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. 

We're welcoming special guest Tom Dotan of Dead Cat fame to the show this week — just in time for the tariff market meltdown. To Silicon Valley's Trump supporters, we hate to say we told you so, but it's hard to imagine how these tariffs on our biggest trading partners will benefit tech and artificial intelligence development in the US.

In the second half of the show, Eric interviews Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen on how to make sense of what President Trump's tariff policies mean for his customers around the world. 

OpenAI has done it again. The AI giant closed $40 billion in fresh funding (kind of) led by Softbank, We debate the bull and bear case for OpenAI's $300 billion valuation. Eric sticks to his guns from his previous bear case, but Madeline is more optimistic about OpenAI's consumer revenue.

We also go over the latest in the Deel/Rippling corporate espionage saga and dig into Eric's reporting on the Deel spy's confession. Plus, Elon Musk is reportedly stepping back from his hands on role in Washington in the coming weeks.

In the second half of this week's episode, Eric interviews Clay CEO and cofounder Kareem Amin, who topped the Enterprise Tech 30 list on mid-stage startups.

Time stamps
00:00 — Announcing Cerebral Valley London
03:26 — Is OpenAI worth $300 billion?
11:00 — The Deel Spy Confession
16:09 — Elon Pulls Back in DC
22:40 — Clay's Kareem Amin Talks Marketing Agents

This week, Eric shared the details of his vibe coding frenzy from the past few weeks, testing out Vercel and the buzziest coding assistant of moment, Lovable. We unpack the benefits and remaining headaches of these tools from a non-coder perspective. We then turn to the Studio Ghibli  memes of the week from OpenAI's new 4o image model integration and try to make sense of all the copyright risks and benefits this new tool could lead us to.

Later in the show, we break down the story on 11x's potentially fabricated customers and subsequent backlash from some of Silicon Valley's most powerful VCs. And as Waymo fans, we're excited about their expansion in to Washington DC.

Produced by Christopher Gates

We're opening in a celebratory mood this week with Wiz's big exit to Google, which if it holds will offer some much needed liquidity to venture firms and their LPs. It's a big win for several of Silicon Valley's heavy hitters, including Sequoia's Doug Leone, Index Ventures' Shardul Shah, and Greenoaks' Neil Mehta. IPOs are looking a little bit more uncertain, however. Plus, Deel's allleged corporate espionage at Rippling has all the makings of a great HR tech spy thriller. Next up, we touch on the new liberal "abundance" agenda, which has more than a few similarities to Marc Andreessen's "Time to Build" manifesto. In the second half of our show, Eric sits down with Browserbase CEO Paul Klein to discuss their tools for running headless browsers and their rapid growth over the past year.

Produced by ⁠Christopher Gates⁠