A Rising Star Investor's Polarizing Plan

Welcome, Weekenders! In this newsletter:

• The Silicon Valley rising star who angered Andreessen

• How a white-collar pirate pilfered the rich

• A million-dollar strawberry that venture capitalists crave

• Plus—Oscars weekend! A digital shortcut to enjoying this year’s biggest films and what the Academy should do in the years to come.

A week ago, I bent the rules of time and space to revisit an experience I’d long forgotten: seeing a movie on opening weekend. Yep, like many of you, I saw “Dune: Part Two,” a resplendent masterpiece and a masterclass in film adaptation. Then I got to keep microdosing the experience through all the wonderful memes. (Delian, a special salute to yours.) I can’t remember the last time moviegoing felt so enjoyable; regrettably, I somehow managed to miss most of the Barbenheimer mania last summer and saw both films later at home.  

As hyped up on Hollywood as I am at the moment, I still have little interest in the industry’s grandest evening: the Oscars, which come this Sunday. With viewership of the awards show near a nadir, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has tried to modernize, increasing the number of Best Picture nominees and widening its membership. If the academy is really serious about attracting younger viewers—or more viewers generally—I think it should really try to tap into how we discuss and share our thoughts about movies: through viral online discussion. Let the nominees wage their Oscar campaigns online—through memes and through the digital venues at the center of our lives.

Of course, I know I’m suggesting an empire-shifting concept to an organization that loves its golden statues nearly as much as its antiquated statutes governing how everything works. “Look, the rules are fucking suffocating,” said Academy member Stu Zakim, who has consulted on campaigns for films including “Schindler’s List,” “Jurassic Park” and “Apollo 13.” As Zakim pointed out, the Academy has taken only the most basic steps toward digitization, having ended DVD screeners just a couple years ago. Rather than worry about how to meld the internet with its rules, the Academy is “worried about whether members are being taken to Lutèce,” Zakim said, referring to the Manhattan bastion of French cooking, which closed way back in 2004. 

Members of the Academy, I’d like to end this speech by paraphrasing an old adage: Fear is the ratings killer.

Abram Brown, editor of The Information’s Weekend section, can happily report that the salmon à la ChatGPT turned out quite well. You can reach him at [email protected] or find him on X.

Back in June, the White House rolled out its red carpet for Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and to fete the fellow, they called in a host of Silicon Valley heavyweights, like Sam Altman, Tim Cook and Anne Wojcicki. Also in attendance was General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja, who’s not such a big household name but is plausibly on a path toward that type of status. 

My colleague Kate Clark explains more about that in her profile of Taneja, which is this Weekend’s Big Read. She charts his steady ascension to the top of venture capital, where he now finds himself tangling with the likes of Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel over nothing less than the industry’s modus vivendi. And why exactly did the White House put him on its guest list? Well, like any good mogul on the rise, he has a vision that reaches overseas. General Catalyst, which has $25 billion in assets, is nearing an acquisition of an Indian VC firm, Venture Highway. Expansive ambition like that is what gets someone from Sand Hill Road an invite to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

What do investors see as fertile ground these days? 

The venture capital landscape can seem pretty barren—but not for New Jersey–based Oishii, a vertical-farm startup that sells the elegantly named Omakase Berry: a strawberry that fetches $12 for a carton of six. Last week, it revealed $134 million in fresh funding as it seeks to enhance its robotics and broaden distribution. The unexpected deal sparked our interest—and appetite—prompting us to assemble this list of other posh produce. 

Following: Hollywood’s Red-Letter Day

On Sunday, the Oscars will name the year’s best film. That’s one measure of a movie’s standing, but I prefer another: the amount of viral Letterboxd reviews a flick gets.

Letterboxd, a cult-favorite app, especially popular with Gen Z, for logging and sharing movie reviews, has exploded from 2 million to 12 million members since 2020, and the content spills over onto TikTok, Instagram and X—producing some of the best movie memes I’ve seen. And it really does sway my viewing habits. For example, I wasn’t much interested in Yorgos Lanthimos’ “Poor Things” and its bizarre plot involving a woman who receives a baby’s brain, then sleeps her way through Europe, but then I spotted this popular Letterboxd review: “this is what happened to barbie after she went to the gynecologist.” Similarly, I added the Paul Giamatti–starring “The Holdovers” to my must-watch list after this Letterbox review: “perfect casting, no remnants of instagram face.” Ahead of Sunday, I’ll certainly be reading every Oscar nominee’s Letterboxd reviews, if only so I can pass off the funniest jokes as my own to my chronically offline husband when we watch the awards.—Margaux MacColl

Listening: The Jolliest Roger

I can hear the groans already: Another scammer podcast? No, think of “The Pirate of Prague” not as a tired genre retread, but as one of the finest entrants in that genre. The titular marauder is Czech Republic–born Viktor Kožený, who tries to thread between treasure and trouble with white-collar charm. Nonetheless, one minute he’s trying to hustle the Azerbaijani government; the next he’s on the lam in the Bahamas. The story is good and the person telling it is stellar. That’s Joe Nocera, a “lifelong magazine and book writer and late-life podcaster,” as he put it, who was both a former Fortune magazine staffer and a one-time Esquire columnist. The podcast’s origins lie in a long-ago Fortune cover story Nocera edited  “on a weekend when the Fortune staff went to Sarasota to go to the races, but I didn’t go because I needed to finish editing,” he recalled this week. “I thought it was a great story about one of the most flamboyant con men I’d ever heard about, and I’d always thought it would translate into another form of media.” That it did.—A.B

Watching: Apple+’s Shining Star 

A few months ago, my fiancé and I embarked on our own personal star trek: a sci-fi movie marathon that has taken us through the so-bad-it’s-awesome (“Sunshine”) to the visually resplendent (“Interstellar”) to the cheesily classic (“Deep Impact”). Sadly, many of these films get so caught up in the physics of wormholes that they forget the laws of good storytelling, neglecting to add any real character development.

Fortunately, Apple TV+’s new limited series “Constellation” has plenty of time to balance the technical jargon with human tenderness. In the show, Swedish astronaut Jo (Noomi Rapace) is desperate to return to her family after escaping a mysterious accident on the International Space Station that killed many crew members. But when she gets home, everything and everyone is different from how she remembers them: her daughter’s uncannily different smell is the first clue that something is off. The series—part sci-fi, part horror, part Nordic noir—asks whether Earth has changed or Jo has. And with eight episodes, the show has the time to deliver a rich mother-daughter story, several satisfying subplots and plenty of mind-bending hypotheticals. This is exactly what’s been missing from my extraterrestrial travels lately.—Julia Black

Oscar bait.