Posts tagged: Palmer

Molly O’Shea is a name-dropper. There’s good reason for that.

I count 29 big names in tech mentioned over our hourlong call. She told me about recently moderating a panel with Kalshi cofounders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara. Ken Griffin took the stage after her. O’Shea breezily referenced talking about the state of new media with the TBPN bros in Peter Thiel’s house.

But it’s O’Shea’s access to executives like these that keeps her audience coming back. The podcaster is deeply immersed in Silicon Valley culture, having several years of venture capital experience under her belt.

“I am institutionally trained not to get canceled,” she said. “A lot of these people really trust me. I think it’s a wonderful component that I come in from the industry.”

Her podcast’s name, Sourcery, references “sourcing deals,” but it better represents O’Shea’s talent herself. She’s clearly sourced up, sporting an ever-growing rolodex of tech’s biggest names.

After buzzy interviews with Palantir CEO Alex Karp and Anduril cofounder Palmer Luckey, O’Shea’s platform has quickly grown. So have her critics, some of whom say she should ask tougher questions.

But her core audience — investors in the world of tech and finance — seem to love that she’s in the know.

From in-house VC newsletter to ‘monk mode’

O’Shea considers herself the first of her family to chase a “capitalistic pursuit.”

“It’s funny, there’s not many business-oriented people in my family,” she said. “My dad had a marketing agency for most of my life, but again, it was a marketing agency. My mom is a home designer and she used to be a creative director.”

She went to New York University for studio art but pivoted to entrepreneurship after learning how low the average artist’s salary was. Eventually, she narrowed in on venture capital.

O’Shea got her start working for the father of a college friend, a secondaries investor for a family office. She moved to Miami to work for him before coming back to New York as an analyst at the Global Public Offering Fund.

She then went to the seed and Series A investment firm TMV — then called Trail Mix Ventures — as an associate. She started Sourcery there as an in-house newsletter, but only made it public when she started at New York Life Ventures as a senior associate. She shared it with friends, and it eventually grew a readership.

Then Upfront Ventures’ Greg Bettinelli reached out with a job offer.

“I was a reader of her email newsletter,” Bettinelli later wrote when asked about the offer. “We were looking to hire a new investor for Upfront Ventures and I reached out as I appreciated what she built as what I think was a side project at the time.”

O’Shea said she was on a boat in the Mediterranean when she got Bettinelli’s offer. She met him in the Hamptons. “It’s like the bougiest story ever,” she said.

O’Shea moved to Los Angeles for Upfront Ventures. She’s stayed in the city and prefers it to New York. “You get so much more for your money,” she said. “I have a hot tub!”

Then Elon Musk took over X, partially open-sourced the algorithm, and launched ad-revenue share programs. O’Shea said, “Game on.”

She started posting more, and her follower count grew. Erik Torenberg of the podcast network Turpentine asked if she wanted to start a podcast about deals, linked to her newsletter.

While O’Shea declined to disclose exactly how much she earns, she said the Sourcery newsletter began generating revenue when it added subscriptions. That includes a $600 “I can expense it” annual tier she said “plenty of people” were willing to pay for.

Sourcery is now her full-time job and a top-200 podcast in Apple Podcasts’ investing category. She employs a “lean team” to help her film, edit, and promote.

The Palantir and Anduril interviews helped generate more interview interest. (Her next guest: Jake Paul.)

After an “insane” end to 2025, O’Shea said she spent January locked-in and focused on laying the foundation for the rest of the new year.

“I’m going into monk mode.”

Getting Karp and Luckey to say yes

O’Shea’s network is big, and her show keeps making it bigger.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Alex Immerman told her he watched her Kalshi video before investing in the company, she said. “I know plenty of people — I won’t name them — that have put millions of dollars into these companies that I’ve profiled,” she said.

That seems to be how O’Shea lands many of her guests: knowing the right people. I spoke to two early interviewees. Oden Technologies cofounder Willem Sundblad was introduced to O’Shea through an investor. Contrary general partner Kyle Harrison met her in 2018 and once considered hiring her while at Coatue Management.

“A lot of these relationships start first as friendships,” Harrison said. “We’ve enjoyed talking to each other off the record, so talking on the record is just as much fun.”

The Karp interview was a right-place, right-time situation. She was at the Hill and Valley Forum in 2025, where Karp was speaking. O’Shea said Palantir’s Eliano Younes recognized her from Pirate Wires and introduced her to Shyam Sankar, the company’s CTO.

Then she published a list of her 100 dream guests. Listed No. 1 was Ivanka Trump. Palantir staff noticed Karp wasn’t on the list, O’Shea said, and she amended it, making him 1B. That set the interview in motion.

Her Anduril series also sprang from the Sourcery 100 list. She put Anduril cofounders Palmer Luckey and Trae Stephens on the list. Matt Grimm commented and helped her set up an interview.

The Karp interview was her biggest by far. The full-length podcast has 4.3 million views on X — and that’s not including the various clips she publishes separately.

It also made her confront the challenges of being on camera.

She published the video on a Tuesday in the back of a taxi in London. She went offline on Wednesday and woke up to hundreds of texts on Thursday asking if she was OK.

In the interview, O’Shea wore an Alaïa dress her friend had lent her. She said she liked being able to “show some femininity and personal style.” Some X users mocked her attire. (Others pointed out that Karp was wearing a t-shirt.)

O’Shea said she was glad to be offline at the time and not glued to her phone watching the comments, and grateful for the women who reached out.

“There were a lot of really horrible tweets, and a lot of really disgusting things that I wish I did not see,” she said. “The internet is a scary place.”

The ‘tough questions’ question

In November, The Guardian published a feature about the “friendly media bubble” that turns CEO interview subjects into stars. O’Shea was the lead anecdote. The piece closed with her asking Karp what type of cupcake he would want to be.

O’Shea knows that some people want her to ask “harder questions.” Her response: “If you want to have criticism of a company, how about do some research on it.”

That doesn’t mean she won’t ask the kind of in-the-weeds technical question about deal structure or strategy that you’d expect from someone with VC roots. The conversations can also veer off of investment talk.

Take a recent interview with the lightning rod venture capitalist Shaun Maguire of Sequoia — who generated widespread backlash after saying Zohran Mamdani was a secret “Islamist” who “comes from a culture of lying.” At one point, she’s asking him about the economics of telecommunications. At another, Maguire is calling Mamdani a communist and a terrorist-supporter.

O’Shea maintains that hard questions aren’t the purpose of her podcast. She’ll sprinkle one in every so often, she said, but the goal is mostly to be a resource. Sourcery is a place for investors to get information about a subject’s views — don’t expect O’Shea to dig in on a guest’s recent scandal or push back on a controversial position.

“If you want to know about lawsuits, I don’t know, go read lawsuits,” she said.

O’Shea is clearly proud of her work. She described a recent nap, dozing off to the “All-In” podcast. She woke up to a new podcast on, and thought: “Holy crap, what is this amazing interview?” It was her own.

Ending our call, I asked if she had a media analogy for herself. TBPN is often called the “SportsCenter of Silicon Valley.” What is Sourcery?

She waffled back and forth; maybe she’s “30 for 30,” maybe she’s Martha Stewart.

Later that day, she emailed me her answer: Barbara Walters, who, incidentally, was famous for her hard-hitting questions.

“Absolute legend,” O’Shea wrote.