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Maor Shlomo, founder of Base44, and Mark Tluszcz, Chairman at Wix, join NEW ECONOMIES to unpack the fastest-moving acquisition story in vibe coding: a solo founder who hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, sold Base44 to Wix for $80M within months, and grew the business from roughly $3M to $150M in annualized revenue in the year since the deal closed.

Maor walks through the origin story — building a tool for his now-wife’s CRM problem, wanting to give non-technical people a way to build tools rather than just websites — and the operational chaos that followed, including running the platform solo with no monitoring and fielding a security scare in the middle of his brother’s wedding.

Mark also explains why Wix, twenty years into believing non-technical people deserve real building tools, saw Base44 not as a bolt-on but as the natural extension of what Wix had been doing since 2006.

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Throughout the episode, we get into why owning the full stack — front end, back end, and now the model layer — was non-negotiable for both companies, culminating in the release of Base 1, Base44’s own fine-tuned model for building web applications, and why Maor thinks the real bottleneck has already shifted from writing code to making good product decisions: as coding stops being the constraint, taste, distribution, and the judgment to know what’s worth building become the differentiators.

We also cover the coming wave of vibe-coded enterprise tools, why “verticalized” models beat horizontal ones for this category, and the emerging idea of Base44 acting less like a coding assistant and more like a co-founder.

We close on where Maor and Mark think the next big opportunities sit — re-humanizing technology through live events and the “off planet opportunity” (space) opened up by the SpaceX IPO — and who each of them would want on their board, landing, unexpectedly, on…

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and X

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NEW ECONOMIES Maor Shlomo (Base44) & Mark Tluszcz (Wix)

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Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Maor Shlomo & Mark Tluszcz
(2:00) The Origin of Wix
(4:07) The Base44 Founding Story
(7:30) $1M in Revenue in Just 3 Weeks
(9:23) The Craziest Base44 Story
(12:08) Why Wix Acquired Base44
(20:42) Launching Base44's AI Model
(30:07) Why You Should Own the Stack
(32:33) How We Update AI Models
(34:18) What's Still Missing for AI Builders?
(39:36) The State of Vibe Coding
(47:40) Tech Predictions from Maor & Mark

Our notes from this conversation

1. Coding stopped being the bottleneck. What to build is.

Base44 hit $1M in annualized revenue three weeks after launch, then a couple million within three months — solo, with no funding. Maor’s line: “coding is not the issue anymore. The question is what are you going to build.” That’s the thesis for the next few years, not just the next few months.

2. Why Base44 and Wix teamed-up

Wix approached Base44 because a “crazy guy” running a one-man show kept generating enough noise that people started telling Mark’s team to buy him. Nir Zohar, Wix’s President, sealed the vibe over steak; the real decision came later, with Maor and Avishai Abrahami (CEO and Founder at Wix) at a whiteboard in the middle of the night, mapping three paths: stay bootstrapped, raise a lot of money, or partner with Wix.

Maor’s real hesitation wasn’t valuation — it was fear of scaling the “magic” too fast and killing the thing that made it work. Avishai’s answer was structural, not financial: lean on Wix for the boring infrastructure, stay lean and move fast everywhere else.

3. Owning the front and back end obligates you to own the middleware too.

Base44’s release of Base 1 — its own fine-tuned model for building web applications — wasn’t a marketing move, it was the logical endpoint of a stack Wix and Base44 already owned end to end. Mark’s framing:

If you own the front end and the back end, you eventually have to own how you deliver the service between them, or you’re dependent on someone else’s pricing and roadmap.

4. Scale generates the training data that makes owning a model worth it.

Two things moved Base44’s model timeline up by a year or more: open-source models reaching frontier-adjacent quality, and Base44’s own traffic generating millions of usable data points. The lesson generalizes — building your own model only makes sense once you have the volume to fine-tune it well, not before.

5. The next differentiator isn’t code quality — it’s taste.

Horizontal coding models are good at many things. Base44’s bet is that a model trained specifically on what makes a good product decision — not just working code — becomes a durable edge as raw code generation becomes commoditized across every vibe coding platform.

6. Distribution, not creation, is the unsolved problem for builders.

Mark’s read on the ecosystem:

Plenty of products get built, very few get used, because building well and marketing well are different skills. Base44’s answer is a beta “distribution layer” that uses its own context on each app — B2B or consumer, local or global — to recommend a growth playbook, not just more features.

7. Vibe coding is quietly eating enterprise software, not just side projects.

The skepticism about production-readiness a year ago has given way to real adoption: internal tools, dashboards, and niche SaaS products built by domain experts with zero developers on staff. Maor’s example — a former restaurant manager building an invoicing tool for local restaurants — is the shape of a much larger shift in who gets to start a software business.

8. Nobody has visibility past about three months, and that’s the honest answer.

Maor won’t pretend to forecast a year out — internal roadmaps only run two or three months because the ground moves that fast. What he will say:

Frontier-model costs keep compressing, open source keeps closing the gap, and the category itself is widening past web apps into games, slide decks, and design — anywhere code can define an output.

9. Building in public is now a distribution channel, not a personality quirk.

Maor’s early growth came from documenting the numbers, the features, and the struggles publicly every day, not from a marketing budget. His conclusion for founders generally:

Storytelling and audience-building are becoming as valuable a skill as the product itself, especially for anyone starting without capital.

10. A board doesn’t need people like you. It needs people who aren’t.

Mark’s operating principle for Wix’s board — deliberately including outsiders like the CEO of Manchester City for a completely different read on marketing and culture — showed up again when asked who they’d add next: both landed on the same instinct, that the highest-leverage addition is someone who understands modern culture and storytelling, not another operator who thinks like they do.

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Maor on X - https://x.com/MaorShlomo

Follow Mark on X - https://x.com/marktluszcz

Visit Base44 - http://base44.com

Visit Wix - http://wix.com

Previous episodes include

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Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explain why we’re still underutilizing AI, why agent management — not individual contribution — becomes the default mode of work within three years, and why the next decade of company-building rewards taste and judgment over raw skill: once AI can draw, code, and write as well as any specialist, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable bar for what excellence looks like.

We also cover why AI carries a positive perception across Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America while triggering data-center bans and slowdown politics in the US and Europe — and why 91% of non-Chinese AI market cap still sits within 30 miles of Silicon Valley. We get into the founding story behind Manas AI — Reid’s drug-discovery venture, plus whether Silicon Valley is still the best place to start a company.

We close on the lessons Reid has learned from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and the technology trends Reid is most excited about next.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Reid Hoffman

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Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Reid Hoffman
(1:36) Why Most People Are Under Utilizing AI
(5:28) How Should We Be Using AI?
(7:17) Why Agent Managers Are Next
(8:47) Are We Taking AI Seriously Enough?
(11:58) How Is Blitzscaling Different Today?
(15:00) Is Silicon Valley Still The Best Region?
(16:27) Should Startups Partner with AI Models?
(21:37) Personalized AI & Taste
(24:28) Is Distribution The New Moat for Startups?
(26:19) Does AI Have a Negative PR Problem?
(28:48) What Would Reid Coach Governments?
(33:20) It’s Not Just Anthropic or OpenAI
(36:36) The IPO Gold Rush
(38:32) Sam vs Dario Characteristics
(42:30) Lessons from Satya Nadella
(47:30) Ollie Joins As Reid’s Chief of Staff
(49:39) Reid’s Trends
(55:27) Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

1. The next career move isn’t a skill — it’s a headcount.

Individual contributors are giving way to agent managers, each overseeing anywhere from a handful to tens of thousands of agents. Reid’s timeline: broad-based adoption within three years, starting with coding and spreading into every “digital closing loop.”

2. Non-US, non-Europe just inherited the industrial revolution’s rematch.

AI carries a negative PR perception in the US and Europe (job-loss anxiety, data-center bans) and a positive one everywhere else — Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa. Reid calls it the reverse revenge of the industrial revolution: the regions that missed the first wave may lead the cognitive one.

3. Distribution didn’t die — it became the AI amplifier.

Moats aren’t dead, but they’ve changed shape. Existing companies with distribution aren’t finished; they’re only finished if they refuse to plug AI into what they already own. Refuse, and “the dinosaur decay has started.”

4. Wrapper businesses are living on borrowed time.

If a competitor can point Claude Code or Codex at your product and rebuild it for the token cost, you were never defensible. The businesses that survive have a theory of the game: network effects, enterprise integration, or data loops the model can’t just absorb as a feature.

5. Hand skill is depreciating. Taste is the new scarce resource.

AI coordination doesn’t need better hand-eye coordination to draw well — so that skill’s value drops. What rises: judgment about what excellence actually looks like, in code, writing, and product. Reid expects taste and context-awareness to matter for decades, not quarters.

6. The market isn’t consolidating to three companies — it’s expanding to ten or fifteen.

Reid’s eight-year-old antitrust argument held: from five-to-seven heading toward ten-to-fifteen frontier and adjacent players, not three. That’s good for entrepreneurs — more potential acquirers, more room to build something valuable without having to out-build OpenAI or Anthropic.

7. Blitzscaling didn’t disappear — it moved from headcount to compute.

The old version was maximum organizational scale under uncertainty. The new version: build something in two weeks, throw it away, rebuild — at higher velocity and higher risk — while a much smaller human team manages a much larger agent workforce.

8. Trust gets built by value, not by messaging.

Reid’s answer to AI skepticism isn’t a better narrative — it’s a free medical assistant, a lease-reading legal agent, a tutor on every phone. “It isn’t by a story of words... how you get trust is by seeing value.”

Links

Follow Ollie on X - https://x.com/ollieforsyth

Follow Reid on X - https://x.com/reidhoffman

Subscribe to Reid’s Podcast, Masters of Scale - https://mastersofscale.com/

Discover Reid’s other projects: https://beacons.ai/reidhoffman

Reid’s Books - Blitzscaling & Superagency

Related previous episodes

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, gaming entered a new era as Sony’s push toward an all-digital PlayStation ecosystem sparked a fierce debate over ownership, preservation, and consumer rights. At the same time, AI continued reshaping the startup landscape: billion-dollar funding rounds accelerated across healthcare, defense, banking, and creative tools, while major industry moves — including Tom Blomfield joining Anthropic, Fidji Simo stepping down at OpenAI, and Greylock and Paradigm raising $2.7B in fresh capital combined — highlighted that the AI investment cycle is showing no signs of slowing down.

This edition covers:

• 🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key trends: The New Era for Gaming

Do you remember the days when we went into an actual shop to buy the latest games for our PlayStation? Well, those times are about to change forever because Sony is discontinuing physical PlayStation discs starting in 2028, and the backlash has been immense.

A petition against the move has passed 300,000 signatures, with KFC and Domino’s joining in with parody jabs of their own. On paper, this looks inevitable: Sony says almost 80% of its game sales are now digital, up from 27% a decade ago, and Capcom, Nintendo and Rockstar are all reporting the same shift. So what’s actually driving fans’ anger?

Well it isn’t nostalgia for plastic cases — it’s ownership. As you might know, physical discs are how players resell, lend and pass games down; losing that pushes everyone into a pure licensing model, where a purchase is really just a rental Sony can end whenever it likes. That shift matters more in gaming than it did for music or film, because a delisted game can vanish entirely rather than simply move platforms — the Video Game History Foundation already rates 87% of classic US-released games as “critically endangered”, no longer commercially available anywhere.

Sony’s economics are straightforward: cutting out manufacturers and retailers keeps a bigger margin on every digital sale, and dropping disc drives trims future console costs — savings unlikely to be passed on to gamers. What’s missing from the announcement is any kind of offset: no resale system, no lending mechanism, no preservation commitment, no price cut. That silence is the real story fans are asking for — it reads less like a company adapting to consumer trends, and more like one that sees its most loyal fans as a captive audience rather than stakeholders worth negotiating with.

🔍 This week’s top tech news

• Neko Health, founded by Spotify founder Daniel Ek has raised $700M Series C.

• YC Partner Tom Blomfield is taking a leave of absence to join Anthropic.

• Fidji Simo, CEO of AGI Deployment at OpenAI, has stepped down.

• David Beckham’s health drink startup IM8 raised $1B from General Catalyst’s unusual CVF fund.

💰 This week’s startup funding highlights

• Intelligence startup Fireworks raised $1.5B at a $17.5B valuation.

• Rippling co-founder Prasanna Sankar launched Vorflux, Autopilot for software engineers. The new startup emerged with $15M in fresh capital.

• Valarian, which is building sovereign infrastructure for high-consequence systems, raised a $50M Series A led by NEA.

• Meticulous, which helps teams ship software at the speed AI agents write code, has raised $15M Series A from the likes of Chemistry Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

• AI-Native private banking startup, Flex raised $70M Series B.

• Chai Discovery, an AI drug startup, raised $400M.

• PixVerse, the creative infrastructure platform for the next generation raised $439M.

• Singularity Defense raised $80M in Series A funding to build low-cost air defense systems that can be produced at scale.

• Infinia raised $13.5M in Series A funding to connect traditional banking infrastructure with next-generation digital asset rails.

• Oak raised $60M in Seed funding to build the AI-native identity operating system for the enterprise AI era.

• Sliceline raised $6M in Seed funding to operationalize internal company comms and more.

• microagi, a data research and deployment lab powering embodied AI raised $55M in Seed funding led by Hummingbird.

• Prediction markets platform Pascal raised $15M in funding.

• Indian AI coding startup Emergent becomes a unicorn after raising $130M in Series C funding.

👀 New VC funds

• Greylock raised $1.5 Billion for Greylock 18 to back AI-native founders.

• AlleyCorp raised $335M for Fund II.

• Paradigm raised $1.2B to invest in ‘technical frontier’ startups.

• Acurio Ventures launched $130M vehicle to provide liquidity to European VC funds.

• Catalyst Fund raised $30M to back climate tech startups across Africa.

🤝 Acquisitions

• Stripe and Advent offered to buy PayPal for more than $53 billion.

• OpenAI deployment arm to acquire Northslope.

• Y Combinator backed startup Benchmark joins Harvey.

• Whatnot acquired Shaped to power real-time live shopping recommendations.

📎 What we are reading

• The Most Human Technology Ever Made | Anish Acharya, Andreessen Horowitz.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

Mark Manson is someone you've probably heard of before. He's the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In this episode, he shares some incredible advice on life, what it takes to become a successful creator, why creators should think more like founders and what he's building next - including his self-help app, Purpose.

Previous episodes include

• The Couple That Bootstrapped a Billion Dollar Company | Julia & Kevin Hartz.

• Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.

• Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.

• Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.

• Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.

• We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.

• 5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.

• How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.

Watch and subscribe now!

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• With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.

• Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.

• Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.

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Mark Manson is someone you've probably heard of before. He's the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide. In this episode, he shares some incredible advice on life, what it takes to become a successful creator, why creators should think more like founders, and what he's building next - including his self-help app, Purpose.

Throughout the episode, we also explore why he believes AI content and human content are splitting into two permanent tracks, why non-fiction book sales are down 20–30% and what an “AI-proof” book would actually need to look like, and why Mark thinks the next decade of media rewards trust and credibility over cleverness — because the moment ChatGPT can write as well as he can, the only thing left to own is the specific, unrepeatable mix of experience that makes his voice his.

If that’s not enough, we go deep on the founding story behind Purpose, his new AI life-advice app built to do what ChatGPT can’t — actually challenge you instead of just agreeing with you — plus why traditional publishing has banned AI outright while his own two-person research team now outproduces the four-person team he had two years ago, and much more.

Timestamps

(0:00) Meet Mark Manson
(2:20) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
(9:00) Why Creators Should Think Like Founders
(17:17) NEW MEDIA: Will AI Content Survive?
(19:30) How Mark Manson Uses AI
(26:55) How To Write A Non-Fiction Book Today
(32:34) How To Master Your Edge Case
(35:13) Has The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Changed?
(37:13) The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Anymore
(39:46) Mark’s App - Purpose

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Mark Manson

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Our notes from this conversation

1. AI self-help is coming for most of human self-help.
Therapy, coaching, and advice are all just language processed through experience — exactly what LLMs are built for. Mark’s bet with his new app, Purpose, is that AI will do it better and cheaper than most coaches ever could.

2. Non-fiction is on a countdown.
Sales are down 20–30% over two years — not to podcasts, but to AI. Readers now get a chapter in, then interrogate the idea in ChatGPT instead. Survival means novel frameworks AI couldn’t have generated on demand.

3. Media is splitting into AI content and human content.
AI is closing in on pure entertainment and education — it can already find the platonic ideal of what makes someone laugh or cry. What it can’t replicate is the parasocial layer: trust, belonging, a specific person’s judgment.

4. The moat isn’t the idea — it’s the audience you own.
Mark regrets chasing traditional publisher/Audible/Netflix deals instead of owning distribution directly. Mel Robbins did it right: a viral book converted deliberately into live events, podcasts, and an owned brand.

5. Everyone needs a 99.9th-percentile intersection.
As AI closes the gap on any single skill, defensibility shifts to combinations — three or four things that overlap in one person and can’t be cleanly copied. Not one moat, a stack of them.

6. Trust-dependent verticals resist AI longest.
Relationships and money are getting hotter, not colder, in the AI era — because people don’t want the same answer ChatGPT gives everyone else. Credibility itself is becoming the scarce resource.

7. AI compounds — and legacy media is opting out.
Mark’s research team shrank from four to two while output and quality went up. Meanwhile traditional publishing often bans AI outright, ceding a gap that compounds every quarter against competitors who didn’t wait.

8. Good advice has a shelf life.
Mark’s own “give a f*ck about less” advice was right for an overwhelmed era — but it also fed the tribalism defining today’s polarization. Advice isn’t universal; it’s tied to the context that produced it.

Links

Follow Ollie on X here.

Follow Mark on X here.

Follow Mark on Instagram here.

Download Mark’s new app Purpose here.

Interested in NEW MEDIA? Visit our latest project on the most promising new media creators here.

Related previous episodes

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

NEWSLETTER | PODCAST | NEW MEDIA

Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, the UK quietly became the most interesting place in tech again — $17B raised in six months, four separate billion-dollar AI rounds, and a growing case that Europe’s AI story isn’t happening in Paris or Berlin. Meanwhile, new data just broke the “AI kills jobs” narrative wide open: the companies spending the most on AI are hiring the fastest, not the slowest.

This edition covers:

• 🗝️ Key trends: The UK is having a moment

• 📊 Graph of the week

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key trends: The UK is having a moment

The UK’s startup ecosystem has had its strongest start to the year since 2022, with startups raising $17B in the first half of ’26, up 102% from a year earlier. The standout trend is, of course, AI, which attracted $12.6B in funding, accounting for nearly three-quarters of all venture funding.

The UK has had its fair share of political challenges over the past few years, so this will be a positive moment for the region. What’s driving the trend?

Four companies, Isomorphic Labs, Nscale, Wayve and Ineffable Intelligence, each raised more than $1B, highlighting how investor capital continues to concentrate around frontier AI infrastructure and applications. Beyond foundation models, enterprise software, healthcare, semiconductors, quantum computing and robotics are attracting significant investment, while later-stage mega-rounds now account for the majority of venture capital deployed.

The UK also captured 39% of all European VC funding and 41% of Europe’s Deep Tech and Life Sciences investment in H1 2026, reinforcing its position as the continent’s leading innovation hub. At an estimated $1.7T (trillion) in enterprise value and with 217 unicorns, the UK’s technology ecosystem is increasingly defined by globally competitive AI and deep tech companies rather than consumer internet startups.

📊 Graph of the week: Heavy corporate AI spenders add staff faster than peers

Companies investing the most in AI are hiring more workers, according to new research that challenges the idea that AI will lead to widespread job losses. Over the two years after adopting generative AI, the biggest investors increased white-collar employment by 10.2%, with growth across all job functions and seniority levels. Entry-level hiring also rose by 12%.

By contrast, companies with lower levels of AI investment saw little to no change in headcount compared with similar businesses that had not adopted AI. The findings suggest that significant AI investment can drive productivity gains that support business expansion and hiring, rather than replacing workers.

A recent study analyzed nearly 22,000 US companies and is the first to combine company-level AI spending with employment data, providing one of the clearest pictures yet of how AI investment affects hiring.

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🔍 Top tech news

• In other news: Vibe coding tool Lovable is in talks to raise $300M at a $13.2B valuation.

• Salesforce just announced that it will be deepening its commitment to Switzerland by investing $1B to accelerate agentic AI transformation.

• 30M US customers later and Klarna wants its own bank by applying for a U.S. banking license.

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💰 Startup funding highlights

• AI law startup Norm raised $120M Series C led by Khosla Ventures to build the future of agentic law.

• Chip startup SambaNova raised $1B at an $11B valuation, as investors continue to double-down on the rising demand for infrastructure tied to AI.

• Even Realities raised $150M to take on the smart glasses market.

• Proxima Fusion raised $468M to build the world’s first nuclear fusion plant.

• Quantum Systems raised $1.2B at an $8B valuation to transform decision-making processes through aerial data intelligence.

• Jesse and Ben’s - restaurant-quality fries without seed oils raised $10M led by Greycroft.

• Nexcade, which does real freight forwarding work with teams raised $6M led by Project A.

• Twelve Labs, which develops artificial intelligence models and infrastructure for understanding, searching, and analyzing video content raised $100M Series A led by Naver Ventures and New Enterprise Associates.

• Venice, which generates text, images, characters, and videos raised $65M led by Dragonfly.

• Super.com raised $65M Series D led by TPG at a $1.2B valuation to scale the savings super app for everyday Americans.

👀 New VC funds

• Ruya Ventures raised $50M Fund I focusing on European deep tech startups.

• Chemistry Ventures is raising $500M for Fund II.

• BAE Systems and the NATO Innovation Fund, closed a $225M second fund to develop sovereign military technologies in Europe.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

How Eventbrite survived the business apocalypse — and why the internet made real life more valuable than ever.

Husband and Wife duo Kevin and Julia Hartz, co-founders of Eventbrite, join us on the NEW ECONOMIES podcast show to share how they built one of the world’s largest event marketplaces, navigating a leadership transition after a decade as co-founders, surviving COVID when their entire industry (and revenue) shut down overnight, and why the future belongs to companies bringing people together.

Previous episodes include

• Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman.

• Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta.

• Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund.

• Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim.

• We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia.

• 5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator.

• How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau.

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine.

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang.

Watch and subscribe now!

NEW ECONOMIES Subscriber Offers

• With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.

• Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here. Enter code NEWECONOMIES.

• Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.

• Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.

If you enjoyed this edition, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.

Subscribe now

How Eventbrite survived the business apocalypse — and why the internet made real life more valuable than ever

Husband and Wife duo Kevin and Julia Hartz, co-founders at Eventbrite, join us on the NEW ECONOMIES podcast show to share how they built one of the world’s largest event marketplaces, navigating a leadership transition after a decade as co-founders, surviving COVID when their entire industry (and revenue) shut down overnight, and why the future belongs to companies bringing people together.

About Eventbrite:

Eventbrite is one of the world's largest event technology platforms, enabling anyone to create, promote, and sell tickets for live experiences. Since its founding in 2006, the company has powered millions of events across more than 180 countries, helping creators — from independent organizers to major venues — connect with audiences at scale.

In our latest podcast episode, Kevin and Julia share Eventbrite's origin story — from a married founding team working out of a windowless office and surviving on cup noodles to building a global marketplace that transformed how people create and discover live experiences. They explain why curiosity became their greatest competitive advantage, why they ignored conventional startup advice by serving every event category from day one, and why complementary founders consistently outperform identical ones.

If that’s not enough, we also unpack the brutal reality of leading a public company through COVID after revenue turned negative almost overnight, why acting before everyone agrees is often a founder’s greatest advantage, what selling Eventbrite to Bending Spoons (who went public this week) taught them about long-term stewardship, and why, despite every wave of technology, they believe the most valuable human experiences will always happen in real life.

Timestamps

(0:00) Kevin & Julia Hartz
(1:45) A Blossoming Relationship
(3:40) The Aha Moment for Eventbrite
(8:15) Ideas Outside Eventbrite
(9:24) Eventbrite’s First Year
(12:50) The Product Market Fit Moment
(14:58) Building a Self-Serving Product
(17:25) 2016: Julia Takes Over as CEO
(23:00) The Brilliance of Eventbrite vs. Competitors
(30:22) The COVID Moment That Changed Us
(38:22) IRL Is Back
(41:34) Bending Spoon Acquires Eventbrite
(45:13) A* Star Raises $450M
(47:10) Young Founders to Watch
(48:25) What’s Next?

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES: Kevin & Julia Hartz (Eventbrite)

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Our notes from this conversation

1. Eventbrite wasn’t built to sell tickets — it was built to make gathering possible.

Kevin and Julia saw ticketing as an overlooked payments problem. If anyone could create an event as easily as sending an email, millions of communities, creators, and organizers could exist that otherwise never would.

2. The best co-founding teams divide by strengths, not titles.

From day one, they focused on complementary abilities instead of overlapping responsibilities. Rather than competing for the same decisions, each founder owned the areas where they naturally created the most leverage.

3. Curiosity became the company’s competitive advantage.

The early years weren’t spent making assumptions — they attended events, watched customers, worked the door themselves, and continuously simplified the product based on real behavior instead of internal opinions.

4. Product-market fit expanded by following customers, not chasing categories.

Instead of focusing on one niche, Eventbrite launched broadly and observed where adoption naturally emerged. Every new customer segment revealed the next opportunity to build for.

5. Crisis rewards speed more than certainty.

When COVID shut down live events almost overnight, the team assumed the worst immediately. They raised capital, reshaped the roadmap, focused on customer survival, and acted long before the situation became obvious to everyone else.

6. The internet didn’t replace real life — it made it more valuable.

Every major technology wave has changed how people connect, but none has replaced the human desire to gather. Digital platforms increasingly become discovery engines for experiences that ultimately happen offline.

7. Building companies isn’t a chapter — it’s an identity.

Even after taking Eventbrite public, leading it through COVID, and eventually selling it, Kevin and Julia continue building new companies and backing founders. For them, entrepreneurship isn’t a milestone — it’s how they approach the world.

Links

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important recent tech news worth paying attention to.

This week, AI infrastructure funding surged, WhatsApp introduced usernames, and one prediction stood out above everything else: in the near future, the most valuable managers may not manage people first — they'll manage teams of AI agents.

This edition covers:

• 🗝️ Key trends: Managers become Agent Managers

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🤝 Acquisitions

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

🗝️ Key Trends: Managers become Agent Managers

One of the most thought-provoking conversations we recently had was with Michele Catasta, Head of AI at Replit, who predicts that 2026 will be the year of the “Agent Manager.”

As he put it:

“It’s more about waking up in the morning, mapping exactly what you want to accomplish in the day, launching several agents... The rest of your workday is vetting what the agents are doing.”

His point isn’t that AI replaces people. It’s that our role shifts from execution to orchestration. Instead of doing every task ourselves, we’ll direct teams of AI agents, review their outputs, and apply the judgment that machines still can’t.

The competitive advantage won’t simply be knowing how to use AI — it will be knowing how to manage it effectively.

See the episode in full here.

🔍 Top tech news this week

WhatsApp just launched usernames!

Tennis icon Novak Djokovic has a new tech job — advisor to private equity firm General Atlantic.

Amble, street-legal EV built for short local trips, with no doors, fewer screens, and a modular design inspired by the 1960s lunar rover just launched!

💰 Startup funding highlights

• 8090 Labs founded by Chamath Palihapitiya’s raised $135M Series A.

• General Intuition raised $320M to use video game data to train robots.

• Caplight raised $16M Series A led by BlackRock to power private market data and secondary liquidity.

• Runlayer raised $30M Series A to help enterprises go all in on AI.

• Lama AI raised $12M Series A to bring AI agents to banking.

• Fomo raised $75M Series B to scale on-chain trading.

• Tsuga raised $35M in Series A funding to build observability for the AI era.

• Allium raised $40M Series B to power blockchain for institutional finance.

• Warp raised $60M Series B to rebuild HR software with AI.

• Partly raised $50M Series B led by DST Global to power AI infrastructure for the vehicle repair industry.

• Patronus AI raised $50M to build ‘digital worlds’ that stress-test AI agents.

• Assort Health raised $120M Series C to scale voice AI agent platform for healthcare.

• Netris raised $15M Series A from a16z to help AI neoclouds go live faster.

• Taxwire raised $25M Series A to simplify sales tax compliance.

👀 New VC funds

• 8VC closed their seventh fund at $1.5B.

• Ashton Kutcher exits from Sound Ventures to set up new venture firm.

• Daybreak raised $100M Fund II.

• Discipulus Ventures raised $30M oversubscribed fund.

• Harpoon Ventures launched Fund IV at $155M.

• Cantos launched Fund IV at $70M.

🤝 Acquisitions

• Qualcomm acquired Modular.

• AMD acquired MEXT.

• Superhuman acquired AI detection startup GPTZero.

• Walmart acquired connected TV platform Vibe.co for $1.4B.

• HubSpot acquired Warmly.

• SpaceX acquired Mesh Optical.

• MoonPay acquired Entendre.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Show

Ben Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Fundrise, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explore the future of investing in an AI-driven world.

From democratizing private markets to backing the next generation of technology companies, Ben explains why software is entering a new era of disruption, and how AI could reshape everything from work and housing to healthcare and human longevity.

Previous episodes include:

• Email Never Died | Rahul Vohra founder at Superhuman

• Replit’s President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta

• Inside Mercury’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund

• Inside Gusto’s Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim

• We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia

• 5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator

• How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang

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Ben Miller, CEO and Co-Founder at Fundrise, joins NEW ECONOMIES to explore the future of investing in an AI-driven world. From democratizing private markets to backing the next generation of technology companies, Ben explains why software is entering a new era of disruption, and how AI could reshape everything from work and housing to healthcare and human longevity.

About Fundrise:

Fundrise is the largest direct-to-consumer alternative asset manager with more than 385,000 active investors, 2.1 million platform users, and $3.3 billion in assets across real estate, venture, and private credit.

In this episode, we explore why Fundrise expanded beyond real estate into venture investing, how Ben thinks about building with conviction instead of institutional consensus, and why some of the best investment decisions come from waiting rather than deploying capital on schedule.

We also go deep on how AI is reshaping software, venture, and the broader economy — from why application-layer businesses may become harder to sustain, to why capital is increasingly concentrating around models, compute, and infrastructure.

If that’s not enough, we also discuss why venture is far more relationship-driven than most people realize, why investors often overstate their impact relative to founders, and why Ben believes the next great opportunities won’t come from another consumer app — but from applying AI to the physical world through biology, materials, energy, and longevity.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Transcript: Ben Miller (Fundrise)

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Timestamps

(0:00) Ben Miller
(1:42) Democratizing Access To Private Markets
(9:50) Venture vs. Real Estate
(12:48) Getting Access To Companies
(15:07) Venture Is Changing
(20:10) What Happens Next?
(22:10) Companies Going Public
(28:16) Where Are The Next Opportunities?
(31:22) The Impact of Longevity
(33:30) Tough Categories Right Now
(35:15) Thoughts On Vibe Coding Tools
(36:12) Ollie Joining As Chief of Staff
(37:35) How Ben Uses AI
(40:53) The Next Big Act For Fundrise
(44:22) What Categories Would Ben Build In?
(46:13) Rapid Fire

Our notes from this conversation

1. Fundrise was built as a reaction to the financial system.

The idea didn’t start with real estate — it started with distrust. After living through the 2008 financial crisis firsthand, Ben’s view became simple: people should be able to own real assets directly instead of relying entirely on financial institutions.

2. Private markets became consumer products.

Fundrise saw the opportunity earlier: It took institutional investing models — private equity, real estate funds, venture — and rebuilt them for individuals. The thesis wasn’t to invent a new asset class. It was to open access to one that already existed.

3. Great investing often means not doing what you said you would.

The team raised venture capital to invest in tech — and then barely invested for a year. Instead of deploying because markets expected it, they waited. Flexibility became an advantage over institutional pressure.

4. Access in venture is more random than people admit.

From the outside, venture looks like a system. Inside, it often looks like relationships, timing, and proximity. Many of the best investments happen through unexpected connections rather than structured processes.

5. Founders create outcomes. Investors mostly provide fuel.

The venture industry talks heavily about value-add. Ben’s view: teams build companies. Capital matters. Advice occasionally matters. But execution compounds more than introductions.

6. AI is making software easier — and company building harder.

As models become more capable, application layers become vulnerable. Product roadmaps compress. Builders increasingly compete not just with startups, but with the platforms underneath them.

7. Capital is concentrating faster than people expect.

AI isn’t only changing software — it’s redirecting capital. Trillions are flowing into models, compute, and infrastructure, creating second-order effects across housing, credit, real estate, and the broader economy.

8. The next breakthrough isn’t digital — it’s physical.

The most exciting opportunities may not be chat interfaces or copilots. They may come from applying AI to biology, materials, medicine, energy, and the physical world itself.

9. The future belongs to people willing to suffer for the hard decisions.

Ben’s framework for leadership is simple: the best decisions are often the ones that are personally painful. Building means choosing uncertainty, absorbing pressure, and taking responsibility before outcomes are obvious.

10. Learning remains the ultimate competitive advantage.

The next company, sector, or wave rarely looks obvious in advance. Curiosity, experimentation, and being willing to look outside your category matter more than defending a fixed identity.

Links

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important tech news from the past few weeks.

This edition covers:

• 🗝️ Key trends: UK lands a roster of AI companies

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🤝 Acquisitions

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

This edition is brought to you by Deel

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Scale your startup faster

🗝️ Key trends: AI startups choose London as their European hub

London’s position as Europe’s AI hub keeps strengthening.

Recently, a new wave of AI startups announced major expansions in the capital — including n8n, ElevenLabs, Lovable, Legora and Cursor — building on earlier moves from OpenAI and Anthropic.

As competition for talent, customers and ecosystem density intensifies, London is increasingly becoming the city where European AI companies choose to scale. With recent political developments in the UK, there is hope that future leadership continues to build on London’s momentum and reinforce its position as Europe’s leading AI hub.

🔍 Top tech news

• SpaceX finally went public!

• YC Spring Demo Day took place last week. If you missed the day, see the full batch here.

💰 Startup funding highlights

• Poland invests $11M into ElevenLabs.

• European startup NEURA Robotics raised $1.4B to develop collaborative robots.

• Odyssey, a world model AI startup founded by self-driving vehicle pioneers raised a $310M Series B round at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital.

• Pramaana Labs raised $27M Seed from Khosla Ventures to bring formal verification to AI.

• Sarvam recently became India’s newest AI unicorn with its latest $234M funding round led by HCLTech.

• NewCore which authenticates, govern, and controls AI agents raised $66M Seed led by Cyberstarts.

• Orbio, automates hiring and onboarding for frontline workers raised $21M Series A led by Dawn Capital.

• Theker raised $85M led by CRV to build the factory robot that doesn’t specialize in anything.

• Trading platform Fomo raised $75M Series B from Index Ventures and USV.

• Voice AI startup Bland raised $50M Series C from Dell Technologies Capital after being rejected by 180 investors.

👀 New VC funds

• The Chainsmokers’ VC Firm Mantis is raising a $100M fund.

• Seedcamp raised $320M for their seventh fund.

• Play Ventures raised $140M to invest in gaming.

• Base10 raised $850M to fund early-stage AI-focused founders.

• Anti Fund closed its oversubscribed $100M Growth I fund.

• CAA, TPG form $250M holding company to acquire businesses led by YouTubers and other creators.

🤝 Acquisitions

• SpaceX to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60B.

• Salesforce acquired Intercom (now branded as Fin) for $3.6B.

• Warner Music acquired AI attribution startup Sureel AI.

• DeepL acquired Mixhalo for live-event audio streaming and translation.

• L’Oreal to acquire majority stake in Indian beauty startup Innovist.

• OpenAI acquired German startup ONA.

• Elastic agrees to buy CRV-backed Deductive AI for up to $85M.

• Databricks acquired cyberattack detection startup Panther.

• AMD buys data center memory optimization startup Mext.

🎤 This week on the NEW ECONOMIES Podcast

Why email never died — and why Superhuman is betting on voice, AI, and the future of work

Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman and now CEO of Superhuman Mail inside the newly formed Superhuman group, joins NEW ECONOMIES on why email remains the most important layer of modern work, how AI is transforming productivity beyond the inbox, and why distribution and focus matter more than technical moats in the age of infinite software.

Previous episodes include:

• Replit's President & Head of AI | Michele Catasta

• Inside Mercury's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CEO Immad Akhund

• Inside Gusto's Founding Story | Co-Founder & CTO Eddie Kim

• We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia

• 5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator

• How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang

• Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on the company’s turnaround story.

• Dan Shipper on why traditional coding workflows are breaking.

• Colin Angle on the $1.7B founder failure story.

• David Haber (a16z) on the future of venture capital.

• Emad Mostaque on AI systems replacing personal productivity.

Watch and subscribe now!

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Why email never died — and why Superhuman is betting on voice, AI, and the future of work

Rahul Vohra, founder of Superhuman and now CEO of Superhuman Mail inside the newly formed Superhuman group, joins NEW ECONOMIES on why email remains the most important layer of modern work, how AI is transforming productivity beyond the inbox, and why distribution and focus matter more than technical moats in the age of infinite software.

In our latest podcast episode with Rahul, we unpack Superhuman’s eleven-year journey — from the contrarian decision to reinvent email when everyone said it was dead, to building one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic productivity brands and eventually becoming the foundation for a much bigger ambition: the AI-native productivity suite.

We also explore why voice could become the default interface for knowledge work, how AI assistants are becoming a new growth channel for software companies, and why Rahul believes the next generation of winners won’t be defined by who writes the best code — but by who owns distribution, executes relentlessly, and knows what not to build.

If that’s not enough, we go deep on the acquisition story that led Grammarly to rename the entire company around Superhuman, why email continues to outperform every prediction of its demise, and what building the productivity bundle of the future actually looks like.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Download the transcript

NEW ECONOMIES Transcript: Rahul Vohra (superhuman)

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Timestamps

(0:00) Rahul Vohra
(1:44) Why Go After Disrupting Email
(4:22) Will Email Still Stay Relevant?
(9:20) The Impact of Voice
(14:20) PLG: Sent by Superhuman
(18:57) Why Moats Are Becoming Increasingly Hard to Build
(24:30) How Does Superhuman Group Stay Focused?
(28:55) Inside Superhuman
(33:20) Missing Products from the Bundle
(36:52) The Acquisition
(45:45) Ollie Joining as Chief of Staff
(47:45) Angel Investing

Our notes from this conversation

1. Email is still the most important protocol at work.

Every few years someone declares email dead — and every few years they’re wrong. Email remains identity, authentication, and the default layer for company communication. The interface will change. The infrastructure probably won’t.

2. Voice is becoming the new keyboard.

The breakthrough isn’t transcription — it’s intent. Instead of writing emails, scheduling meetings, and prompting AI manually, people will increasingly speak outcomes and let software execute. Work becomes orchestration.

3. The biggest moats aren’t technical anymore.

Software is becoming cheaper and easier to build. Features get copied faster than ever. Distribution, trust, brand, and knowing exactly what not to build are becoming the new defensibility.

4. Distribution compounds. Products alone don’t.

The winners won’t necessarily be the teams with the smartest models — they’ll be the teams that own attention, create habits, and get embedded where users already work. Distribution has become product.

5. AI changes interfaces before it changes infrastructure.

Voice, agents, and AI-native workflows will reshape how we interact with email, docs, and software — but the systems underneath often survive much longer than people expect.

6. Focus becomes more valuable as building gets easier.

When the cost of creation trends toward zero, restraint becomes leverage. The companies that win won’t build the most — they’ll build the few things that matter.

7. The next growth channel is AI itself.

Users are no longer only discovering products through search, social, or sales. Increasingly, AI assistants recommend, connect, and even activate software on behalf of users. Tools such as The Prompting Company help companies get cited in AI models for example.

8. The future isn’t humans or AI — it’s humans with AI.

The products that endure won’t remove people from work. They’ll amplify judgment, creativity, and decision-making while automation handles the repetitive layers underneath.

Links

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Why I built the coding tool everyone dismissed — then watched it take over the Fortune 500

Michele Catasta, President and Head of AI at Replit, joins NEW ECONOMIES on why vibe coding is no longer just for hobbyists, how Replit went from a side project to having 85% of the Fortune 500 as users, and why 2026 is the year everyone becomes an agent manager.

In our latest podcast episode with Michele, we discuss Replit's origin story — a fifteen-year journey that started as an open source side project in 2011 and spent years building infrastructure in obscurity before the AI unlock that changed everything — and how launching the very first vibe coding agent on the market, before the term even existed, put Replit at the centre of a category it invented.

We also unpack why the SaaS apocalypse is real but overblown, why technical moats don't matter as much as execution moats, and how a crucible encounter with Replit's founder Amjad over a primitive AI demo set the course for what the product would eventually become.

If that’s not enough, we also explore why Replit scrambled an enterprise sales team almost overnight after Fortune 500 IT departments started knocking, the Visa partnership that lets anyone monetize a product they built in a single prompt, and why Michele believes the coding problem is almost solved — and what that means for where Replit goes next.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Transcript: Michele Catasta (Replit)

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Timestamps

(0:00) Michele Catasta
(1:25) The State of AI
(3:25) The Impact of AI Companies Going Public
(6:17) What Michele Is Most Excited About
(8:50) Replit's Founding Story
(18:40) Where Is Vibe Coding Going Next?
(21:00) The Role for PMs Today
(26:07) What Are Agent Managers?
(33:42) Are Technical Moats Relevant?
(36:31) Visa Partnership
(40:05) Ollie Joining as Chief of Staff
(43:48) How to Stay Disciplined
(46:27) Rapid Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

1. Launch before the category has a name.

Replit shipped a vibe coding agent months before the term even existed. They didn’t wait for validation — they built, launched, and let users define the market. Lesson to founders is to just launch fast.

2. Sometimes being early means writing the playbook, which is totally okay!

Product–market fit as we know can takes ages to figure out. For a decade, Replit looked technically strong but commercially stuck. Those years built the infrastructure and conviction that made the AI moment possible. Remember, successes very rarely happens overnight.

3. Enterprise wasn’t actually a strategy for the team - their users pulled them there.

When employees started building internal tools, IT followed. Strong PLG can create demand before sales does.

4. Technical moats fade. Execution moats compound.

Features can be copied. Judgment can’t. A decade of learning what breaks, scales, and actually matters becomes the real advantage.

5. Coding is becoming the easy part.

The harder problem is everything around it — integrations, payments, governance, and infrastructure. The product becomes the platform.

6. 2026 is the year of ‘’the agent manager.’‘

Work shifts from creating everything yourself to directing, reviewing, and orchestrating multiple agents. The operating model changes before the job titles do.

Links

Subscribe to NEW ECONOMIES: ‪@NEWECONOMIESPOD‬

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Why I built banking for America's startups — then rebuilt it around AI

Immad Akhund, Co-Founder & CEO at Mercury, joins NEW ECONOMIES on banking one in three U.S. startups, raising $200M without needing a dollar of it, and why the legacy banking system was never going to win.

In this episode, we discuss Mercury’s origin story — launched in 2019 when the entire industry told founders that nobody would trust a startup with their money — and how a million-dollar deposit arrived within four days of launch from someone Immad had never spoken to. We dig into why incumbent banks were always going to lose this fight, why AI makes their position ten times worse, and how Mercury is now rebuilding its entire product around the idea that your bank should live inside whatever AI tool you already use.

We also explore why Immad dropped all one-on-ones after watching Jensen Huang run NVIDIA with 60 direct reports, the Amazon “working backwards” process that mapped out Mercury’s entire AI roadmap from a single doc, and why the fintech companies that planted seeds in 2017 are only now bearing fruit.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Podcast Immad Akhund

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Timestamps

(0:00) Immad Akhund
(2:35) Why Raise $200M?
(3:55) Why FinTech Is Having a Moment
(6:02) How Has AI Impacted Mercury?
(10:25) What Is Defensibility Today?
(13:29) Mercury Finding Product-Market Fit
(15:22) Legacy Banks Never Caught Up
(19:22) Inside Mercury's Product Team
(23:56) The Nuclear Power of Talent
(26:05) Is AI Moving Too Fast?
(29:00) Keeping Up-to-Date with AI
(31:20) Ollie Joining Immad as Chief of Staff
(33:45) Our Latest Product Features
(35:45) Immad's Interest in Angel Investing
(38:20) Today's Underappreciated Opportunities
(40:36) AI Wrappers: Will They Last?
(42:34) Why Is Consumer So Hard?
(44:17) Immad's Quick-Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

1. Raise when you don’t need to — and the terms will show it

Mercury has been profitable for four years. That single fact changed everything about the Series D. When you’re not desperate, you get to choose your investors, your timing, and your narrative. Immad has watched enough founders raise under duress to know the difference — and deliberately built Mercury to a position where fundraising is a strategic move, not a survival one. The best negotiating leverage is not needing the deal.

2. Legacy banks lost because their incentives were always wrong

Deposit banking is a cost center for incumbent banks. Their real product is loans. That single structural fact explains almost everything: why they underinvest in product, why they charge fees instead of building features, why their “engineering” teams are actually IT teams stitching together third-party vendors. They weren’t slow to adapt — they were optimized for something else entirely. Mercury was always competing on a different game board.

3. Trust isn’t a brand asset. It’s an infrastructure layer

Within four days of launch, someone Immad had never spoken to wired a million dollars into a Mercury account. That moment signaled something real — but it took seven more years to get customers holding $400M in their accounts. Trust compounds slowly and is almost impossible to manufacture quickly. It’s also, eventually, one of the most durable moats in financial services. The product is the interface. The trust is the product.

4. AI made the incumbent problem ten times worse

If legacy banks couldn’t keep up with Mercury’s pace over the last decade, they have no chance now. The window for meaningful product decisions has shrunk from years to months. Launching an MCP integration, shipping an AI-native feature, rebuilding a workflow around an agent — these are things Mercury can do in weeks. A bank operating on a core banking vendor’s release cycle cannot. The faster the world moves, the more permanently the gap widens.

5. The paradigm shifts every six months — that’s the feature, not the bug

A year ago, nobody was seriously talking about agents living on your machine and connecting to every service you use. Now it’s Mercury’s central product thesis. Immad isn’t trying to predict which paradigm comes next — he’s building an organisation that can absorb the shift when it arrives. Curiosity and optimism aren’t soft skills. They’re survival mechanisms for operating in an environment where the rules rewrite themselves annually.

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important tech news from the past few weeks.

This edition breaks things down into:

• 🗝️ Key trends: The IPO Comeback

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🤝 Acquisitions

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

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🗝️ Key trends: The IPO Comeback

After three years of limited activity, the IPO market finally started moving again in 2025. The U.S. saw 347 IPOs, up from 225 the year before and the strongest showing since 2021. The difference this time was investor selectivity. Technology remained the most active sector, but capital largely flowed toward businesses with scale, proven business models, and a clear path to profitability.

Globally, 1,293 IPOs raised $171.8 billion in 2025, a 39% increase in proceeds despite a similar number of listings. More money was raised without a meaningful increase in deal volume, suggesting investors were willing to write larger checks but only for companies they viewed as higher quality.

Attention is now shifting to the next wave of potential listings. Companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX, OpenAI, and Canva remain among the most closely watched IPO candidates, while a broader group of late-stage private companies has spent the last several years strengthening operations and waiting for market conditions to improve. With continued interest in AI and defense technology, and signs of recovery in biotech, the pipeline for the remainder of 2026 appears strong.

🔍 Top tech news

• OpenAI files confidentially for IPO, following Anthropic.

• Italy’s Bending Spoons, owner of AOL and Vimeo, files for Nasdaq IPO.

• Users took to X this week to express their VC horror stories - see a collection of them here.

• Vlad Yatsenko, CTO and co-founder at Revolut, has stepped down.

• Airbnb founder and CEO Brian Chesky is planning to start a new AI company.

• Supabase, the open-source database of choice for the vibe-coding world, raised $500M Series F, valuing the company at $10B.

• Filmmaker Martin Scorsese joined German AI lab Black Forest Labs as an advisor.

• AI music startup Suno raised $400M, at a $5.4B valuation led by Bond.

• Nvidia-backed robotics startup Generalist AI raised $400M led by Radical Ventures, valuing the startup at $2B.

• Lovable is in talks to raise funding at a $12B valuation.

• Fuse Energy just hit $550M in ARR and raised another $30M.

• Factorial raised $150M Series D at a $2.5B valuation.

• Y Combinator’s Spring Demo Day takes place next week. See the latest batch here.

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💰 Startup funding highlights

• Legal startup Wordsmith raised $69M Series B to scale legal AI platform for in-house teams.

• Wix CEO backs Willow as the startup raised $7M for an AI agent control layer.

• London’s Airspeed raised $20M Series A to build AI-powered execution layer for revenue teams.

• UK AI startup Scope raised $17.9M led by Index Ventures to speed up industrial inspection workflows.

• AI startup Viktor raised $75M to put a virtual ‘coworker’ in Slack and Teams.

• AI video generation startup TrueFan raised $10M Series A funding.

• Geordie AI raised $30M Series A led by Balderton Capital.

👀 New VC funds

• Benchmark raised $2B for new VC funds.

• Version One Ventures raised $108M as top Canadian seed investor expands globally.

🤝 Acquisitions

• Salesforce acquired Contentful.

• Autodesk acquired MaintainX.

🎤 This week on NEW ECONOMIES Podcast

Eddie Kim, Co-Founder and CTO at Gusto, joins NEW ECONOMIES on cracking the small business market, keeping all three co-founders for 15 years, and why he just built the most important product of his career in eight weeks.

Watch the episode in full now.

Watch or listen now on… YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

• We Had to Reimagine Nextdoor | CEO & Co-Founder Nirav Tolia

• 5 Grand Slam Champion Maria Sharapova: Tennis Icon | Entrepreneur | Investor | New Media Creator

• How Many $10 Billion Startups Will There Be? | Eric Hippeau

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang

• Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on the company’s turnaround story.

• Dan Shipper on why traditional coding workflows are breaking.

• Colin Angle on the $1.7B founder failure story.

• David Haber (a16z) on the future of venture capital.

• Emad Mostaque on AI systems replacing personal productivity.

Watch and subscribe now!

Special Offers

• With Deel, companies get full coverage across payroll, HR, benefits, mobility, performance, and device management in 150+ countries — with compliance built in. Try it here.

• Hyperagent: Build AI agents super easily. Get $1,000 in free credits here.

• Hostinger: Buy a domain, hosting service or build any website within minutes. Start building with 10% off here.

• Attio: Tired of trying multiple CRM tools? Attio is the favorite, used by thousands of startups. Start using it here.

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Why I built America's most-loved payroll company then reinvented it with AI

Eddie Kim, Co-Founder and CTO at Gusto, joins NEW ECONOMIES on cracking the small business market, keeping all three co-founders for 15 years, and why he just built the most important product of his career in eight weeks.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Podcast: Eddie Kim

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Eddie Kim is the co-founder at Gusto, the small business platform that just crossed a billion dollars in annual revenue serving over 500,000 companies across payroll, benefits, HR, and compliance.

A two-time YC founder who met his co-founders at Stanford and at a half marathon starting line, Eddie has spent 15 years proving that the most unglamorous problems in business are often the most valuable ones to solve. In this episode, we explore what it actually takes to build a category-defining company in a space nobody wanted to touch — and why Eddie believes he just built the most important product of his career — Gusto Cofounder: The AI Teammate Built for Small Business.

We also explore the blank canvas problem holding AI back from mainstream adoption, why the distinction between engineer and designer is disappearing, and how a team of five people went from zero code to full launch in eight weeks.

Timestamps

(0:00) Eddie Kim, Co-Founder at Gusto
(5:40) Lessons from Y Combinator
(9:30) 15+ years on co-founder relationships
(15:00) How to give feedback to your co-founders
(17:45) The early days at Gusto
(21:10) Gusto’s new product: Gusto Cofounder
(33:05) How to launch new features
(38:15) The rise of solo entrepreneurs
(41:25) How to avoid distractions
(45:20) How Gusto would launch today from scratch
(47:00) Lightning fire round

Our notes from this conversation

1. Boring problems are the best problems — if you can stomach the grind

In 2011, the hottest companies were chasing eyeballs. Mobile, social, local. Nobody wanted to work on payroll. Hiring was nearly impossible, and one of the category’s own pioneers told the Gusto founders to their faces: don’t do it. That discouragement was actually the signal. The problems everyone avoids are exactly the ones worth solving — because if you can crack them, the competitive field is almost empty.

2. The co-founder relationship is built over years, not conversations

All three Gusto co-founders are still at the company 15 years later — a genuinely rare thing. What makes it work isn’t a communication framework or a weekly check-in cadence. It’s shared values, accumulated trust, and the quiet confidence that comes from having survived a hundred disagreements and come out the other side. Real directness — saying what you actually think — only becomes possible once you’ve built that foundation. You can’t shortcut it.

3. The blank canvas problem is AI’s biggest obstacle

The reason most small business owners can’t harness AI isn’t capability — it’s context. Install Claude Code or open a frontier model and you’re staring at infinite possibility with no clear starting point. That’s paralyzing. The insight behind Gusto Co-Founder is that AI becomes transformative the moment it’s anchored to a specific domain, with real data and real problems already loaded in. Generic intelligence is a tool. Contextual intelligence is a co-founder.

4. Trust is infrastructure — and it takes 15 years to build

Gusto couldn’t have launched its AI co-founder product on day one. The depth in payroll, benefits, compliance, and tax took over a decade to accumulate. That history — 500,000+ customers, millions of data points on what makes small businesses succeed or fail — is what makes the product genuinely useful rather than just technically impressive. The lesson: trust and data are compounding assets. The longer you stay focused on one problem, the harder your moat becomes to replicate.

5. The future of building is builders — not roles

The team that built Gusto Co-Founder was five people: four engineers and a designer. No roadmaps, no sprint planning, no documentation. The designer wrote code. The engineers made design decisions. They ran a permanent Zoom call instead of meetings. In eight weeks, they went from zero to launch. That’s not a fluke — it’s a preview. AI is erasing the gaps between specialties. The builder mindset is the only identity that matters now.

Links

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Our NEW MEDIA Community (new-media.co)

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Why I Returned As CEO After 5 Years Away

Nirav Tolia, Co-Founder & CEO at Nextdoor, joins NEW ECONOMIES on the company's founding story, why Nirav came back as CEO and the impact of community in the midst of AI.

Watch or listen now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

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NEW ECONOMIES Transcript

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Nirav Tolia is the co-founder and CEO at Nextdoor, the neighborhood network connecting over 110 million people across communities worldwide. Having built and sold Shopping.com to eBay, returned to lead Nextdoor through a major transformation, and served as a guest shark on Shark Tank, Nirav is one of Silicon Valley’s most seasoned operators. In this episode, we explore what it takes to rebuild a company from the inside — and why the hardest thing in tech isn’t starting, it’s coming back.

We discuss Nextdoor’s origin story, born from the ashes of a failed startup called Fanbase, and the crucible moment that gave Nirav the courage to keep going. We dig into what it really feels like to return as founder-CEO after five and a half years away, why incumbency is often the straightest path to irrelevance, and how Nextdoor is repositioning itself for what Nirav calls the age of human connection — where AI reduces friction but real neighbors remain irreplaceable. We also explore the future of local community, the untapped potential of 110 million sign-ups, and the lessons Nirav has taken from working alongside legendary investor and mentor Bill Gurley for over two decades.

Timestamps

(0:00) Nirav Tolia, Co-Founder & CEO at Nextdoor
(2:05) A Multi-year Turnaround
(4:20) Crucible Moments That Led to 20+ Million Weekly Active Users
(9:25) How to Fight Through Difficult Days
(13:20) A Blossoming Co-founding Relationship
(17:37) Stepping Away, Then Coming Back as CEO
(24:40) The Third Act: An AI-Enabled Version
(29:50) The Age of Human Connection
(36:30) Building to Stay Relevant
(44:30) Will Nextdoor Win In This Market?
(52:15) Rapid Fire Round

Our notes from this conversation

1. The Crucible Moment Is About Daily Survival, Not Long-Term Vision

The romanticized version of founding a company — the carefully considered spreadsheet, the bold strategic plan — is a myth constructed in retrospect. In the moment, it’s pure survival. Nextdoor was born from the ashes of a failed company called Fanbase, with co-founders who gave themselves one last summer to find something that worked. Having the courage to keep going when things are at their darkest is what separates founders who break through from those who don’t.

2. The Only Tolerable Way Through the Entrepreneurial Journey Is With Other People

Nirav credits community — specifically his co-founder Sarah Leary, who he’s worked alongside for 27 years — as the through line of everything. Great co-founders aren’t just talented; they’re people you like, respect, and trust in equal measure. You need someone who can crack a joke at the right moment, solve an impossible problem the next, and stay when everyone else heads for the exits. That combination is extraordinarily rare, and when you find it, you don’t let go.

3. Coming Back as CEO Is Harder Than Starting From Scratch

Returning founders face a unique psychological challenge: the temptation to restore what once was. Nirav was clear from day one that the answer was never to go back. The company he left in 2018 was different from the one he rejoined in 2023, and the company that needs to be built now is different again. The only useful frame when returning is phase three — learning from both prior chapters, but building something genuinely new.

4. Incumbency Is the Straightest Path to Irrelevance

The story of the tech industry is one company eating another in a cycle of creative destruction. Standing still is effectively moving backwards. Nextdoor’s next phase required asking honestly: what still matters to people today, and what doesn’t? The shift from “what happened last weekend in my neighborhood” to “what’s happening this weekend” is deceptively simple but fundamentally changes the product — moving from objective information to subjective, human recommendation, which is something an LLM will never do as well as a neighbor.

5. The Age of Human Connection Is Not in Competition With AI — It Requires It

The false choice between AI efficiency and human authenticity is one of the most important things Nirav pushes back on. The birth of the internet was the age of information. The emergence of AI is the age of intelligence. What comes next is the age of human connection — and AI’s role is to reduce the friction that stops people from finding each other, not to replace the connection itself. Nextdoor’s early decision to require real names and verified addresses, made long before AI was a concern, turns out to be one of its most valuable assets in a world where trust and identity are everything.

6. Bill Gurley’s Lesson: Whatever You’ve Achieved, 10x It

No matter where Nextdoor reached, Bill Gurley’s consistent challenge was to multiply it. Not iterate — multiply by 10x. That relentless expansion of what’s possible, held by someone who simultaneously believes you’re capable of it, is the rarest and most valuable thing an investor can offer a founder. It’s not just high expectations. It’s high expectations paired with genuine faith.

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Y Combinator’s Spring ‘26 Demo Day is two weeks away. We’re back with a full overview of the latest startups in the batch — what they’re building, which categories they’re focused on, and which partners coached them. We’ll also highlight the most exciting startups to watch and take a closer look at the teams behind them.

So what have we learned about this batch so far?

• 62% of the batch is made up of B2B startups, with many founders building across product infrastructure, tools for product leaders, engineers and operators. 64% of startups were building across B2B in the previous batch.

• Legal tech: We noticed far fewer legal tech startups in this batch than the last — just two compared to seven previously. This may be an early sign that the category is becoming overcrowded, with dominant players like Harvey and YC unicorn Legora leading the market.

• 12% of the startups are building across Industrials with a particular focus on Robotics.

• Defense is becoming a major trend.

• Healthcare stayed flat but is overwhelmingly AI-for-clinicians / ops, not biotech.

Let’s explore the latest trends shaping this batch in full and how markets are shifting.

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The History of YC

In under two weeks, over 190 startups from the latest Y Combinator batch will present to investors at the Spring ‘26 Demo Day, and this may be the strongest batch yet. After meeting several founders in recent weeks, one trend is very clear: the founders are doubling down on AI, focusing on B2B — the same trend as the last couple of batches.

Ask any founder or investor, and they have undoubtedly heard of Y Combinator — one of the world’s most renowned startup accelerators, with a mighty track record. Founders who raise from them are 45% more likely to raise a Series A and the accelerator turned 20 years old last year. Throughout that time, they have achieved some incredible stats, including:

• $1.2T+ in combined market value has been created.

• 6.5% of YC startups become unicorns.

• A quarter of all YC-backed unicorns achieve a valuation of over $10 billion.

All within just 20 years. So with the latest batch wrapping up, many of these startups are poised to rise — let’s meet them!

Trends from this batch

We’ve spent the last few weeks analyzing the latest batch in full and this is what we are seeing:

19% of startups in this batch are solo-founder companies

Nearly one in five companies has a single founder, and the median core founding team is just three people. Solo founder examples include:

• Drip: The operating system for enterprise deal execution.

• Lattice Health: The operating system for clinical AI in imaging.

• OpenProse: A natural language agent framework: write the future into existence.

• RentAHuman: Marketplace for AI agents to hire humans.

• Smol Machines: Ship software faster with portable, self-contained virtual machines.

The rise of AI agents

60% of startup one-liners mention AI or agents. They’re not shipping features anymore — they’re shipping coworkers, and the tools those coworkers need. Examples include:

• Dayjob: AI Agents for industrial logistics.

• Replicas: Background coding agents for engineering teams.

• AgentPhone: Phone numbers for AI agents.

• Callab: AI voice agents for legacy telephony systems.

• Userlens: AI agents that predict churn months before it happens.

Is Healthcare finally having the breakthroughs it needs?

We now have access to healthcare tools that were previously unavailable or prohibitively expensive, at a fraction of the cost before the AI boom. The developments are striking: AI-powered primary care physicians, barrier-free cancer screening, and other tools that dramatically expand access to care. Examples include:

• Clara is building the AI primary care doctor.

• Adialante: Cancer screening without barriers.

• Lumius: Fast, smart, accessible 3D ultrasound for everyone.

Defense tech is fully back

For years, building weapons was off-limits for Silicon Valley founders. That taboo has collapsed. Examples include:

• Tenet Industries: Low-cost, mass-produced strike drones.

• Maquoketa Research: The intelligence layer for one-way attack drones.

• AICE Power: Submarine drones for defense.

• Arlo Industries: Passive aerial sensing mesh to track drones and missiles.

The hiring stack flips — agents that hire, and get hired

Recruiting is being rebuilt by AI — and in the batch’s strangest twist, the agents are now the ones doing the hiring. Examples include:

• Asendia AI: AI Recruiters for staffing agencies and enterprise.

• Prism: AI-native recruiting agency.

• Standout: Agentic hiring marketplace.

• Ontora: AI agents that interview every employee to map how work gets done.

• RentAHuman: Marketplace for AI agents to hire humans.

Wall Street in a box — autonomous capital markets

The ~$30K-a-year Bloomberg terminal, the analyst and the trader — collapsed into a single agent. One founder even pitched a hedge fund where the AI makes every trade. Examples include:

• Standard Signal: Hedge fund where AI researches and executes every trade.

• Cohesion: Your public equities agentic teammate.

• WithAI: Custom command centers for hedge funds.

• Wealor: AI-native platform for wealth managers.

Meet the Spring ‘26 Batch

With a lot of eyes on YC companies, we wanted to showcase them through a wider infographic to help you navigate the areas that most interest you.

So, let’s dive in!

Meet the 190+ startups from YC’s latest batch who are building across the following categories:

• B2B startups (110+)

• Industrials (20+)

• FinTech (15+)

• Consumer (10+)

• Healthcare (15+)

• Real Estate & Construction (3)

and more…

Explore all 190+ startups in the batch.

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You can discover the batch in full on our interactive market map which includes

• Information about each company.

• Select startups by YC partner

• *Insights on each startup, including the trends shaping the category they’re building in.

Explore all 190+ startups in the batch.

Discover previous batches

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Hey readers!

Welcome back to your regular tech digest — a quick snapshot of the most important tech news from the past few weeks.

This edition breaks things down into:

• 🗝️ Key trends: AI Micro-Dramas

• 🔍 Top tech news

• 💰 Startup funding highlights

• 👀 New VC funds

• 🤝 Acquisitions

• 🎤 Must-watch interviews

and more… let’s dive in.

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🗝️ Key trends: AI Micro-Dramas

There’s been a frenzy on X this past week around AI micro-dramas — short-form, AI-generated stories built purely for entertainment. These dramas are already massive in China and are now gaining traction in Western markets.

One viral example this week was a post about Dario Amodei, co-founder of Anthropic, developing feelings for someone he meets at Stanford. It’s already pulled in millions of views.

If this trend continues, it won’t replace Netflix or creators — it’ll simply become another layer of entertainment we consume.

Watch the Anthropic drama and join the discussion on the latest trend.

🔍 Top tech news

Layoffs are happening rapidly! Meta just laid off 8,000 employees, Wix, ClickUp, and Cloudflare are also announcing major layoffs. Additional layoffs come from the likes of Webflow, Groupon, Intuit, Cisco, and ZoomInfo — all of which have taken place in the past few weeks.

In other news:

• Anthropic raised $65B in Series H funding at a $965B post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia ahead of its IPO.

• SpaceX is due to go public in the coming weeks!

• South Korean chip giant, SK Hynix joined the $1 trillion market cap club.

• Cognition raised $1B at a $26B valuation.

• Oura unveiled its Ring 5 with a thinner, lighter design starting at $399.

• Ferrari launched its first EV.

💰 Startup funding highlights

• Insurance startup Corgi raised another $106M at a $2.6B valuation since announcing their last round three weeks ago.

• Glean surpassed $300M ARR, just five months after crossing $200M and growing ~3x over the past 15 months.

• Amazon fulfillment competitor Stord raised $250M at a $3B valuation.

• Triomics raised $22M to bring oncology-specific AI to cancer centers.

• Stilta raised $10.5M from a16z and YC to help companies rediscover the patents they forgot they had.

• Marketing operating system Nectar Social raised $30M Series A led by Menlo Ventures.

• Health companion Lucis raised $20M Series A led by General Catalyst.

• Legal AI startup Lexroom raised $50M Series B led by Left Lane Capital.

• Upskilling talent platform Multiverse, founded by Euan Blair, raised $70M Series E.

👀 New VC funds

• Convective Capital raised an $85M fund to build disaster resilience

• Meridian Ventures launched a $35M fund with a focus on MBA-deferred founders

• A*, founded by Eventbrite founder Kevin Hartz, just closed its third fund with $450M.

• European fund byFounders raised an oversubscribed €130m+ Fund III.

🤝 Acquisitions

• Lyft to acquire UK-based black cab app Gett.

• Anthropic acquired Stainless.

• Mistral acquired Emmi AI.

• Asana acquired StackAI.

🎤 Must-watch interviews

Maria Sharapova - Tennis Icon: From 800 matches, 36 singles titles, and 5 Grand Slams to entrepreneur, investor, and now media creator.

Watch the episode in full now.

Watch or listen now on… YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.

• Will AI Models Ever Compensate Creators? | Tony Stubblebine

• No More Traditional School Teachers | Joleen Liang

• Yahoo CEO Jim Lanzone on the company’s turnaround story.

• Dan Shipper on why traditional coding workflows are breaking.

• Colin Angle on the $1.7B founder failure story.

• David Haber (a16z) on the future of venture capital.

• Emad Mostaque on AI systems replacing personal productivity.

• Anatoly Yakovenko on how Solana survived early collapse.

• Anish Acharya on the realities of building in the AI era.

Watch and subscribe now!

🗓️ Previous insights

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Watch or listen now on… YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Maria Sharapova is one of the greatest sporting icons of our time, having played over 800 matches, won 36 singles titles, and claimed 5 Grand Slams. Since retiring from the sport, she has become an entrepreneur, investor, and more recently, the host of her podcast Pretty Tough.

In this episode, we explore what it takes to reach the top of your game in sport and why athletes should always be planning for their second act after retirement. We discuss some of Maria’s most iconic championship moments and which fellow tennis icon she has the most respect for.

We also explore NEW MEDIA — the latest buzzy tech trend changing how we consume news and information, and who we get it from. Reflecting on our thoughts about the new media landscape, we discuss the impact of AI, how to become a great storyteller, and why creators could become the next generation of reporters at sporting press conferences.

This was a very special episode, enjoy!

Timestamps

(0:00) Intro
(3:19) Maria's Proudest Moment
(4:45) Preparing for a Match
(10:34) How to Find Balance
(12:18) The Business of Sport
(14:16) Having Dad as a Coach
(17:32) Preparing for Retirement
(20:40) How to Reinvent Yourself
(25:40) New Media: Maria's New Podcast
(35:30) Maria's Take on AI
(39:55) Is Legacy Media Fading?
(44:15) Reflecting on Maria's Career
(48:15) Our Pretty Tough Questions

Links

Subscribe to Pretty Tough (https://www.youtube.com/@mariasharapova)

Subscribe to NEW ECONOMIES (https://www.youtube.com/@NEWECONOMIESPOD)

Follow Maria on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/mariasharapova/)

Follow Maria on X (https://x.com/MariaSharapova)

Follow Ollie on X (https://x.com/ollieforsyth)

Recently published editions relevant to new media

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There’s a new shift quietly reshaping Silicon Valley — and suddenly, everyone is paying attention.

It’s called new media.

As legacy media continues to decline, more people are turning to trusted creators for news and insights. What once felt niche is quickly becoming mainstream, with hundreds of independent creators already shaping the next era of media.

A few weeks ago, we published The New Media Landscape, mapping the creators and channels reshaping how people consume information online.

The response made one thing clear: audiences are increasingly moving away from traditional media brands and toward independent creators.

The shift is already starting to show up in the data. According to recent traffic rankings, Substack ranked among the top 10 most visited news and media platforms in April, ahead of NBC.

If the term “new media” is new to you, it’s not actually a new concept. Some would say it’s simply the latest term for the creator economy — and that’s probably the most accurate way to think about it. However, following OpenAI’s recent acquisition of the technology show TBPN, the category is clearly having a moment as seen in our viral post.

So why is new media having so much momentum right now? There are a few reasons:

• AI slop is everywhere. In a recent podcast episode with Medium CEO, Tony Stubblebine, we discussed what AI-generated content actually means for the future of the internet. Will it eventually fade out? Everyone will have their own opinion, but the new media channels that survive will likely be the ones focused on taste: content that is either timely or timeless. We may also see a trend where timeless content goes private as we discussed in the episode.

• Our attention spans are becoming shorter, faster than ever, forcing platforms to constantly reinvent how they capture — and keep — people’s attention. Some of us rely on AI models for answers, while others increasingly turn to independent creators they trust.

• Tech companies are no longer using traditional Google and social ads as much as they don’t move the needle enough anymore. Instead, they are partnering with creators to better position them as market leaders.

Discover the latest new media channels across technology and where this category is heading.

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The NEW MEDIA Tools Landscape

Following the release of The NEW MEDIA Landscape, today we’re publishing the tooling landscape: the platforms helping new media creators do what they do best — creating content and building their businesses.

To make the map easier to navigate, we’ve categorized the tools into the following areas:

• Ads: Design ads within a few clicks.

• AI / Agentic Video: Edit and create videos with AI.

• AI Content Detection: Identify whether content has been AI-generated.

• AI Studios: Studios creating videos and films using AI.

• Build AI Agents: Build and deploy AI agents.

• Build Apps & Websites: Create apps and websites within minutes.

• Cited by AI Models: Help brands and creators get cited by AI models.

• Clipping: Tools for clipping and repurposing content.

• Community: Platforms for building communities.

• CRM: Manage contacts and relationships in one place.

• Design: Create graphics and visual assets.

• Dubbing: Translate content into multiple languages.

• Editing: Edit videos, photos and clips.

• Engage with Fans: Find new ways to connect with audiences.

• Fans Supporting Creators: Monetize through memberships, tipping and one-off events.

• Financing: Banking and fundraising.

• Grow on YouTube: Tools designed to help creators grow on YouTube.

• Legal: Manage contracts and legal workflows.

• Link In Bio: Keep all your links in one place.

• Live Streaming: Stream across multiple platforms.

• Music: Royalty-free music for content creators.

• Newsletters: Platforms for publishing written content.

• Podcasting: Tools built for podcasters.

• Presentations: Create presentations using AI.

• Productivity: Tools designed to improve workflows and efficiency.

• Research: AI models and tools that support research.

• Social Platforms: The social platforms we use daily.

• Talent: Hire creators and talent.

Discover the tools in full here.

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Hey listeners,

If you work in tech, you’ve probably heard of Eric Hippeau, co-founder of Lerer Hippeau Ventures, one of the most prominent venture firms focused on the NYC startup ecosystem. With decades of experience in venture capital, Eric joins us to help unpack where we are in the new AI era, and where things may be headed next.

Throughout this episode, we discuss what the current state of AI means for startup valuations, how many $10B+ companies this wave could create, what it really means to take a company public and whether it’s still the right path for founders, and how venture firms can continue to stay relevant in a rapidly changing landscape. Finally, as the former CEO of The Huffington Post - one of the most influential digital media publications of its time - Eric shares his words of wisdom on the future of news, creators, and how we consume information online.

In this episode, we cover:

How Eric thinks about physical AI: Why the best startups won’t just be thin wrappers around existing models.

Why today’s startup market feels disconnected: With mega-funds, inflated seed rounds, and fewer realistic paths to liquidity.

What happened to journalism online: From building The Huffington Post to navigating today’s fragmented media environment. How is the new media landscape being shaped?

Venture capital is changing: Why solo GPs may struggle to compete against larger firms over the next decade.

Could AI reshape healthcare: Especially across diagnostics, primary care, and lowering the cost of basic medical services.

Anthropic tools like Claude are changing internal workflows: Why some firms are rebuilding around AI from the ground up.

AR glasses may deserve another look: Why lightweight wearables could succeed where bulky headsets failed.

The best founders treat startups like a marathon: How long-term thinking helps companies survive difficult markets and failed bets.

Watch or listen now on… YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify

Chapters in this episode:

(0:00) Why the Tech Market Feels Broken Right Now
(4:45) The Biggest Tech Trends Everyone’s Watching
(10:30) The New North Star for Startups
(14:20) The Hidden Cost of Overvalued Startups
(21:00) Why Companies Still Go Public
(24:00) Why AI Could Create Massive New Wealth
(26:40) How VCs Are Fighting to Stay Relevant
(32:20) The Biggest Mistakes Solo GPs Make
(33:56) How New Media Changed Everything
(43:30) Building The Huffington Post
(49:10) Can Creators Build Billion-Dollar Companies?
(53:00) Rapid Fire Questions

Stay in touch

Follow Eric on X (https://x.com/erichippeau)

Visit Lerer Hippeau (https://lererhippeau.com)

Follow Ollie on X (https://x.com/ollieforsyth)

If you enjoyed this episode, help sustain our work by clicking ❤️ and 🔄 at the top of this post.