Super Pumped (w/Mike Isaac)

02/22/22 • 63 min

As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses.

So Tom Dotan, Katie Benner, and I were interested to see how New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s propulsive book about Uber from 2019 — Super Pumped — would be translated to our television screens.

Since we can’t watch the show yet (the first episode airs Feb. 27), we spoke to Isaac — who has played an integral role in making sure that the show’s writers know the true story behind what went down in the Uber saga. We’ll soon see how closely they hewed to reality.

But ears will be burning. Despite only running seven episodes, the show features a long list of tech characters. They might not be famous outside of Silicon Valley but they are the stuff of legend to Silicon Valley obsessives. That includes people like David Drummond, Larry Page, Arianna Huffington, Emil Michael, Rachel Whetstone, and Jill Hazelbaker. That’s not to mention the headline conflict between Travis Kalanick and Bill Gurley.

Isaac gave us a spoiler-free behind the scenes look at the making of the show. We talked about Hollywood’s obsession with tech. Isaac gave us a preview of the questions he’s asking going into his in-the-works book on Facebook — which is already slated to become the sequel to the Uber series. And we concluded our conversation with a brief discussion of Isaac and his colleagues’ latest reporting on Spotify, which revealed that Spotify had committed to paying Joe Rogan a stunning $200 million-plus.

Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

As much as insiders might bristle over their portrayals, television and movies shape how the world sees Silicon Valley.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network defined how people thought about Mark Zuckerberg. Movies like The Wolf of Wall Street and The Big Short sold arcane financial stories to the masses.

Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Previous Episode

Razzlekhan and Wordcels

Our regular special guest, Katie Benner, recently sunk her teeth into the intersection of an old passion and a new one: technology industry ignominy and, her current beat at the New York Times, the U.S. Justice Department. Benner talks me through the arrest of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan. The duo were accused by the Justice Department of laundering money from the 2016 Bitfinex robbery.

The arrest shows the federal government’s increasing sophistication when it comes to crypto currencies. But there are plenty of open questions about whether Lichtenstein and Morgan had the knowhow to pull off this historic heist. Morgan was a Forbes contributor who once wrote a column about protecting businesses from cybercriminals. She raps under the moniker Razzlekahn.

Benner and I also talk about the apparent Chinese hack of the Wall Street Journal, Katie Notopoulos reporting on the identities of the creators of Bored Ape Yacht Club, and the latest technology meme — Wordcels and shape rotators.

Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe

Next Episode

A Content Farming Retrospective (w/Shawn Colo)

In 2011, Google brought the hammer down on Demand Media. The search giant changed its search algorithm and sent Demand Media’s stock plummeting. The company had built web traffic by paying an army of independent writers — including Dead Cat co-host Tom Dotan — to write low-effort posts that ranked highly on Google search results.

The kneecapping of Demand Media’s content farm was a precursor to the platform wars of the next decade. Facebook became famous for building up ecosystems — whether it was social games or video news content — only to pull the rug out from the companies trying to play to the algorithm.

Tom and I take a trip down memory lane with former Demand Media CEO Shawn Colo. He gives us a clear-eyed portrait of the company’s business strategy at the time and what brought it back down to Earth. Demand Media, co-founded by former Myspace executive Richard Rosenblatt, was for a brief moment more valuable than the New York Times, which had a content play of its own in About.com.

Demand Media offers a case study for the challenges of media businesses: if the content is cheaply made, then it doesn’t have staying power; if the content is costly to produce, then the business will have low profit margins. It’s also a potent reminder as to how the companies that were once essential identifiers of a current moment in business can disappear from our collective memory.

Colo — today the founder of investment firm 3L — identified some private companies to watch in the media business today. For his part, he has mixed feelings about the sector these days.

He’s an investor in warehouse delivery company GoPuff, which we talk about toward the end of the conversation, and telehealth company Ro.

Colo reveals that 3L’s second fund, which he’s already investing out of, is going to end up totaling between $400 and $500 million.

Colo advises us that “if you’re making money, guys, the best strategy is to make money quietly.”

Give it a listen.

Get full access to Newcomer at www.newcomer.co/subscribe