More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

So there's a pattern matching of all these execs and for people going over there, which has absolutely nothing to do with like actually the quality of the business, right? But it's purely about chasing that experience again at all costs, which is why you see some of these people hopping around trying to find it. Same thing with investors.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

Well, this will be interesting because if that is the thing that you believe, which I'm not criticizing, saying if you believe that is their philosophy, what we're actually going to see over AI on the consumer side is a literal business model war, right? Because that is not what Google is running. That's certainly not what Metta is running. And so that will be the interesting. And I would say historically the free computer. Yeah, go ahead.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 127

constantly responding to Telegram and pumping story, right? Just for the traders if you're actually well, maybe that's true and maybe you want I would actually argue that Elon in a lot of ways I've said a long time is the ultimate cult leader and in some ways a lot of Elon stocks behave like this on absolute steroids plus he crossed the chasm and also got the retail people in right so like I'm sorry that the institutional people in but there's a lot of similarities culturally on what's going on in these spaces

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

like super free speech, whatever. I of course think I won this debate handily. The only thing that we agreed upon, the only thing we, I think I just like crushed it, but you know, but the only thing we agreed upon is it's all Apple's fault. Like this is just like Apple should just fix this problem and like, yeah, you want to turn off YouTube games, whatever. This is like an OS level problem. Please be done with this, right? Stop trying to.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

this very interesting set of episodes where they tried to ban it and they couldn't, right? For technological reasons, because Pavel's so smart and Telegram's so smart. And also for cultural reasons, there was this whole campaign where all the Russians were throwing paper airplanes out of their window to protest getting Telegram taken away, because it was how they really communicated. So this is very positive thing. The weird parts are, right? One,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

I mean, here's the question. What is more overfunded in terms of like stuff? it people building, is it AI or is it rockets? What about relative to the potential market size?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 90

Because people, that's well done. News is expensive. Truth is expensive. Here's a question. How long do you think it'll be before we're like shooting boats full of H200s offshore? Like smuggling those.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 129

Well, that's basically what I did for my future VC. And I have 15 ,000 VC's email addresses, which I now send them my weekly thoughts.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 61

Well, it should make you play Sudoku while you wait for your shit to get done. It's like, but I love, Jess caught me. I like built an entire app flying home like last week. was great.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 140

potentially somewhat legally questionable ways, the answer to transparency questions is more transparency, right? You're just like, fine.

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

Alright friends, well that was a lovely more or less. I really feel it's a great way to end the summer with a thoughtful piece. I mean that I gotta say I usually think that I've come up with all the ideas months in advance, but this one I had not thought about. I like it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 60

and having its own stories and communities and games built out and interactions, it's extremely hard to trustably connect it to the real world. That's why AI is really good at fantasy. It's really hard to make sure to stick to reality. That is the entire game of the next level of value. It's gonna be fascinating to play this out. mean, right now it's in a really weird position because if anything, take the Jelly Jelly experience. Jelly Jelly has a pure narrative with no connection to any line utility or anything like that.

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

It was a great build out in a great period. AI is too easy a slap on the top for the cloud providers. And again, I'm not saying no one will make any money. just don't think it's a great, I think it's just more cloud, you

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

Oh, it's, well, you know, it's like FTX fell apart, actually the equity value, they became a venture investor and that actually from an investor perspective saved them and never was gonna their money back. OpenAI's core business is meh, but they're gonna like try to parlay it into a venture portfolio. Now, Opal would not have been my first choice.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

Well, and you know what, let's just lay this in the hedge fund discussion for a second, right? Which is look, if you are a market maker and you're the biggest in the world and the extra billionth of a millisecond matters, right, that's at massive scale, then maybe it's worth paying up for whatever the number one thing is, but that's actually not what 99% of businesses, right? Like that's like a very rarefied thing. I mean, again, I'm not saying there's no value in it. I'm not saying that there's going to be someone who cares about having the absolute most cutting model, blah, blah. I just, I think that's not most of the world. It's like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

No. Well, it depends on you think about it. There's just a relationship between story and money and power and product. These things are all interrelated, right? And they feed off each other. And so I don't, I just don't think you can look at it as just like a single thing. We were very purist in our era, Dave, of product first and whatever and capitalism first. There's an old era of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, which were last generation's tech companies. This generation is just like a very power-oriented world versus a money and capitalism-oriented world.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

It's everyone needs this. Everyone needs this. It's like so it's really well made. It's portable. It's massively overpriced and like, but you can plug it in and it pitches mini wiffle balls at you. And it's just like, no, this is like someone's some bros slapped like a bucket on some spinning wheels and sell you like the mini wiffle balls, but it's great. And like it is the best. now have the kids just like whacking wiffle balls all day. It's great for hand eye coordination.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 134

Well, that's actually the degenerate case. I'm worried about that, right? Like, which is like, is that, you people, I was joking about like the drunk test is like the best product of the product after five beers you just engage with and like know how to use. And we started out in like social context. Now it's like, you know what a drunk person loves to do is just talk to chat GPT for hours, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

And a lot of people who went there actually made a ton of money in the Facebook era. And then for the last 10 years, they've been depressed, right? Because there's like no corporate experience, like after that high that you're going to get again. so when, so anything that sorta looks like it, they jump on because they're desperate for that high again. They want that experience. It's like nothing else is exciting. And so the pattern match,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

No, it's just like, I'm it's like the same thing. It's just like, it's, it's the same conversation we were having for years. And like, I think the thing that I think gets interesting is, yes, that's true. Like everyone wants to have like, every company would love to have your personal file of all the information because they think that's lock in so that you'll only use them because if one knows you have a stat and the other doesn't, you have to use the one that has knows you have a stat. And it's like a classic like, thing, I just think it's like, the strategic and like play out of how you get there.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

right, ahead of reality, or in their case, to fight each other in the hopes of a someday market. Now that kind of worked out for Uber at this point, because they effectively eventually won the war against Lyft. It certainly didn't work out for Lyft, right? And even for Uber, the dollars into value created is nothing compared to an earlier generation, right? And that's in like a win case. The AI, yeah, and the AI.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

I just think there's been a ton of shots on goal trying to figure out how to do it in a way that works and everyone's excited about the idea and this social. That's very different. So the creator actually, one of the reasons I like our creator fund is because it's not crowdfunding, right? Like the creators that we invest in. We, cause again, there's just too many sensitivities with your fans. Like the reality is people who trade meme coins are like having playing a game. It's like a degenerate trading game and they can have a lot of fun doing it. There's nothing wrong.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 113

really well. And so the interesting thing is gonna be like, yeah, for a while, we're gonna be in this code generation, faster coding, help me write this script for a while. But like, I think we're just not that far away from like these things being like even much more integrated, where you're just like, just do this. Right? Like, I don't want to think about it. And then all of a sudden, like, I think, you know, thinking and writing, as a human become your core skills again, which I think I'm really, I'm really psyched about this idea that, that, again, I'm not in the camps, I think, like LLMs are some like,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 71

To be clear, thematically this is both obvious and gonna happen. And actually one thing I will say about it is it's a lot easier than the assistant thing. So like, why not? Right? Like it's

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

Like two seconds. We can, you want to make one right now? We can have a Spotify. It's actually basically making, it's basically making a podcast guys.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

where all of a sudden making a series of like, like effectively like bet it all or bet something on like outside outcomes isn't as crazy as it might sound. Right. Again, we talked before about the average of infinity and zero is infinity. And I look at my own investing behavior, right. As a venture capitalist and you know, as I like to point out, because I feel like you have to lick the cookie I've done well, right. It's like the asymmetry is unbelievable, right? Like, you know, I was, I

— Sam Lessin, Episode 83

No, bad joke. Well, it's a commentary about the state of the world that is important to actually execute. And so here's the reality. Why is it offensive?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 117

because the performance were great, it would be like 2020 all over again. And people would be committing to new funds every, what was it, like six, seven months or so? Every four months.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

upsetting to see people pouring more money yet again into hardware projects that are clearly not going to be financial returns.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 45

I don't know. I think the interesting thing look back on in 10 years will be all these huge secondaries. Like what is the correlation? Not causation necessarily, but correlation between people taking big ass early secondaries as founders and outcomes. We'll see.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 99

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