MAFIA (Founders Fund)

technology, science, venture capital // what does the future look like?

MAFIA is a long-form video series from Founders Fund that sits twelve prominent tech founders, investors, and operators around a table and films them playing Mafia, the social-deduction party game built around deception and detection. Episode 001 runs about half an hour and was shot at Tosca Cafe, the San Francisco bar that served as the location of the famous PayPal Mafia photo published in Fortune in 2007 , a setting the show leans into as it positions itself inside the lineage of Silicon Valley insider culture. The first episode is hosted by Mike Solana, the CMO of Founders Fund and editor of Pirate Wires, who narrates the rounds and deals the cards. The group of 12 players includes Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, biohacker Josie Zayner, Wait But Why writer Tim Urban, professional poker player Liv Boeree, AI policy expert Ryan Beiermeister, Figma founder Dylan Field, Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike, angel investor Cyan Banister, Flexport founder Ryan Petersen, and Founders Fund partner Trae Stephens. The format is straightforward party Mafia with townspeople, a sheriff, an angel, and three mafia, but the entertainment value comes from watching this specific cast bluff, accuse, and read each other under the rules of a game where lying is the point. The launch matters because it is one of the clearest signs yet that a major venture firm is treating original programming as a core channel rather than a side project. Founders Fund is launching a TV-style game show featuring A-list founders and investors playing a fierce game of Mafia , with Solana saying on X that the next two episodes will be released on Thursdays over the next couple of weeks . The show arrives as Silicon Valley pushes further into new media ventures, with one of the most prominent being OpenAI's acquisition of the tech talk show TBPN , making MAFIA a useful data point for anyone tracking how venture brands, founder personalities, and distribution on YouTube and X are converging.

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