More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

That's where all the money is. It's not about selling to people things they know they want, right? Like that's not discovery.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

Yeah, I don't know. I just, I feel like, I feel like Apple just. I don't think they want that to be clear, but I think that they can be tiptoed into it and forced into it. And I honestly think like, if you think about it, like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 37

Because honestly, the thing I keep in mind is the coding stuff has gotten to the point. It is perfect for people like me and Dave. Right? Perfect. It's like you need to know quite a bit to like use it well. Yeah. Like you need to know quite a bit about app development. You can't just like build me an app and have it do it correctly. like you need to have, you need to structure the data. There's all these things that like are fun and interesting problems. But then there's like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

Well, I applaud you for not actually, I don't think having AI anywhere on your, no, deploy AI apps in seconds. You almost don't say AI on your homepage because I agree with that. That the second, the second that this is actually true of most things is whenever people are excited about infrastructure, beware, right? Like infrastructure should disappear. That's the point of infrastructure and it only gets exciting once it's gone. So you almost don't say AI on your homepage, almost.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 72

Same thing. It's like, it's like, I looked this up recently, the IOC has like 19 priorities. It's ridiculous. And they also like have added since the 2000s, this idea of like youth appeal, I get it. They have some, they hired McKinsey and they told them they were losing the youth demographics. should add youth sports, but like breakdancing is not a sport. It's beautiful. You should be rewarded for doing it. But like you have Olympic gold medal in breakdance. It's like, why don't you win a fucking race?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

But we got caught again in the identity verification. So I went back even this weekend, was like, well, I'll just use my old account I never finished setting up from like many years ago. And I logged back in and did the terms of service update from 2021 and the whole nine yards. But you know what? Again, I keep getting rejected. I keep getting rejected. So the real identity problem is there are creators like me desperate to be on OnlyFans and I can't get on. What?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 101

Well, this guy emailed me. This is definitely getting paid for. This is actually very exciting, guys. I have a first ever on air ad. Someone wrote me back on my newsletter and had this whole thing and he said, Sam, I want to advertise on your podcast. So you ready? This is our ad. It's from getvictor.com.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 139

Oh, from like the entire media industry talking back at Jessica in the back, I can't do it because it's not my story and I don't know how to weave the needle. But like, let's just say that like this Atlantic op -ed she wrote, which was excellent by the way, went everywhere and is a hot button, a hot button issue in the tech slash media world right now.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

zero because they would get instantly canceled for doing it. Then the partner would actually have to do the work themselves and we know they're not going to do that.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

you're betting on it adding a few trillion in market cap, you're not betting on a 10 or 100 X thing. The problem is you put even a few million bucks in at a few trillion dollar valuation, who cares? Like in the other hand, it's not worth it, like risk reward. But so the whole strategy I'm trying to figure out, which I'm not an expert at this is what is the right way to go long Google but

— Sam Lessin, Episode 126

Right? So the thing that people miss about capitalism is that when anything's open, it ultimately collapses margins to zero. That's like how capitalism works. Right? So it's kind like in the public markets, you can't win against the people who are algorithmically trading super fucking fast in like the public markets. Right? On, on, if you think about it in our world, in the venture world, the public market is all the random ass companies and YC or things that everyone knows about. can't make any money on those.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 139

right, to get around your limitations or whatever, all the way through to like, I bought a subscription to your thing and clearly stole it. And I think that the social contract to I bought a subscription to your thing and clearly stole it is still mostly intact, right? Not for like bad people, but for like real, like an engineer at OpenAI isn't going to be like, oh, that's okay. And therefore I'll do it for you. Whereas I think basically a bunch of engineers at OpenAI were like, eh, like we're researchers, we're not a for -profit thing. And like, sure, they were about to test, but that's not really for us.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

the thing if if Elon were a normal if Elon were a normal person like you have plenty on your plate like why would you you're trying to get to Mars and build cars and deal with all this shit why do you want to deal with this like why take on more so you'd be like this is it makes no sense because like why take on more but he's not yeah exactly but he um but I that's right Dave he loves the house ads

— Sam Lessin, Episode 82

Well, that's like, I've always thought you should do a thing where you like, just like measure the out of offices by company. Cause you get like millions of them, right? People that are autoresponders and just like rank companies by them out of office-ness, On the replies to, like that's like an obviously fun thing to track over time. There's no AI, you literally just, it's counting. It's counting.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 86

Look, I couldn't agree more than this. The way we've been playing this is our creator investing strategy, right? Which is you find creators, right? Who have built cults around them in super specific verticals, where they are the trusted brand, right? Whether it's in lawn care or terrariums or something like super weird and niche, there's a community around it. And they have structural advantage, which is a cack of zero, because the people actually trust them. And it's a durable audience as opposed to just hacking.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

Now I do think I'm very bullish on the vertical creator is getting way bigger, right? Like if you truly are like the voice of a community and the most trusted node in a place where product ID product development is getting cheaper and code is getting cheaper and supply can't get any more efficient. I think it's never been a better time to know like the aviation vertical better than anyone. Like if you have a Cessna, you trust me. I'm the Cessna guy and I'm going to sell you a shit loads of products, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 64

It had nothing to do with the software. The software was already easy. I mean, this is my kind of thing with you is that the software is not, it's totally easy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 72

right and paper marks, you just like it takes longer, it takes years to even have exposure to it usually, and then it takes much longer to get good at it, right. And so I mean, it's slow, like, we've now sold at all stages in public markets, we've sold private positions, we've sold a lot of fucking crypto over the years, like we finally are starting to care about and get good at selling. But that that's a lagging thing. And you just fewer reps means it takes longer to figure out. And I think that's partially why the market's so broken, is because the market for buying

— Sam Lessin, Episode 99

I really I think it's probably just the smell but I think an old person pill that you could sell as like a you know don't smell bad. The other thing this article pointed out is that the other reason old people the other reason old people smell is because a lot of them don't have showers you can walk into and they're scared to take baths and showers so they actually just like smell but the bigger issue is the mushroom.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 105

I said, we can agree that we can argue about 50 year olds, can we all agree as parents of small children that it is generally a bad idea? Not always, but generally a bad idea to back parents of small children.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

turns out there's two scenes. He was referencing a completely different scene that I forgot existed and he had forgotten about the prostitute scenes. We had a very awkward pitch meeting because I thought he was, I thought he was pitching me an AI pimp, which isn't the worst idea I've ever heard for the dating scene. You know, cause like pimp, like I kind of think an AI pimp that like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

Well, that's because at least the difference well It's also like they just need more money like stripes doesn't need much money. So like fine. They don't need it That's the big thing is opening I needs to play in the they're playing at a table Where they need such a deep chip stack that they can't they don't have the money like it's like medic and meta makes what? 60 billion dollars in profit a year that they can play with right like they get to basically they get a one and a half acts of open AI is most recent ridiculous fundraising for free every year to play with

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

I think you should start absolutely. And there could be a spin-off publication called Tennis Mars Today. And I bet people would sign up for that.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 90

Now it's just, now it's why I love the glasses. I just go boop, boop. You don't like it though, right Jess? When I hear the boop.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

does the same thing and then no one gives a shit. The whole creative thing is finding edge. It's edge. You gotta do something different.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

I mean, holistically, like the whole cost, right? Like I've like, I gotta like drive, like, but okay. So like if AI, if intelligence really does end up being like power, right? Here's the interesting about power. It's super regulated, right? Like you can only use PG and AE, right? Like there's not an open market for power in most of the country, which is how it supports pricing. If there were an open market for power in the country, power would be unbelievably cheaper, right? But we have like regulated monopolies effectively in power.

— Sam Lessin, Episode Brit, Jessica, Dave_69964fac564c4d362f5c52cd

which really is like a Trump era phenomenon that everyone's like, yeah, whatever, do it. They're like pretty well positioned. I think it's actually fairly hard to spin this stuff up. So everyone liked the idea of them. There was obviously really interesting stuff going on culturally, but you got to hand it to Polymarket, Kalshi, and a few others who just like did the dog hard work of like staying in the game regularly long enough to survive for the moment where they were now doable. And then someone like Coinbase is like, look, it's gonna be fucking annoying and hard to build this ourselves. We probably wanted to

— Sam Lessin, Episode 126

A lot of people are, no, people are just generally for re I just had a long tirade from someone on our team at slow about how to Gemini is way better for like research on certain things. I think everyone's using everything. Look, Dave, I actually agree with your central point, right? Which is like, it's just completely fucking obvious. Like launch, launch the stupid app and make it clean. So for what it's worth, I think the same thing goes with APIs. Like the only real interface advantage, even I will admit that like chat GPT has, it's like, it's a dead simple fucking API, right? And like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

I'm making a joke about AI. It's an AI joke. It's an AI joke that all the children, all the children have followed the Pied Piper to San Francisco.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 112

No, I think it's actually, um I think that a lot of us to do the Peter Thiel mentality of like monopolies and winner take all capitalism. I think people like deeply, like deeply internalize this culturally, this idea that like, if you could own space, maybe they can own space, like, is that a thing? And like, what is that worth? It's worth infinity or like Bitcoin infinity or like gold. So and I think what people have also internalized is the idea of owning a normal stock.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 135

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