Building cultural artefacts, not podcasts: Mike Solana on the making of MAFIA

Key points

Key takeaways from the Mike Solana: Creating Celebrity Mafia (YouTube) interview with Mike Solana, CMO of Founders Fund and founder of Pirate Wires (August ​2026):

A show, not a genre. Solana says he did nothing new with Mafia — it is "just a well-produced TV show on YouTube" built around a game he has played since college. He finally made Celebrity Mafia once budget, contacts and a team were all in place.

The new-media label is hollow. "New media," a concept from the blogging days, today means anything done on the internet by a tech person — yet, he argues, none of it has come close to the cultural impact of the original new media, so he considers himself "doing something else.\"

Standalone artefacts only. From Anatomy of Next (inspired by Serial; season two toldthe story of Mars)to Hereticon, Pirate Wires and now Mafia, his projects are self-contained and made when they feel needed — worked on with Founders Fund creative director Mike Petriano, "a little more like artists.\"

The cast is the point. Players were almost all people he has played Mafia with before, chosen because they are fun to hang out with and good at the game; because they know and like each other, cameras capture their real selves without direction.

A full-circle location. The show was shot at Tusca, the San Francisco restaurant where the famous PayPal Mafia photo was taken some 26 years earlier; Solana says that photo was the inspiration for the whole aesthetic, only realized afterwards.

A full season is very likely. The first three episodes were three games in one night, progressively drunker; he expects a full season — four more groups, 12 more episodes, released week by week — though he will keep narrating rather than playing.

Why narrating beats playing. Playing Mafia well requires tapping "some darkness" and genuinely lying, which he hates; narrating is his middle ground, and he has no taste for becoming mafia himself.

A cultural moment. At launch Mafia took over the X/Twitter timeline with millions of views and the tech elite engaged; a month on, people were still talking about it — and it works as a holiday rewatch, like a favourite TV show.

Read more: Mike Solana on Creating Celebrity Mafia (YouTube)