Great Chat

This week on Great Chat, The New York Times piece about San Francisco's "struggling" six-figure earners has Helen and Ashley doing the math on their early-20s rent checks. Then: the New York congressional primary results, where the biggest Twitter personalities got the fewest votes (and the guy with no following won??). Ryan Petersen calls remote work "white collar fraud," the internet responds, and it's actually kind of productive? And very sadly, Om Malik passed away at 59, and the outpouring from the tech community was unlike anything we've seen in years. What made him irreplaceable — and what does it mean that we can't imagine who fills that role today?

Mercury is back as the headline sponsor for year two of Great Chat. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

This podcast is edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠⁠LightningPod

Inspired by Midjourney’s foray into full-body scanning, we dig into our industry’s obsession with health and longevity. From the earlier wave (think: 23andMe, Forward) to this current era (Prenuvo, Function, Neko), those of us in tech have been eager early adopters. But what are the tradeoffs in a system that isn’t designed to act on all this information? Plus: the pro-natalists are split on Anne Hathaway’s latest pregnancy, GLP-1s change women’s lives way more than men’s, and WIRED’s invitation to Dialog must have gotten lost in the mail.

Mercury is back as the headline sponsor for year two of Great Chat. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

This podcast is edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠⁠LightningPod

This week on Great Chat, we talk about the biggest IPO in history, the wealth to follow, and what people from prior liquidity events in our industry have learned about money, identity, and happiness. We also cover venture-backed M&A activity, revisit "why Twitter is not real life," and hypothesize how Anthropic will recover from its current fall.

Mercury is back as the headline sponsor for year two of Great Chat. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

This podcast is edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠LightningPod

Over the past week, our Twitter feeds were filled with stories that rarely get told: VCs behaving poorly in pitch meetings. Some founders even named names. What does it say about this moment that founders are publicly sharing these tales? And where are we in the spectrum of founder friendliness? Plus: OpenAI joins the IPO party with a confidential filing, Hunter Biden is the antithesis of the looksmaxxing trend, and maybe escorts are a social good? Go Knicks!

Mercury is back as the headline sponsor for year two of Great Chat. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

This podcast is edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠LightningPod

You can’t turn around in San Francisco without seeing a startup billboard…or five. We share some of our favorite marketing stunts of all time, and talk about why startup-branded shuttles and cafes are all the rage in our current era. Plus: more SpaceX S-1 talk (we can’t get enough), with Anthropic’s confidential filing close on its heels. It’s going to be a fun few months in the group chat.

Mercury is back as the headline sponsor for year two of Great Chat. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust; Members FDIC.

This podcast is edited by Eric Johnson from ⁠LightningPod