A Newcomer Baby & Reflections on Newcomer's Five Year Anniversary

Introducing Esther Emilia Newcomer

This newsletter is 5 years old. My daughter is 29 days old.

My desire to produce profound reflections on what I’ve learned from 5 years building this small-but-mighty tech media empire is colliding with sleep deprivation from taking care of a sub-1-month-old.

• One life milestone — going independent and then building a well-respected bootstrapped multimillion-dollar revenue Silicon Valley-oriented media and events business — has reached a moment worthy of reflection.

• The other life moment is at its most frantic, most novel, and — if you’ll indulge me — its cutest.

Before I dig into what’s going on at Newcomer these days, let’s talk about the real news item here:

My wife, Sara Joe Wolansky, and I couldn’t be prouder to introduce you to Esther Emilia Newcomer, born at Mount Sinai Hospital on Oct. 1 at 8 pounds 15 ounces.

Esther Emilia Newcomer at 2 weeks | Photos by Jolene Cody

This is our first baby, but my sense is that on the scale of infants she’s pretty pleasant to be around. We are finding her absolutely adorable. I’m writing some of this with her half asleep on my chest.

Ezzy has been snuggled up in a Kleiner Perkins blanket, nuzzled next to an Index Ventures bunny and an M13 sloth, while staring off into the distance as her mom and I read books from Root Ventures and Graham & Walker. (Shernaz, we’ll dress her up soon.)

We’ve been extremely fortunate to have a lot of help and support. On the home front, grandmothers have set up camp to help out for days and weeks. We’ve had a grandfather hard at work building furniture and another one visit from Macon, Georgia. A night nanny is helping to make these Brooklyn evenings more manageable.

It’s the most cliché thing in the world — but it really does take a village.

And these days, it takes a village here at Newcomer, too. I’ve been mostly offline on paternity leave for the past four weeks. Hopefully you haven’t missed me too much — ideally, you didn’t notice my absence at all. We’ve published exclusive reporting on Andreessen Horowitz’s returns, dissected AI’s impact on software-as-a-service and in Hollywood, kept you apprised of the top deals and happenings in Silicon Valley every Friday, all while publishing a weekly podcast. Jonathan Weber, our editor-at-large, has been overseeing stories filed by staff reporter Madeline Renbarger and our senior correspondent Tom Dotan.

Meanwhile, thanks to the hard work from our business lead Riley Konsella — along with our fantastic events contractors and help from co-host Volley — we’ve been gearing up for the best Cerebral Valley AI Summit yet.

Personally and professionally, my wife and I are navigating a perfect storm. Cerebral Valley is Nov. 12 in San Francisco and then the next day, Sara Joe has her already sold-out premiere of her first documentary feature, “The Big Cheese,” at DOC NYC. I’ll take a red-eye back to New York in time to be there. (You can buy tickets for a digital screening or the matinee here.) Major career milestones are colliding with an all-consuming bundle of needs.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Five Years at Newcomer

Okay, enough baby talk. Back to the newsletter business.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on what we’re doing right, what we’re doing wrong, the state of tech media, my conflicts of interest, our financials, and much more. I’m overdue for some navel-gazing in the newsletter so indulge me (or don’t).

In 2020 in the heart of the pandemic, I quit my job as a technology reporter at Bloomberg to start this newsletter. I called it Newcomer and gave it the tagline, “Your Seat at the Cap Table.”

We’ve done a good job of sticking to what I promised, which included:

• an assumed baseline of industry knowledge

• a presumption that Silicon Valley’s denizens are human beings

• a belief that venture investing information should be brought out into the open

• people saying what they actually believe

• me saying what I actually believe

In the past six months, we have criticized Benchmark even though they are a firm I respect and admire, revealed Andreessen Horowitz’s returns, and published an essay criticizing a Sequoia partner. At the same time, this is clearly a newsletter that believes in startups and venture capital, chronicling the key trends and buzzy deals. We write stories about big venture exits and celebrate up-and-coming startups at our events.

Honestly, I don’t aspire to be optimistic or pessimistic. I want to have a good mix of dispositions — sometimes celebratory and sometimes chastising. Right now, I think the Silicon Valley media mix is getting too laudatory. If you never say anything critical, your compliments are pretty empty. Especially as we enter pretty frothy territory in AI, we have a glut of marketing-as-media publications.

One challenge that you could have seen coming a mile away for Newcomer is going from “me” to “we.” I promised from the very beginning “me saying what I actually believe.”

How do you do that when other people are writing under your last name and while readers still expect to hear from me personally?

Broadly, I’ve tried to take real ownership over the things we publish — even when I’m not meddling in the copy and people are writing under their own bylines. But we are still working through the answer.

I am jealous of Bari Weiss at The Free Press who has been able to stake out a lucrative and identifiable ideological disposition while not necessarily staking her personal reputation on every piece The Free Press writes. I don’t think my general pro-startup, anti-corruption, pro-democracy, comfortably elite, moderate liberal political lens has the same ideological spice (though in an era of tech subservience to Trump I know some readers appreciate our moments of what-feels-like-it-should-be-obvious moral clarity).

I think we are delivering on being “insiders” better than some buzzier media properties. By sticking to startups and venture capital — an industry in which I’m very connected and knowledgeable — I can legitimately claim to be an insider myself and to write for people who get it.

One of our biggest problems continues to be building awareness among non-startup/VC elites that this is perhaps the key publication that Silicon Valley elites are paying attention to. That’s one of the reasons we’re putting some energy into building out a YouTube channel to bring our reporting to a broader audience.

Of course, one thing I did not anticipate when I launched during a pandemic lockdown period was that in-person events would become the core revenue and profit driver for our business. This year, we will have hosted four marquee invite-only events: Breaking the Bank, Deus Ex Medicina, Cerebral Valley London, and the upcoming Cerebral Valley AI Summit. We’re hosting sponsored dinners around all of our events — so a one-day event becomes a rallying cry for other intimate gatherings. We are attracting top speakers, sponsors, and attendees. Uber and Figma’s CEOs made the trek to London to speak at our summit there, for instance.

While the newsletter has been an amazing platform to make sure the events are a thing and that what happens there reaches a broader audience, we also do a ton of work hand-inviting people and leveraging my network to make sure that the best startup founders are at our events.

I’ve always run our business pretty transparently. This year, Newcomer will generate more than $3 million in revenue, up meaningfully from last year. Our profit margins fell, however, as we developed new event brands. We’ll likely generate about $1 million in profit this year. We have more than 100,000 free subscribers and more than 2,700 paid subscribers. We publish on Substack and are generally happy with the platform.

We have never raised outside money. In fact, I haven’t really “funded” Newcomer either. I used the money I made from paid subscribers, kept some of it in the bank, and then over time spent that money to expand the team. We have always been profitable.

I’m proud to say that my first and second hire — Riley and then Madeline — are both still at Newcomer and thriving. Meanwhile, I defy anyone who tells you not to work with your friends. Tom joined as a weekly contributor this year after leaving the Wall Street Journal and Jonathan, whom I’ve known since working together at The Information, has been an integral part of the team. And Cerebral Valley wouldn’t be possible without the support from Max Child and James Wilsterman, the co-founders of Volley, who are two of my best friends. They helped to cajole me to start this newsletter and then to create the first Cerebral Valley AI Summit from their office.

At Newcomer, we want to hire some great people to grow our business.

We are on the hunt for someone who can serve as a sort of chief revenue officer, schmoozing with prospective sponsors, launching corporate subscriptions, and generally making the most of all the relationships and business opportunities that we have. And/or we could use someone more junior on the event operations side, learning my network and helping us to book speakers, satisfy sponsors, and get great attendees to our events. (If you’re interested in working with us, reach out to newcomer@newcomer.co.)

We’re happy to build a custom job for the right candidate.

We want people who are really passionate about tech, media, and what we’re building. We want someone who sees the rise of influencer brands and gets the opportunity here.

I think we still have a lot of tailwinds behind us:

1. Artificial intelligence is carrying the economy and we host the top insider startup AI events. Even if it’s a bubble, where else would you want to be building right now?

2. Brands are slowly processing that influencers like Joe Rogan are more powerful than most mainstream media outlets. That brand awareness is trickling down to smaller-scale influencer and niche media businesses like ours.

3. We have way more ideas and relationships than we know what to do with. There are so many events that we could put on, tech products we want to experiment with, partnerships we could try, and revenue streams that we could explore — we just don’t have the bandwidth to implement them all right now.

I worry a little bit about how to ensure that we don’t get lumped in with traditional media again as that world starts to react to the more personality-driven and niche-oriented world of influencer media. And on the other end of the spectrum, as individual journalists continue to go out on their own, how can I better remind people that we have a serious events business, a substantial newsletter following, a real team, and stories that stand out?

One thing I have been meaning to talk about at some point in the newsletter is conflicts of interest. I haven’t felt too worried given we proudly brag about our sponsors for our events in the newsletter. Companies like Oracle and Samsung have been anchor sponsors. This year, venture firms like Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, and Oak HC/FT have played a big role, hosting exclusive dinners with us and sponsoring our events. My hope is that we host dinners with so many venture funds that people can credibly believe that we are not so indebted to any particular firm. We’ve had Greylock, Sapphire Ventures, Felicis, Bain Capital Ventures, and many more sponsor our events. We’ve had major investor speakers from firms who did not sponsor. We host an annual dinner with top marketing and communications leaders from across Silicon Valley’s top venture capital firms. We’re eager to work with everyone while making sure the newsletter remains honest and direct.

There will always be a juggling act between being an insider and being independent.

Unlike some journalists, I am proud to say that I’m very involved in the business side of the house. I try not to get involved in haggling over the money — but that’s more a negotiating posture than a matter of principle. At Newcomer, we are hardcore capitalists, which amusingly, I think our customers mostly enjoy; we are happy to ask sponsors to pay us what we’re worth.

While we’re making disclosures, I have also invested in a couple startups. I put money into my friend Bobby Samuels’ startup Protege and my friend Thomas Smyth’s startup Concourse. I’m also an inconsequential and late-stage investor in Substack and an investor in Volley. I’m not actively pursuing investments at the moment (though if we’d just invested in all the startups at the first Cerebral Valley, we would have an amazing portfolio). Mostly, I’m interested in supporting my friends and otherwise focused on building my own business.

There’s a certain irony that my media class peers tend to be more worried about conflicts while many of my actual readers seem happier the more embedded I am in the industry.

There’s so much exciting work ahead of us. We’re going to develop our existing summits and build new ones, grow the newsletter and YouTube channel, and continue to find new ways to serve Silicon Valley insiders.

I’m thrilled to do it with Esther in one arm.

The New York Times has been a very successful family business. I have no idea what Ezzy’s passions will be, but I’ll do my part to make sure Newcomer is thriving should she ever decide she wants to pick up the mantle.