More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

It's, they're so good. No, I really, look, I wish I were, cause I think it's but I'm in good enough condo, guy, look, he sends me stickers. Like he sent me t-shirts and stickers, like this guy's the best. I try to get, I try to, I,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

No, people, you know why people also don't people don't like doing this fear because the problem this fear is you have to pre program it. So you have to do the same show over and over, which is like totally not her style. Right.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 115

If you look longitudinally over time, like the whole... So I actually did this comparison recently, and I'll pull up the data. We can stick it in the notes, the show notes. It's not a great story to have invested in. Now, it's true that you can make money. Like, you're, you know, you get there first pre-regulation, ride the IPO wave, you get out, you've done fine. But if you just held electricity from the beginning to now, it turns out it's like it's a great utility. And by the way, that's a regulated utility with regulatory capture that's hard to transport. AI is globally liquid with no borders and is easy to transport. So you're gonna get the lowest cost provider. There's no money to make.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 163

get people to do things, right? And like go on like with them. I just believe that from what I've seen. Like I think they're both way too smart to believe what they say, right? um

— Sam Lessin, Episode 113

So, I think you're totally right about how quickly you can build a of these things. Facebook was, the original Facebook was built in like a week, right? I'd say that I don't know this, but I assume that Delicious was built unbelievably quickly. It was so simple. Dig is like literally an afternoon hackathon project at this point. And so I think what you're seeing is to your point is the cost structure on rebuilding Web2 is so low and you have founders like, really want that back. I mean, the reason I built my Delicious AI thing was I wanted, and it's so cheap, I can just build it as personal software.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 89

manage all the pieces of this business and could understand them and you articulated it through this like document you handed over and people were like, okay, I'm evaluating the leadership as much as anything else by like what they're showing me. That got blown out of the water. I was like, well, this is all bullshit. We know that these projections are bullshit. It was just an exercise. Just build something like just show me a prototype and give me four slides, right? And that became like what we're used to evaluating is like the four slides. Are they reasonable? Are they well designed? Are they telling the right story? And then like the app is the pudding. It's like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

And it's literally all just like a Harvard party, it's who's there, right? And like, is, and so I think that's like a very real thing. By the way, these people in general, like my sense is they're looking at it like, I always think you think about their financials position. My sense is it's a lot of young people. It's a lot of young men. They know they can't earn their way into the upper class, right? They can't, like they can't compound their way in the S and P and they are looking for these like thousand X plays, right? And so like, this is a extremely high velocity thing that it

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

So I, I think this is the future framework for education. I think there's still, like, rough around the edges. I've heard every Alpha School's a little bit different. Um, however, what I really did like is that on the parent side, you get a dashboard every day of, like, their performance and stuff. I... Which could be a blessing or a curse. It's like tiger parents were definitely gonna love this. And, like, of course, I fed mine right into my agent and had it about, like, because I feed every report card, and I have, like, a whole, like, framework for how each of my kids is, like, growing with their education. So I think it could be bad too, because sometimes you just gotta let kids be kids and, like, learn things a little bit more on the fly. Um, I will say for our A- like, more ADD kid, he actually preferred the AI, like, screen-based learning because it wasn't a voice where, that was teaching to the whole class where he felt a little bit more anxious, um, and less focused. So anyway, it was a good experiment. I think there's something there. I think it's a little early. And if I were a seed investor, I would invest, but I, I think I'm gonna participate more at the series A, to give it a good analogy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 156

But I, and again, I agree. just think it's a really challenging thing because on one hand we do have that problem with China and I'm the first advocate of fixing it. But the problem is we export our bits globally everywhere. Like it's, that's part of our power, right? It started with Hollywood, you know, our celebrity cultures, our influencers, like we dominate bit exporting our software. And so it's like, you start messing with that from a global trade imbalance perspective. It's like, there are certain corners where

— Sam Lessin, Episode 77

And this guy's an I'll do my bit I always do. At least the stock isn't ripping today on the news. It was priced in to some degree because it's going to be for the next year. He's like, remember what I said? I should buy Google stock and didn't because they're going to consolidate everything. Every episode for the next two years.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 135

You just subtly, you think about bot farms and control. It's like, you're like, ah, I'm going to let these people that are like pro this issue, I'm not going to like limit them quite as much or these other people. You can be so sophisticated without, without about how you approach just changing on specific issues. And the key is you wouldn't do it normally, right? Cause it's not worth it, but like it's a super weapon, right? And you can just like, when you choose, you just push the needle a little bit in one direction. And all of a sudden you have American youth saying insane shit, right? And we realized by the way, in the last, since 10 -7,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 37

It might be. She is a m- suspicious woman, this mysterious Taylor Swift. She likes Easter eggs. She likes all kinds of things, so.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 152

No, a fleshlight is what it's called, Britt. We're just gonna move on. For the people who know what that is. And I will agree that if Johnny Ive made one of those with AI on board, that would sell.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 112

when you're grasping for signals about what's going to happen here. you know, I like my pool house too. Like put differently, Dave, if I came to you as a Dave, was Dave, if I came in, if I came to you as investors and said, Dave and Brett, I'm all in, I am going to do this company. And I'm going to do it. think it's so important. And it's so great. I'm to go to San Francisco five days a week, right? Me, towel boy, pool boy, you'd like, you would probably invest

— Sam Lessin, Episode 86

So you just need to find places where you just are so structurally advantage or do things so uniquely or so powerfully that you're just not competing. There's no one to compete with. You are you.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 104

No, no, no. I think this, I'm gonna start. I like this idea of cheap, high volume documentaries as a form of influence and profit. And I think there's a way to do this. Like, you know, there's the whole horror genre where people make super cheap horror films and then sell them. It's great business in its time. But I think that cheap documentaries really are the future, like feature length. So the first one,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

there is this narrative of like, that's kind of tipping their hand. Like the reason they care about TikTok is not because it's a natural for-profit business, where obviously divestiture is the reason. And if you were a bite-dense shareholder, you'd be lobbying the crap out of the Chinese government to change that law because you have hundreds of billions of dollars at stake. But the reality is the Chinese don't operate this as a natural for-profit company with a profit motive that we can all understand and get behind. It's, you know, it has ulterior potential motives.

— Sam Lessin, Episode #38: Hartz & Minds_66cc4b089d6d7a010022af1a

'Cause their fing- 'Cause they type A on their keyboard, and it autocompletes to airtable.com, and so they will keep using it. Like, why do people... Like, Yahoo is still fucking huge. Huge. Yahoo's huge. Like, why is Yahoo huge? It's-

— Sam Lessin, Episode 161

No, it's just attention. No, I think, well, here's the question. We talked about this before. We talked about the eras of just entertainment broadly. You started with People Magazine, general entertainment, grocery store bullshit. It turns out your friends are more compelling than People Magazine, right? Then it turns out that professional friends are more compelling than your actual friends because they're hotter. Then it turns out that after them, you know, the algorithmic everyone, which is the TikTok thing of just like fuck an individual person like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

That's fine. mean, like, look, I just think like, let's put it this way. We can all be, you know, one of the things that did happen to me was kind of wild was like this Trump token, right? And like, it was a really interesting, if you step back, you can be as cynical as you want about this, whatever. I understand all the like, this is this guy, I get it. But if you just step back for a second, like what happened here, right? There's this like moment, a meme, there's you have a creator Trump in this case, like putting out a meme, you have a bunch of, you know, 20 something boys probably.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 83

Anyway, this is my pop culture is internet meme ads conspiracy theories. I get served about restoration hardware and if they were so good, I almost short of the stock.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 120

Well, I also think people are going to want to get all this stuff out. mean, this is the thing is like the great question of the whole thing. As we've talked about many times, minus AI, we're in a recession, right? AI is the only thing keeping the US out of a recession. Politically, a huge incentive to stoke the fires of the story, right? All these companies, if you want like right now, GDP looking pretty good, real GDP, right? Cause it's all Chinese housing boom computers, but still GDP number is better than recession, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 129

Bob Bar- Bob Bob- No. It wasn't Bob Barker. It was Bob Barker. He loved- He loved spaying and neutering dogs. He loved spaying and neutering dogs.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

fishing in that one pond that you think it's the most robust, it's really, you could actually have zero outliers. Yeah. And so the network based approach is really intended to find our way to those outliers and they may be in lousy ponds and so forth. So I don't know. Does the trawling kind of work? Yeah. You sound like less of a trawler, right? I'm not a trawler. I feel like the, um, yeah, I think it's an interesting question. mean, like for me with startups,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

My uncle spent six months in a prison hotel. No, he didn't actually. No, I'm just joking. I think people are gonna just now say I didn't go to prison. I went to a hotel that's a prison.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 117

We're on the same wavelength. really, try to like point him at specific tweets of mine I think he'll particularly like. And sometimes I get featured.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

Like, the Anthropic thing is so funny, 'cause, like, that's not a natural design pattern. It's also not based on anything other than speculation, really, right? And, like, I think part of the story there is, like, um... Like, here's a funny thing. There's a bunch of people who are gonna make a ton of mo- money on Anthropic purely because they didn't have the time to sell, right? Like, this happened a little bit with Facebook, but it's definitely happening with these companies where, like, if you had gone to a rational early employee and it had been public, hypothetically, and they went from having $2 million to $20 million, they would've been like, "Fuck yeah, I'm out," right? They'd be thrilled. The fact that it grew so quickly is you have this whole class of people that irrationally should never have been concentrated in that asset, and never would've been had they had the option and it had been public. But because they had no option to sell and it happened so meteorically fast, there's all these random people that are now gonna be worth hundreds of millions of dollars by accident, right? And, like-

— Sam Lessin, Episode 155

Well, not for a lot of money, I can tell you that. uh I'm just saying like, Grammarly is acquiring a bunch of companies very cheaply right now. Because if think about Grammarly is an interesting one, right? Very high flyer, lots of the money, like people loved it. Great. Great, great, great in a lot of ways. Talk about talk about companies that are like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 126

You can't target ads. You can't offer different services and you also can't charge us. It's like, well, what would you like us to do then? Like, NOISE then you just like, then you just like can't have nice things, right? Like it's the same thing with these AI policies.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 54

Uh, well, he's got something else going on. He's got something else going on, but I think we're probably both tiny investors in it, but the, um, the,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 89

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