Great Chat

The tech industry used to be way funnier; there was a whole HBO show about it! Now the timeline is earnest, angry or self-righteous, and rarely self-aware. Comedian Alexis Gay, who spent seven years working in tech and startups, joins the chat to diagnose what happened: tech got too big to be a cottage industry, too powerful to poke fun at itself, and too fragmented to share an inside joke. She also makes the case for why now is exactly the moment for a new Silicon Valley-style show. Plus: the Brian Chesky hack that nobody believes, why buying tech merch hits different than earning it, and the "directionally very bad" mug we all need ASAP.

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 grapple with the wave of tech leaders who are trading mystique for distribution and engagement-maxxxing. Is this the new world, and we're just boomers? Probably. But that's not going to stop us from crashing out over it. We also chat about Anthropic's latest model and television commercial, and comms blunders by Phia and 1X.

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

The SPV drama keeps coming, this time with some new main characters. We break down the public spat between AngelList-affiliated USVC, Anduril co-founder Matt Grimm, and the SPV/fund manager caught in the crossfire. We explore the mounting pressures around deal access and liquidity contributing to the explosion of SPVs, and why SPVs keep taking reputational damage for what's really an incentives problem. Plus: Fable is back (kind of), Angela survived her cruise with a new appreciation for hygiene tech and some notes for Starlink, and we marvel at Taylor Swift’s lockdown on wedding content.

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, 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