Hi, I'm Eric Newcomer. And I am Madeline Rinbarger.
And this is the newcomer podcast.
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Welcome back, Eric. How is Las Vegas sunny Las
Vegas? I am staring out right now
looking at this fear. Which have you seen it?
I've never seen it in person. No, I haven't.
Pretty amazing actually. I mean, I haven't been inside
it, but as a object it's fascinating to look at.
I'm here for human X. You're at South by and then
what? Why is going?
On today right now as well. It's just conference week over
here in Startup Land. You end up making a statement
wherever you go, like what I think Katie Roof at Bloomberg
tweeted. Like you're either at human X or
you're at a South by maybe it was James Champ at Bloomberg
beta. I think it was like, you know,
we're, we're here in San Francisco, you know, sort of
like are. You doing the work building.
Yeah. Good for you, have fun.
I saw another tweet that said that S bio was the BTC
conference and human X was the bTB conference.
Maybe that has some more truth to it.
Honestly, because this has been my tour through brand
activations and like bigger tech firms rather than the classic
startup ecosystems, scrappy teams, hearing talks from IBM
and. Well, now you're contradicting
yourself. I like the B2B versus B2C, but
you're you're saying South by is B2C, right?
Well, I'd say the bulk of who's attending and the founders that
are around are very media heavy and it's, you know, people
related to the film and music industry as a whole and creator
economy. There's a lot of that here.
Maybe I'll put it this way, South By is people selling to
consumers and people who are old and haven't caught up with where
the times are and are still at South By.
What's been your take away from human X so far?
How's it been? Yeah, the energy is good.
You know, they're pros. Obviously we host our own AI
conference, so there's always a little jealousy, but I'm pretty
supportive. I mean, they're they're going
for something much bigger. You know, they've got a whole
Convention Center. We have our nice little intimate
sort of founder and investor gathering.
Coding looms large. I think that's key.
I mean, we're all watching sort of the cursor codium sniping,
which I guess we can touch on. Coding doesn't just come up as
like, oh, what's a cool use case?
I think, you know, the AI founders are the most true
believers in no, these coding tools are going to make it so we
really have to build our company fast.
You know, you hear from founders, I think I was talking
to abnormal security and, you know, they're just like, Oh
yeah, what? What if it turns out our product
pipeline needs to be much more aggressive now because we can
build much more. I was talking to a founder just,
I don't know, an hour ago who definitely thinks it's all a
bubble. You know, she's in AI world.
And it's like, you know, they're all selling to each other,
right? They buy, they buy from each
other and sell to each other. I think the information just had
a story today about how core weave has NVIDIA as a customer
and a major supplier. You know, it's just sort of
like, oh, there's a lot of like money flowing back and forth
here. I think the buzzword of the
event vibe coding. Anyway, enough Fumenex.
How's South by Southwest? That was awesome.
Your hometown? You happened to want to go to
South by now? Yeah, my hometown.
Well, it's it's kind of the best thing ever where if I want to
pitch a work trip to South by Southwest as part of a routine
family visit, it's incredibly easy to do.
So that's awesome. It's been great.
The energy's been lively. Well, it's maybe to your point,
it's like it is the BTC conference.
I've seen a lot more, you know, influencers and startups and
technology companies that are more media adjacent, so things
closer to the other kind of banner pillars of South by
music, film, that sort of thing. There's been, you know, people
here with tools for monetizing sports, athletes and creators
that I've met at a couple dinners, which are really
interesting. So it's it's more in media
world, but there's still some energy.
I just think it's been interesting because you know,
this was the place for like Twitter launch, you know, back
in 2007 and you know, Foursquare had its big debut here in 2009,
Meerkat 2015. It was kind of this launching
pad for a lot of really big startups in the app wave, you
know? I'm getting to be an old timer,
you know, it's like I, I guess I've been covering tech like
12:00-ish years. And so I, I was there the
Meerkat years. So you, what did you say?
That was 20/15/2015. Yeah.
I'd say I was in the period of like can South by recreate the
glory. You know, it's like you had
these viral moments and everybody still sort of believed
that a consumer app could launch.
I never really saw the with success, you know, Meerkat, but
I saw the I forgot is his name Ben.
You know, the Meerkat CEO is like the minor celebrity at the
party and you're like, where is he for an app that you know
people care about? For six months, all the
reporters went, we wrote our trend pieces about what was
happening. But I think the the hope for the
viral South by consumer app was already fading by then.
Definitely. I will say though, there's been
an interesting showing at least just maybe it's my source
network. But a couple companies have had
some mixers and that's, you know, really where you get to
meet founders that are building interesting things at this
during this week. And I attended, you know, a
mixer hosted by a base power company, which is Zach Dell,
Michael Dell's son and his Co founder, who's an ex Andrel guy
who worked really close to under Matt Grimm.
And they're building hard tech power storage batteries that
connect to your house. So if you know, the Texas power
grid fails, they can, you know, have your energy saved.
And they're really looking to target deregulated energy
markets, which there are. Texas is the biggest, which is
why they started here. But there's more everywhere and
it was lively and like Old South by and people were mingling in
the backyard and, you know, everyone was dressed in their
T-shirts and jeans. Classic Austin festival and the
energy was really there. And right after that, I hopped
over to like a defense tech happy hour, which had a really
good showing. So there's some pockets of hard
tech and some founders still mixing.
Have you gotten any political vibes?
I don't know. I, I, I think it's a fair
statement to say no business leader has said to me, oh, these
tariffs are great. Or like, you know, there's,
there's some range of very negative to like I'm not focused
on it. I think at long time horizon
Vinod Khosla on stage, you know, I asked, so I interviewed him.
He was less negative about the Trump administration than I
expected. He certainly wasn't defending
tariffs, but he was just sort of like, I think in a long time
horizon, Vinod was clearly like, Oh yeah, I have the ear of
Doctor Oz. So they're listening to me.
So I'm not I'm not so mad at them right now.
But but I'd say generally like the backroom sort of mood is
like, why are they like sabotaging the economy for for
no reason? Have you picked up political
vibes or are are the Republican Silicon Valley people relenting?
You saw Balaji sort of tweeted something that's like a
corrective to the right wing. I know, I think there's, I would
say cracks if not just outright frustration being voiced now
about the tariffs, OK, this is going to be the economic
prosperity, American dynamism, innovation, economy
administration. And to then have policies that
are directly pushing back against that has ruffled a lot
of feathers. And I would say even just in
talking to people more kind of in the hard tech defense world,
people are very bullish on American dynamism, but very not
here for the tariffs. So I think they're kind of all
still hoping that they're going to not really do it, honestly.
Delians brother tweeted something like, all right, I'll
put the pronouns back in my profile where I think like
retweeting, like the stock market going down, which is sort
of like, okay, like we, we did all this for what?
Having so many like I'm sorry I talked bad against woke.
I reclaim woke. Please come back woke means with
just like every stock read, yeah?
One somber political comment and then we'll go back to our A
observations. This green card holder getting
arrested for leading Palestinian protests is terrible and they're
like getting disappeared. Yeah.
I mean, I, I continue to think the biggest issue with Trump is
law and order. And like, how can anybody in the
tech world who is shouting about free speech?
It's not like I'm some pro Palestinian, you know, I'm
pretty supportive of Israel, but like disappearing people is just
like, uh, terrible. And so I I find that deeply
troubling. I mean, same here as you know, a
Barnard Columbia double alum. Oh yeah, exactly.
It's very, it's been hitting very close to home just within a
lot of my networks. And there's been reporting out
as of today that students who are at the journalism school now
are being directed by the administration to not talk as
much for their last two months of coverage on anything that
could be, you know, negative around this case because they're
afraid of being targeted. It's like actually silencing
journalism students at the journalism school currently,
which I mean, I honestly, I don't have the answers.
I would, frankly, I would love to read something more and get
some clarification on how much Columbia is involved in this
because or if this just happened, you know, not on their
watch, which is very possible. Right, We don't know how much
Columbia facilitated the actual apprehension or not.
Or at least allowing ice on campus.
Yes, because we know he was living in campus housing, but we
don't know how much that was, you know, facilitated with or
coordinated with. And that is not out yet.
I will not speculate on that, but I just as an alum, I really
would like some answers about protection around speech going
forward, especially on campus. I, I felt like I had to bring
this up only just because I feel like I was talking about the
Trump thing as a farce. And obviously, I don't know,
we're all losing our money. There's a certain nihilism, if
you're comfortable enough to lose it, that you're like, it's
terrible, but like, what are you going to do?
But obviously there are lots of pieces of the Trump agenda that
are beyond farcical and yeah, this that being one of them
anyway, redirecting back to the the AI industry.
Any other observations from South by I've couple more
thoughts I think on human X. People were very excited about
quantum computing here. Actually, Team Quantum had a
really big show that's. Coming up, Yeah.
Yeah, and just that the ability for, you know, chips and
compute, you know, development in tandem with AI to really
unlock a lot of quantum ability, People were more bullish on that
than I've heard in years. So fascinating.
How are the rest of your panels? I know you mentioned you talked
to Vinod. What other conversations were
you having on stage here? I talked to Jason Warner and
Erica, Jason X Red Point, now CEO of Poolside, one of the
foundation model companies focused on coding and then Erica
is a investor in Poolside at Red Point.
Jason is committed to AGI is going to be big being one of the
few, you know, a select less than 20 companies in the world
that really get sort of foundation model level
intelligence is going to be valuable.
I mean, I think they have going for them their ability to strike
enterprise deals and sort of the GitHub lineage and sense like we
can work with real companies. I mean, they're very guarded
about the actual capability of their foundation models.
They haven't released a consumer version, so you can't really try
it hard to believe they're ahead of people given that they
haven't sort of bragged about it.
So I think, you know, they are we're going to need to see more
proof points. But overall, you know, I think,
you know, they're very representative again, of this
sort of big progress in, in the coding world being the vanguard
of AI applications. So that was one.
Then I did AQ and a which is, I don't know, it's like Eric's
thoughts on the world. I mean, it, it ended up being
mostly about media, honestly. I, I did a panel with three
people in sort of communications and marketing and venture world
and sort of I was the independent media voice.
I, I feel like I'm always gay. I, I like the meta story of how
tech is covered. I mean, going back to the dead
cat version of this podcast, so always game to talk process.
My main point on that panel. I'd be interested in your take.
I, I was sort of saying that I think that one thing that will
happen because of AI is that we'll have a platform where
we're really strong, like hopefully the newsletter and the
podcast, but like, you know, not TikTok experts or not wanting to
spend time on blue sky. And there will be much more of a
AI like take this product that we have thoughtfully built for
one platform and build it for another.
You know, we're already hiring A-Team to use AI tools to make
videos faster. But I think over time there'll
be more and more this sense that if you're a creator, it's like,
OK, this is my platform. And then the marketing
platforms, I'm going to sort of, you know, automate.
I don't know. I'm curious what you think about
that. I think that's spot on.
But more just to further that point, I was having
conversations with, you know, media people at South by this
week about how the bulk of what's going to happen,
especially with like creator influence reporting is the
ability to find original information.
And like the journalist toolkit is going to be like what really
sets you apart. And like all the marketing stuff
is going to get very automated and like the, the, the video
creation part of it that's not shaping a narrative is going to
be a lot tougher too. And.
I agree with that and I was hitting that point as well, just
that, you know, tech people can overestimate how much the
challenge of getting information is organization rather than the
fact that there is still a lot of information that is not
posted online. And so if AI is really good at
organization or create, you know, creating a lot of blather
that's hard to differentiate. I mean, I think having novel
information remains something that is hard, hard for the
computers to replace us on. And so if you can get real
information from real people, that's valuable.
So some media, some AI last couple like minor themes that I
thought were interesting. I mean, I think there's creation
of real world AI information. You know, it's like whether it's
like if you think about self driving cars obviously and Tesla
taking things in or Fei Fei Lee's company, I just think this
the sort of efforts to capture information about the real world
to train, to train models is an exciting area.
Oh, well, that's been actually a bigger theme at South by that
I've found really promising too. There was a really good robotics
panel the head of robotics over at Amazon talked a lot about.
It was the classic, you know, humanoid versus non humanoid
pitch of like what's better? And of course everyone's, you
know, in the warehousing world where robots are really in
effect, we're saying like you don't need humanoid robots.
Like the money's going to be made with robots that aren't
human shaped because then they can do things, things that
humans can't do, physical AI. And like the embodiment of AI
and algorithms to do hard tech and hard things.
And that kind of learning and information capture is one that
people are very excited about. A fun one, you know, I studied
philosophy in college. It was precision neuroscience,
which is trying to a sort of neural link competitor different
philosophy that they're trying to put something on the brain, I
think instead of in the brain. A very sort of medical focused
team that's I think they've implanted in like 30 people.
The questions that raises about like, if we, you know, could we
do communicate in a different way?
Like the founder that I was talking to is making the point
that, you know, what if you turns out you could read like
emotions directly from a person, right?
And if you think language is directly, you know, shapes how
we think about thought, right? That those interplay and that
you can't really think of 1 without the other.
Like, what if the brain has a new way to sort of externalize
things besides like movement and language?
You know, I don't know, it's just crazy that in 20 years we
got different ways of directly exporting information from the
the brain. So, you know, it's going to take
a while, you know, and I think they're very focused on, you
know, people are paralyzed in medical use cases where you
could also imagine this period where like someone who's
paralyzed gets to leapfrog potentially, you know, it's
like, oh, they have a reason to get this device.
And you could imagine, like, the devices have less latency,
right? Like, one of the advantages,
like typing there, you know, there's a delay.
Even talking, there's a delay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's a fascinating space. So, you know, a lot of exciting
companies remain really optimistic, honestly, about what
Silicon Valley is working on at the moment.
On on the side of, you know, coding applications being a big
use case, it seems to be working out very well for Anthropic
beyond just coding. But generally there's some new
reporting came out this week that their annualized revenue
has grown to 1.4 billion as of the beginning of this year and
they're generating 115,000,000 monthly.
A big, you know, hit product for them has been like computer use
and their clawed AI assistant is very good at coding.
So that's been something that developers have been really
excited about, specifically with Anthropic, and they're making
money. Mike Krieger, the chief product
officer at Anthropic, was at the event.
I sat down with him. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know,
Anthropic is clearly doing really well on coding.
I do think there's going to be this question, you know, they
help power Cursor and then they are creating a product that
could be perceived as competitive.
I think, you know, people are really excited about what
Anthropic is released, but are still trying to get their heads
around it. I think Anthropic's point of
view is that whatever they build will help companies built on top
of it, and so will flow to companies like Cursor.
To me, like the best case scenario for a lot of these
foundation model companies is that they all sort of find their
lane. You know, it's like, it's like
Peter Thiel's thing. You sort of want to be a
monopoly. It's like if they're all just
like directly competitive with each other, that could be a
problem. Whereas if it's like Anthropic
is good at coding, Open AI is good at sort of the general sort
of text box. You know, there's just more of a
path. XAI is good at people who hate
Democrats, but you know, they, they, all these companies also
feel compelled to gobble the world given their evaluations,
so I don't know if they're going to stay out of each other's
lanes at all. Moving on down to our deal of
the week, any Sphere, which is the maker of the powerful coding
assistant Cursor, is in talks to close another round of funding.
It's coding assistance all the way down.
Oh my gosh. Bullish on coding assistance?
This is what, 10 billion? What are we at now?
Round has not closed yet, but if they're in talks to be close to
a ten billion valuation, according to Bloomberg
reporting. Any sphere, of course, has
raised a ton of money already. They've raised already around
175,000,000. They're backed by, you know,
Andreessen and Thrive and Thrive is expected to lead this new
round as per the reporting too. They're crushing it.
They're growing super fast. Classic lean team AI tool with
big use case coming up. Yeah, I I can't talk thrive
anymore for its high-priced deals.
I don't know they they've been doing well.
I don't know. It does feel windsurf is a
little the buzzier one at the moment.
It feels a little bit and you know, I, I don't want to get too
much into petty Twitter drama, but you know, your fierce
rifles, Kodium and Cursor are just like trading barbs on
Twitter now. But it's a hot space.
So it's they're both doing well. And Congrats to Cursor when they
close this big $10 billion round.
That's a super high valuation for a lean team.
But you know, in the AI era, build something that people
want. You got it, you got the funding.
I guess we'll both be back in New York next week.
The newcomer Roadshow will be returning to New York City.
Yeah, exactly where where everybody thinks.
Everybody thinks I live in San Francisco, which I take as a
compliment. You know, that it's like, oh,
the newsletter is a very of Silicon Valley.
People think of Silicon Valley in San Francisco.
I'm like Silicon Valley's on the Internet.
My Twitter bio says I'm in New York.
I am saying on this podcast item, New York.
I could not be more transparent that I live in New York, though
I remain extremely bullish about San Francisco and we host many
of our events. They're breaking the bank.
May 20th have we talked about on the podcast.
Yeah, we got a fintech coming up excited about that in San
Francisco. So apply if you haven't and we
should talk about it more on the podcast.
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