthetics of the early ’90s shaping taste, rhythm, and community instincts.
11:30 – Syracuse and discovering the graphical web
First Ethernet connections, Mosaic, Marc Andreessen in the newspaper, and realizing the web could become a mass medium.
13:30 – Early digital storytelling
Scanning photos, building homepages, blink tags, animated GIFs, and using the web as a proto-blog long before social media had a name.
15:00 – Advertising school meets the internet
Majoring in advertising, minor in information studies, and becoming the “internet kid” inside traditional agencies.
16:30 – Jupiter Media and the dot-com boom
Moving to New York in 1998 as a research associate, learning how the internet economy actually worked, and living inside nonstop startup parties.
20:00 – Studying the plumbing of the web
Infrastructure research: ecommerce systems, personalization engines, early customer-service analytics, and measuring how badly websites handled users.
23:00 – The crash arrives
Dot-com collapse, layoffs, evaporating optimism, and the sense that the entire New York tech experiment might be over.
SECTION II — Dodgeball: Inventing Location Before Smartphones
25:00 – Discovering Indigo and city software
Falling in love with Palm Pilots, mobile city guides, and the idea that cities deserved real-time digital maps.
26:30 – Teaching himself to code
“Learn to code in 30 days” books, hacking together early prototypes, and turning curiosity into functioning software.
28:00 – Layoffs, eviction, and personal collapse
Job loss, housing instability, breakups — and how downturns compress life into creative pressure cookers.
29:00 – Montauk, Harry Potter, and the Marauder’s Map
The idea spark: phones as real-time maps of where friends are, long before GPS or push notifications were normal.
30:30 – Building primitive location sharing
Email hacks instead of SMS, self-reported locations, and inventing “check-ins” without calling them that.
31:30 – 9/11 and leaving the city
Being in the West Village on September 11th, the emotional shock, and temporarily abandoning New York.
33:00 – Snowboarding exile and reflection
Retreating to New Hampshire, teaching snowboarding, video games as therapy, and deciding what comes next.
35:00 – NYU ITP: art school for the internet
Returning to New York through NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program — a collision of artists, hackers, designers, and urban technologists.
38:00 – Dodgeball reborn at ITP
Partnering with Alex Rainert, remixing Friendster ideas into mobile social networking, and making phones socially alive.
41:00 – The Lower East Side as a living network
Bars as incubators, bloggers as amplifiers, Dodgeball driving physical crowds in real time — a proto-network effect.
43:30 – Media flywheel
Blog coverage → mainstream press → CNN → cultural legitimacy, all happening inside New York’s dense media ecosystem.
45:00 – Why venture capital didn’t show up yet
Scarce funding, dismissive investors, and the feeling of building something culturally obvious but financially invisible.
SECTION III — Google, Loss, and Reinvention
48:00 – Google acquires Dodgeball
A chance lunch, repeated demos in one afternoon, and a long acquisition process that finally closes.
50:00 – Life inside early Google New York
Watching Google scale the building footprint, seeing other acquisitions (Docs lineage), and learning how platforms actually grow.
53:00 – Identity crash after leaving Google
Losing Dodgeball as a personal identity, feeling professionally unplaceable, and facing creative emptiness.
55:00 – The sunset press release
Google announces Dodgeball will be shut down — triggering urgency and emotional ignition.
56:00 – Birthday party epiphany
At Lockhart Steele’s party, deciding to rebuild — this time with a launch deadline: South by Southwest.
58:00 – Everyone says no (again)
Investors skeptical, legal fears, déjà vu rejection, and the persistence muscle getting tested.
01:03:00 – The breakthrough: real-world rewards
A San Francisco café accidentally invents the Foursquare business model — check-ins unlocking real benefits.
01:05:00 – Overnight momentum
From ignored to oversubscribed almost instantly as the flywheel becomes visible.
CLOSING — What This Episode Is Really About
This isn’t just the origin of Foursquare.
It’s a story about:
how creative subcultures feed technical invention
how cities shape product behavior
how failure metabolizes into insight
how timing matters more than genius
how the internet learned to inhabit physical space
And how New York — messy, artistic, media-dense, socially entangled — uniquely incubated a category that Silicon Valley later industrialized.
1 hr 22 min
October 28, 2025Albert Wenger, Union Square Ventures
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Albert Wenger tells me about his 20 years at USV, and how NY went from apps-mostly to deep and infra.
🎙️ In the Know — OG NY Tech
Guest: Albert Wenger (Union Square Ventures)
Theme: 30 years of New York tech — personal origin story, early ecosystem formation, iconic USV bets, and future-facing frameworks (crypto + AI).
00:00–03:00 — Cold Open & Framing
Playful cold open bumping into Fred Wilson; teasing a broader oral history of OG New York tech.
Framing: 2025 ≈ 30 years since the “start” of modern tech (1995 milestones: Netscape IPO, Amazon founded, Yahoo incorporates, etc.).
Establishes the podcast arc: reconstructing how New York became a real tech ecosystem.
03:00–07:30 — Discovering the Web (MIT Years)
Albert discovers the web via Mosaic browser in an MIT lab.
Describes the visceral “I’ve seen the future” moment and early intuition that newspapers would be disrupted (timing optimistic, direction correct).
Nice color on early internet UX and accidental discovery.
07:30–10:00 — First Startup: W3 Health
Doing a startup and a PhD simultaneously (strongly not recommended).
W3 Health tackled patient data interoperability — still largely unsolved today.
Learns he’s not a great CEO; brings in operators.
Finishes dissertation, graduates MIT (1999), moves permanently to NYC.
10:00–13:30 — Fintech Detour + Bubble-Era Incubation
Joins internet bank (Telebank → E*Trade Bank).
Raises $25M for incubator LC39 at the peak of the dot-com bubble.
Near-merger with a European internet vehicle collapses when the bubble bursts.
Returns ~90¢ on the dollar to investors — rare mercy in that era.
Early relationship with Brad Burnham (board member).
13:30–18:30 — Nuclear Winter & Almost Buying a Trucking Software Company
Post-bubble funding freeze (2000–2002).
Almost acquires TMW Systems (trucking software in Cleveland); deal collapses over tax issues.
In retrospect, a lucky escape.
Meanwhile Brad + Fred form Union Square Ventures (first fund raised ~2003–2004).
18:30–28:30 — Delicious: Social Tagging, Early Web Culture
Meets Joshua Schachter; Delicious becomes one of USV’s earliest investments.
Social bookmarking + tagging as foundational internet primitives (proto-hashtags).
Yahoo acquisition happens quickly; secondaries didn’t exist yet, forcing early exit.
Pushback on Yahoo bureaucracy; avoids west-coast relocation; first real liquidity moment.
Theme: influence vs financial outcome — cultural impact exceeds exit value.
28:30–34:30 — Angel Investing → Tumblr & Etsy
Starts hanging around USV; angels into Tumblr and Etsy.
Etsy thesis: highly engaged sellers + low fees rejected by West Coast VCs.
USV style crystallizes: large networks of engaged users, differentiated by user experience.
Pattern recognition over fashionable narratives.
34:30–41:30 — New York vs Silicon Valley Narratives
Stereotype debate: “taste vs engineering.”
MongoDB as proof that deep infrastructure can emerge in NYC.
LP skepticism toward NYC as a tech hub in mid-2000s.
USV flies constantly to SF while nurturing NYC companies.
41:30–50:30 — Foursquare: When Too Much Money Breaks a Company
Andreessen Horowitz forces entry by dramatically increasing valuation.
Overcapitalization causes bloat, loss of product discipline, slow execution.
Facebook clones features; Instagram ultimately captures the category.
Lesson: capital velocity can destroy product velocity.
50:30–55:30 — Tumblr, Pinterest Miss, and Product Geometry
Pinterest originally incubated in NYC; misread as “too similar” to Tumblr.
Key insight missed: flow (Tumblr) vs stack/board (Pinterest).
Small UX topology differences create massive outcome divergence.
55:30–01:04:30 — E-commerce, Network Effects & What USV Avoided
Vertical e-commerce lacked strong network effects.
USV generally avoided pure “sell stuff online” models (Etsy exception).
Preference for compounding networks over margin arbitrage.
01:04:30–01:09:30 — Tech “Mafias,” Google’s Gift to NYC
NYC historically lost talent after acquisitions forced westward relocation.
Google’s NYC engineering presence reverses brain drain.
Alumni effects begin to seed local startups.
Bloomberg’s closed culture inhibited entrepreneurial spinouts.
01:09:30–01:12:30 — Crypto: Stablecoins as the Quiet Killer App
Stablecoins transforming cross-border trade, especially emerging markets.
New rails replacing old banking infrastructure.
NYC initially constrained by regulatory friction and legacy finance antibodies.
01:12:30–01:16:30 — AI: The Four Futures Framework
Two axes: speed of AI improvement × openness of models → four futures.
Possibility of massive closed-model monopolies vs open chaotic ecosystems.
Crypto potentially essential for machine-to-machine economies.
Existential risk acknowledged without theatrics.
01:16:30–01:19:30 — Physical AI & Deep Tech in NYC
Portfolio example: Veeam (robotics / physical AI) founded by MongoDB alumni.
NYC strength in biotech + robotics + applied AI despite weaker infra dominance.
Convergence of AI, physical systems, and biology as next frontier.
01:19:30–01:22:30 — Looking Forward: Bubbles, Cycles, Curiosity
Comparing AI hype curve vs dot-com timeline.
Reminder: dot-com valuations were far more extreme than today’s AI multiples.
Closing reflections on curiosity, long-term compounding, and ecosystem evolution.
1 hr 25 min
October 07, 2025 Owen Davis, Contour and NYC Seed
Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now.
Owen Davis tells us how advertising powered early NYC tech and the big transition post-dot-com-crash to both consumer and enterprise tech superstars from New York.
1 hr 11 min