Podcasts about Silicon Valley, California

The dominant sound on the Silicon Valley feed is money explaining itself. Adeo Ressi, on Sand Hill Road, says his accelerator VC Lab launches between 60 and 70 percent of all new venture capital firms in the world, and the interviewer says he double-checked the figure before recording. Jack Leeney, on the same show, argues that a 20 percent first-day IPO drop can still work out for existing shareholders. Venture capital and the founders who raise it are the largest subject here, and nearly everything else -- the oral histories, the critics, the true-crime serials -- is about that money too. The Valley as a set of towns is largely absent; the shows treat Silicon Valley as an industry, a founding myth and a power to be watched.

What Silicon Valley is

Silicon Valley is the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area in California: San Jose, the largest city, with Palo Alto, Mountain View, Cupertino, Sunnyvale and the towns between. The name dates from the semiconductor companies that clustered there in the mid-twentieth century; it now covers the whole apparatus of technology firms, venture funds and research around Stanford, and serves worldwide as shorthand for the American tech industry.

How the money moves

Sand Hill Road and Something Ventured -- Silicon Valley Podcast are both interview shows filed under Business & Finance. Sand Hill Road stays close to the mechanics, Ressi comparing VC Lab to Y Combinator and quoting a 6 percent unicorn creation rate for YC. Something Ventured, with Kent Lindstrom asking, ranges wider, from a billionaires tax and California to a fund betting on teenagers over Ivy Leaguers. Its clips have Hadley Harris building Eniac Ventures' first fund with $1.6 million before TapCommerce sold to Twitter for about $100 million, and Lee Edwards on turning the productivity tools he built around his ADHD into an advantage in venture capital.

The founder's side of the table is clearest on Silicon Valley - The Investor's Podcast Network, hosted by Shawn Flynn, whose episodes on this page date from 2020. Elnaz Sarraf of Roybi Robot describes closing a $4.2 million seed round after 500 emails and more than 100 meetings, with no product on the market and her own bank account twice close to zero. Bill Reichert of Garage Ventures complains that venture capital now chases "hot" deals rather than novel technologies; Kelly Coyne of Grit Ventures says pre-seed robotics now needs a working prototype, a pilot and go-to-market traction.

The founding stories, in the founders' voices

The histories are told by the people who were there. On Valley of Genius (Audio), drawn from Adam Fisher's interviews, Biz Stone gives his version of Twitter's start: after Apple bigfooted the podcasting company he and Ev Williams were running, he and Jack Dorsey paired off like third-graders in gym class, Stone pitched picture blogging, and Dorsey had an idea, prompted by his AOL Instant Messenger, that in this telling became a two-week hackathon around SMS status updates. Larry Brilliant recalls Steve Jobs refusing a funding request but offering to help turn his software into a company; Howard Warshaw describes building Atari's E.T. in five weeks to meet Ray Kassar's July 27 deadline.

Stayin' Alive in Tech says its history starts at Noyce and Fairchild Semiconductor, but the clips here are closer to business lessons than to silicon. Tom Peters reaches for football, a coach who went two-and-fourteen while building a culture and won the Super Bowl two years later, and for Vince Lombardi's rule that he did not need to like his players but had to love them; Hewlett Packard, he says, taught him that leading is an intimate act. Heidi Williams argues Flash lost on the iPhone because App Store economics mattered more than technical capability.

The Valley as a power to be watched

The openly critical one is Tech Won't Save Us, with Paris Marx; its titles run from Cybertrucks as a safety disaster to Iran attacking data centres to Elon Musk and Jeffrey Epstein. The Epstein episode's introduction sets up Ed Niedermeyer as someone who knows Tesla's history well enough to read between the lines of the files: it was Epstein who tried to cultivate Musk, partly through Musk's brother, not the reverse. Sam Biddle describes AI being used to hit the gas on killing.

Uncanny Valley | WIRED is a reported show of interviews and newsroom analysis. Kara Swisher describes meeting an AI avatar of herself built from twenty years of interviews; asked how to balance innovation with protecting humanity, she told it we don't, and it agreed that was something to think about. From the episode "Silicon Valley Is Spending Millions to Stop One of Its Own", Alex Borges explains how Palantir's data ontology helped recover $20 billion from banks after the Great Recession.

The Times Tech Podcast keeps Britain in the frame: a brisk two-voice show, one person teeing up a story and the other pushing back. Nick Clegg tells it Britain is a vassal state to American tech and calls billion-dollar investments sheds full of GPUs. Its other clips have a man charged with attempted murder after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco house, and Lei Zhang predicting AI will need a hundred times more energy.

Three serials about what the money does to people

An engineer named James Harper is the subject of Spy Valley: An Engineer's Nuclear Betrayal, from Brazen, whose description calls Silicon Valley an espionage innovator since its inception. The clips are the caper details: Harper strapping $50,000 to each ankle for the flight home from Geneva, and the KGB flying twenty experts overnight to Warsaw to examine his documents.

Cover Story, from New York Magazine, sounds like an investigative conversation shaped into narrative, comfortable admitting confusion and revising as it goes. The season here tracks claims around a venture capitalist and a supposed ex-spy: the reporters recall asking a man named Mike whether he was a sugar daddy or polyamorous, and note the $590,000 he gave one woman before she ghosted him; a real Recon Marine, Frank Gallagher, confirms that a man named Matt never attended a single special forces school.

The Cost of Happiness is the outlier: a formal, measured documentary about Tony Hsieh whose story runs from Zappos to the Downtown Project in Las Vegas and on to a mansion in Park City, Utah. Its narrator lays out the aftermath of his death in short declarative beats: a $523 million estate, no will, contracts on post-it notes, more than $130 million in claims.

Where to start

• For how venture capital works, Sand Hill Road: Adeo Ressi on launching VC firms, then Jack Leeney on IPOs.
• For the origin myths in the founders' own voices, Valley of Genius (Audio): Biz Stone on Twitter.
• For the sceptical view, Tech Won't Save Us on Musk and Epstein, or Uncanny Valley | WIRED for Kara Swisher meeting her avatar.
• For a story to follow across episodes, Spy Valley: An Engineer's Nuclear Betrayal, starting with the cash on James Harper's ankles.

The Silicon Valley feed on this page plays clips from these shows.