Newcomer Pod

We’re officially one week out from the Cerebral Valley AI Summit! On today’s episode, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join host Eric Newcomer to preview what’s ahead — from standout speakers to can’t-miss panels and the big ideas that will shape the conversations next week.

To kick things off, Eric poses a timely question: What themes are starting to take shape across the participants and topics at this year’s summit? What’s really driving the energy in AI right now?

Here are a few of the themes that emerged from the discussion:

• Designers are moving closer to engineering, not just prototyping but launching internal tools and shaping product development in deeper ways.

• The war for context is just beginning — expect fierce competition over who owns the layers that make AI actually useful.
• Vibe coding: is it a real paradigm shift, or just a fun phase? And how big could it get?
• Is there a Microsoft Office Suite for the AI era?
• Distribution vs. product: what do the strategies of Uber and Waymo reveal about the future of AI deployment? Who wins self-driving cars?
• Text box solution vs. product: should everyone be copying ChatGPT, or is that a mistake?
• The growing appetite for data is fueling a new surveillance state.
• And finally, Eric's "Sprinting Toward the End of History" — companies face competition from every direction, but is there an end point?

It’s all building toward what promises to be a packed, thought-provoking week in Cerebral Valley. Let’s dive in!

Timestamps:

1:40: Eric poses the question

1:55: Evolution of the role of the designer

8:00: Text box vs product

14:15: Unbundling ChatGPT

19:19: Is there a Microsoft Office Suite for the AI era?

22:10: Who owns the context

26:02: Surveillance state

36:57: Distribution vs product

42:00: Sprinting until the end of history

In this second installment of the Cerebral Valley podcast series, co-hosts James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley join Eric Newcomer for a thought-provoking conversation about the future of AI-generated voice and video — and what it means for our sense of reality.

From TikTok trends to the future of Hollywood and podcasting, the trio explores where generative video might take us over the next five years. Will AI content dominate our feeds? Will we even be able to tell the difference?

To put these predictions to the test, the hosts play The AI Video Turing Test — a game where they watch viral AI-generated videos from 2018 to today, ending with the latest clips made with Veo 3. Can they spot what’s real and what’s fake? And what makes some fakes feel too real?

This episode dives deep into the shifting boundaries between synthetic and human-made content — and makes one thing clear: we’re no longer at the bottom of the uncanny valley. AI is climbing fast.

The 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit will be held in London on June 25th

Timestamps:

02:50 — Predictions: AI in 5 years

15:00 — Hollywood perceptions of AI

18:55 — AI generated video games

23:05 — AI Video Turing Test

The Cerebral Valley AI Summit is right around the corner! To help you navigate the fast-evolving AI landscape ahead of the event, Newcomer Podcast is launching a special four-part series — co-hosted by James Wilsterman and Max Child of Volley. Get insider insights, expert analysis, and fresh perspectives on the trends shaping the future of artificial intelligence.

In this first episode, James, Max, and host Eric Newcomer dive into what it really means to be an AI agent — and explore how agentic AI could reshape the future of work and everyday life. From picking wedding outfits to writing code, they share personal experiences of agents in action and reflect on where this technology is headed next.

So — where is AI headed? In the second half of the episode, the trio revisits market predictions made by AI last November and puts them to the test using fresh data pulled by Deep Research. After a spirited round of forecasting, they return to their 2024 AI Fantasy Drafts to see whose lineup is raising, exiting, and, ultimately, leading in the race for AI dominance.

Our next episode focuses on AI's impact in voice and video, and may include a few more surprise games...

The 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit will be held in London on June 25th

Timestamps:

00:39 - Intro & the scaling wall reversal

06:13 — How we use Claude and Deep Research

08:45 — Agents are here for the web search

14:44 — Coding agents as the breakout tool

24:24 — Update on last year's AI predictions

36:51 — AI Fantasy Draft

We're welcoming Bloomberg's Kate Clark to the show this week and diving into her reporting on the rough fundraising environment for any VC that isn't an a16z or GC-style megafund. The only emerging funds that can raise, it seems, are ones that are started by investors who leave these brands. If it weren't for the AI funding bonanza, the situation would look even worse.

We each make our predictions for how rosy or dreary the venture market will be 2 years from now. And, of course, take a moment to comment on Elon's DOGE departure.

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro and welcome to Kate Clark

00:57 Emerging managers struggle to raise

14:34 The X factor, sovereign wealth

22:07 Venture market predictions

32:51 Elon Musk out in Washington

In this special episode, we feature two interviews recorded live during Newcomer’s Breaking the Bank Summit, a financial technology summit held this week in San Francisco.

We’re including two of the most dynamic discussions here, beginning with Gabriel Stengel of Rogo and Jeff Seibert of Digits, followed by an interview with Josh Reeves, CEO of Gusto.

The episode kicks off with a breakdown of the event, highlighting the key debates that emerged between Rogo and Digits around the trustworthiness of LLMs in fintech, as well as Reeves’ perspective on the service intensive business and going shoeless in the office.

After getting our hosts’ reactions, we dive in to live-recorded audio from the event.

For a full selection of discussions from the summit, including video of each talk, visit the Newcomer Youtube at youtube.com/@newcomerpod

Timecodes
00:00 - Intro
09:43 - Rogo + Digits Discussion
28:13 - Josh Reeves, Gusto Interview

Eric relays his dispatch from Dimension Capital’s biotech summit in Park City, where the crowd was much more academic than the conferences we usually attend. Biotech stocks aren’t doing great, meanwhile university funding cuts could spell trouble for drug research. Still, people were rosy about AI tools. 

We also took a temperature check on the state of fintech, which investors tell us is mixed. Everyone’s hopeful about IPOs and streamlined stablecoins, but the dollar getting destabilized by the tariffs has some investors skittish. Later in the episode, Madeline explains how Trump’s crackdown on immigration is spooking startup founders and employees. 

Timestamps: 00:42 Lineup of our upcoming fintech summit02:02 Eric's dispatch from Dimension Capital and Recursion's biotech summit09:22 Fintech IPOs and stablecoins en vogue18:50 Heightened immigration enforcement spooks startup employees

How does the AI gold rush look from the helm of a $40-billion software giant? Salesforce co-founder, chair, and CEO Marc Benioff joins Eric Newcomer and Tom Dotan for a tour of the next tech boom cycle. The conversation opens with Benioff’s sweeping vision of “Agent Force 2.0,” where large language models paired with reasoning engines mint whole new classes of digital labor, and brands from Gucci to Disney are already swapping call-center scripts for autonomous agents.

The episode closes on politics and philanthropy: Prop C, homelessness, the 2024 electoral tightrope, and how Benioff plans to work with any administration and still sleep at night.

This week, we kick off by discussing Ben Smith’s bombshell post ”The group chats that changed America,” that exposed the private chats that nudged Silicon Valley’s money crowd into Trump’s orbit. 

Then we hop to DC’s Hill-and-Valley Forum, where the mantra was industrial renaissance or bust. The race with China, AI’s essential energy demands, and the need to reshore American manufacturing were the talk of the forum. Fear of China loomed over the entire forum and only whispers of tariffs crossed the lips of attendees and speakers alike. 

In the back half, Eric and Madeline are joined by Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe, fresh off his on-stage appearance at the Hill and Valley Forum. Wolfe predicts two flashpoints the commentariat is ignoring: a terror-fertile Sahel and a China-courting Latin America. He spars with Eric Newcomer and Madeline Renbargner over Trump’s tariffs, friend-shoring versus reshoring, and whether founder-led startups like Anduril can out-maneuver bloated primes. If you think that the only great power game is Taiwan, Wolfe widens the aperture to central Africa and the Americas. 

Timecodes

00:00 - Intro

01:10 - Silicon Valley’s Most Important Group Chats 

08:18 - Hill and Valley’s “America First” Victory Lap 

16:20 - Josh Wolfe on America’s Next War

We’re back to opining on the state of tech media! A16z has aqui-hired Erik Torenberg and his newsletter Turpentine, while the Technology Brothers with ties to Founders Fund have created a podcasting empire. Eric and Tom reminisce about the original wave of “going direct,” why it failed, and what’s different this time around. 

Later on, Madeline shares that crypto VCs are growing frustrated with President Trump’s meme coin grifts, and how hosting a private dinner for top coin holders doesn’t help legitimize the industry. 

This week, Tom breaks down his scoops on how the big foundation model providers are doing.and much to the chagrin of our resident skeptic, they’re earning lots of real revenue! OpenAI is on track to crack over $12 billion in revenue this year, and Anthropic projects it will double its ARR to $4 billion by the end of the year. But have we hit the AGI moment? Eric relays his o3 experiments as evidence. Madeline gets into the perpetual VC optimism in spite of market turmoil and why AI has early stage investors mostly unphased. 

In the second half of our show, Eric interviews Contrary’s Kyle Harrison about his viral foundation model market map and why AI has led many VCs to embrace startup polyamory.