In the Know with Amol Sarva

Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now. Howard Morgan started as an engineer and professor in the early computing days, and ended up building three (four? five?) huge and import investment groups. Renaissance... Idealab... and listen for more on the early computing gods through to Bitcoin and AI. 🎙️ Episode Chapters — Howard Morgan Computers Before PCs, Venture Before “Venture,” and the Hidden Origins of Quant Finance SECTION I — The Long Arc: From Mainframes to the Internet 00:00 – Recording everything Louis Armstrong’s house in Queens, tape recorders running 24/7, and the idea that capturing everything matters—an unexpected entry point into a life spent documenting and building the future.  02:00 – Why keep doing this? Why founders and investors in their 70s, 80s, and 90s keep starting new firms: curiosity, youth by proximity, and the refusal to stop building.  04:00 – 1995 is arbitrary (but useful) Why the mid-1990s are a convenient marker for New York tech—even though the real story starts decades earlier.  06:30 – Browsers before browsers Early web commercialization: Mosaic, Spyglass, Quarterdeck, browser history, and the moment when the web quietly crossed from research to product.  SECTION II — Becoming a Computer Scientist (1960s–1970s) 07:30 – City College, 1962 Discovering computers via a desk-sized machine with punch tape—and deciding, very early, to go all-in.  09:00 – Dick Hamming’s intervention A Bell Labs legend redirects a physics student toward computers, operations research, and what would become modern computing.  10:30 – Speedrunning academia Three years of high school, three years of college, three years to a PhD—becoming the youngest assistant professor at Cornell.  11:30 – The first computer-printed PhD thesis Punch cards, justified text, and convincing the university that this was the future.  12:30 – Making computers less stupid Early spell-checking, syntax correction, semantic error handling—and the belief that computers should fix mistakes, not punish users.  SECTION III — The Office of the Future (Before It Was Obvious) 14:00 – Databases, UX, and email (1970s) Large databases measured by the ton, early email, and building user-friendly systems long before “UX” was a term.  16:00 – Windows before Windows Multi-window systems, color vs. black-and-white debates with Alan Kay, and building what Xerox PARC would later popularize.  18:00 – Personal computers as an experiment DARPA hands out minicomputers to see what researchers will do—and accidentally invents networked personal computing.  19:00 – The wine list incident Creating one of the earliest online interest groups—and being told to shut it down before Congress notices.  SECTION IV — From Research to Venture (Late 1970s–1980s) 21:00 – First taste of company-building Commercializing Unix, meeting Jim Simons, and realizing that investing—not academia—might be the real lever.  23:00 – Jim Simons before Renaissance How a math professor accumulates capital, discovers computing’s power in markets, and dreams of a money-making machine.  25:00 – Founding Renaissance (1982) Splitting time between quant trading and venture investing—before either category really existed.  27:00 – Early deep tech investing Encryption hardware, LCD panels, Unix tools, QA software—companies that look like modern “deep tech” decades early.  SECTION V — Quant Changes Everything 31:00 – The great split Venture returns at ~25% IRR, quant at ~38%—and the decision to spin venture out of Renaissance.  33:00 – Medallion Fund mythology Capacity limits, extreme fees, internal-only capital, and quietly becoming the most successful hedge fund in history.  35:00 – The quant ecosystem forms

Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now. Alan Patricof's been at it since he graduated from Columbia Business School just a couple years apart from Warren Buffett. And you might as well think of him in that same legend league, in Alan's case for Venture Capital. We start from the very early days and go right through today. 🎙️ Episode Chapters — Alan Patricof Inventing Venture Capital in New York, Then Walking Away (Repeatedly) SECTION I — The Core Interview: A 70-Year View of Venture 00:00 – A living timeline Setting the frame: Alan Patricof at 91, still working, still curious—why this is less an interview than an oral history of American venture capital.  03:00 – Pounding the pavement (1950s Wall Street) No recruiters, no security desks: walking every building on Wall Street, floor by floor, asking for a job. How finance careers started before finance careers existed.  05:30 – Learning investing the slow way Investment counseling, portfolio construction, and why balanced, family-office style investing shaped everything that came later.  07:30 – Development capital before “venture” Real estate, bridges, electronics, finance companies—proto-venture investing before the word venture capital meant anything.  10:30 – Family offices and private deals Discovering the overlooked power of private company investing while everyone else focused on public stocks—and why this felt more human.  13:00 – Becoming a board member at 34 New York Magazine, Datascope, Lin Broadcasting: early board roles, founder relationships, and the addictive pull of building instead of trading.  15:30 – What separates great founders The pivot instinct: knowing when to abandon the original market and redirect a product without abandoning conviction.  18:00 – “You invest in the jockey” Why founder psychology matters more than ideas, and why you can’t actually diagnose this until you’re already in business together.  SECTION II — Inventing Venture Capital (1968–1980s) 20:00 – Starting Patricof & Co. Nine family offices, a tiny first fund, and the realization that venture could be a service business as much as a capital business.  22:00 – Warburg, Pincus, and the early peers The handful of firms inventing venture in parallel—and how indistinct the lines were between VC, merchant banking, and private equity.  24:00 – Surviving the 1970s Why venture almost died: inflation, stagnation, and the need to do M&A work just to keep the lights on.  26:00 – Going international before it was fashionable London, Paris, New York—building venture infrastructure in Europe when the concept barely translated (literally “capital risk”).  27:30 – The birth of Apax Unifying global activities under one name and accidentally creating one of the world’s largest private equity platforms.  SECTION III — Iconic Deals Before Tech Was “Tech” 29:00 – Apple, almost casually A phone call, a small allocation, a $315k check—and a reminder that early venture often felt mundane in the moment.  31:30 – Why nobody held forever Ten-year funds, capital recycling, and why paper fortunes usually stayed theoretical.  33:00 – Beating the bushes for deals Fifteen deals a year, maybe one investment—finding companies meant showing up physically, not scrolling inboxes.  35:00 – Office Depot and firm-building Delegation, partnership, and why building institutions matters more than personal deal mythology.  37:00 – AOL’s forgotten origin Online games, modems, bankruptcy, and the pivot from play to communication that reshaped the internet.  40:00 – Doing the messy work Hands-on restructuring, capital engineering, and why early venture often looked more like salvage than storytelling.  SECTION IV — Walking Away (an

Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now. Dennis Crowley tells us how he got to New York and the early internet culture in the media/Wall Street world: and how it all led to Foursquare -- the art of the game 🎙️ Episode Chapters — Dennis Crowley From Punk Zines to Foursquare: How New York Taught the Internet to Find Itself SECTION I — The Core Interview: Growing Up Inside the Internet 00:00 – Setting the frame: OG New York tech Why Dennis Crowley belongs in the canon of New York founders, and why 1995 feels like a plausible “Year Zero” for the consumer internet. 03:00 – Suburban modems and early online culture Dial-up life, BBS culture, AOL, Prodigy, and discovering the thrill of connecting machines to people before the web had pictures. 05:30 – Punk zines, skating, and DIY publishing Photocopied fanzines about video games and skate culture; disposable cameras as “screenshots”; learning layout, editing, and distribution before the word “creator economy” existed. 09:00 – Music as an operating system Native Tongues hip-hop, skating culture, and the aesthetics of the early ’90s shaping taste, rhythm, and community instincts. 11:30 – Syracuse and discovering the graphical web First Ethernet connections, Mosaic, Marc Andreessen in the newspaper, and realizing the web could become a mass medium. 13:30 – Early digital storytelling Scanning photos, building homepages, blink tags, animated GIFs, and using the web as a proto-blog long before social media had a name. 15:00 – Advertising school meets the internet Majoring in advertising, minor in information studies, and becoming the “internet kid” inside traditional agencies. 16:30 – Jupiter Media and the dot-com boom Moving to New York in 1998 as a research associate, learning how the internet economy actually worked, and living inside nonstop startup parties. 20:00 – Studying the plumbing of the web Infrastructure research: ecommerce systems, personalization engines, early customer-service analytics, and measuring how badly websites handled users. 23:00 – The crash arrives Dot-com collapse, layoffs, evaporating optimism, and the sense that the entire New York tech experiment might be over. SECTION II — Dodgeball: Inventing Location Before Smartphones 25:00 – Discovering Indigo and city software Falling in love with Palm Pilots, mobile city guides, and the idea that cities deserved real-time digital maps. 26:30 – Teaching himself to code “Learn to code in 30 days” books, hacking together early prototypes, and turning curiosity into functioning software. 28:00 – Layoffs, eviction, and personal collapse Job loss, housing instability, breakups — and how downturns compress life into creative pressure cookers. 29:00 – Montauk, Harry Potter, and the Marauder’s Map The idea spark: phones as real-time maps of where friends are, long before GPS or push notifications were normal. 30:30 – Building primitive location sharing Email hacks instead of SMS, self-reported locations, and inventing “check-ins” without calling them that. 31:30 – 9/11 and leaving the city Being in the West Village on September 11th, the emotional shock, and temporarily abandoning New York. 33:00 – Snowboarding exile and reflection Retreating to New Hampshire, teaching snowboarding, video games as therapy, and deciding what comes next. 35:00 – NYU ITP: art school for the internet Returning to New York through NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program — a collision of artists, hackers, designers, and urban technologists.  38:00 – Dodgeball reborn at ITP Partnering with Alex Rainert, remixing Friendster ideas into mobile social networking, and making phones socially alive. 41:00 – The Lower East Side as a living network Bars as incubators, bloggers as amplifiers, Dodgeball driving physical crowds in real time — a proto-network

Welcome to my series on OG NY Tech -- celebrating 30 years of NY tech ecosystem, from 1995 to now. Owen Davis tells us how advertising powered early NYC tech and the big transition post-dot-com-crash to both consumer and enterprise tech superstars from New York.

Pablos built one of the first decentralized money networks, the first experimental Blue Origin rockets, one of the first handheld computers, invented 1000s of new patents with Nathan Myhrvold, and most recently launched a deeptech venture firm called Deep Future. And now, on July 12, expect his book: "Deep Future". -- Pablos Holman and Amol on Deep Future Amol Sarva: [00:00:00] On today's episode, I'm excited to have my pal, Pablo Coleman from the future. Are we rolling? We are rolling. Right on. Bob, are we rolling? Bob? And we're gonna talk about, I don't know I think we should talk about a little bit of origin story before we get to the fund and the new book that's coming out. And I'm excited to be the first interviewer Yeah. That you've chosen to speak to  Pablos Holman: about your freshly. Finalized manuscript. We're gonna turn the tables. I'm gonna have you on my podcast sometime too. Yeah, that'd be great. Apparently you have, we should  Amol Sarva: have done right now, apparently you have hundreds  Pablos Holman: of listeners, I dunno, hundreds or thousands here. Here. Not hundreds of thousands  Amol Sarva: Here on this podcast we have the two of us who will listen to it be recorded. Hey, I'm  Pablos Holman: cool with that. I once had a radio show in Alaska and we had a full studio and we broadcast. But we had no antenna. The station had no antenna, but we had 24 hour a day broadcasting. So imagine like how esoteric and weird the DJs for a radio station are that have no listeners. Yeah. Like we had the best [00:01:00] parties.  Amol Sarva: Yeah. Wow. Then I guess let us begin then with the origin stories. Cool. You were born in Alaska? Apparently. I was born in  Pablos Holman: Alaska. Yeah. It's hard to find an Alaskan who's escaped from Alaska, but I'm one of 'em, I've literally never met anyone who's from Alaska. I know. Yeah. They make it about as far as Seattle and then they really feel like they've traveled and then they usually go back to Alaska. Very few Alaskans make it this far. So you made it to the great capital of Seattle across the I left Alaska, I went to Silicon Valley and then ended up, yeah, after the.com collapse, I retreated to Seattle. And but that was good. And Seattle was really good for a long time. Now I'm over it.  Amol Sarva: I, part of part of what's really cool about that experience, or at least that I quite admire, is you got to work with some of the real. Intellectual rock stars of the tech world. Certainly yeah, in the, I guess it would've been the two thousands, roughly. Yeah.  Pablos Holman: Yeah. After Silicon Valley I went to work I went to Seattle and I started Blue Origin or helped start Blue Origin with Jeff Bezos. Yeah. [00:02:00] And so that was great for me and an inflection point where I took all of the experience of bringing computer technology to life and trying to use the computers to bring other technologies to life. And so that's what. What I think of as deep tech.  Amol Sa

Jim, founder of Juvenescence, old China and Russia hand, and investor in our fund LifeX sends me an email every morning with lots of attachments that he read that morning. Here's what he's been thinking about the last month.

I gave a talk in Stockholm last year, that I asked these robots to discuss. Hope you enjoy it. This doesn't look LIKE me but it does sort of resemble what I could possibly look like. It was the first draft. Some better prompting got us to the final image.

We analyzed the 1,000s of companies we're watching and investing in at LifeX. We looked at every update email from every CEO and every conversation notes from every team member. And we made hits outlook for the year ahead, automagically. (Excuse robo-typos.) Enjoy!

We synthesized the dozens of outlook reports from Silicon Valley observers of techbio for AI x Health startups and trends. Listen in to Amolbot (an automated Amol) and co-hosts.

The journey from food through digestion to your liver to energy stores and metabolizing work is the obsession of sports science - and hugely relevant to metabolic health overall. Let's get this perspective from research professor Derek Huffman at Einstein Medicine in New York. Dive into metabolic health!

Let's understand an overlooked dimension of the weight loss revolution underway -- the microbes in the digestive system themselves, potentially where GLP-1s come from in the first place. Duke's gut biome expert Maya Kaelberer gives us a guide. Metabolic Health is the biggest medical breakthrough of the moment. Dive in!

Metabolic Health is the biggest medical breakthrough of the moment Mapping all the ways the GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic do and might work means we need to understand the biome and the efficacy of surgical interventions. We talk to Professor Randy Seeley who directs University of Michigan's Nutrition Obesity Research Center