Sam Lessin on Social Media & Platforms

Essays

From the Podcast

Like, all... The thing that was valuable in early, in Dave's era of platform, was feed distribution. It was a trade. I give you distribution, you let me do this and give me data, and that was a trade that worked. Every iteration of after that, leading up to when I ultimately had to be silly one who had to say, "Fine, we're done," and really shut things down a lot on platform, the problem is you couldn't find a value exchange that worked. It was supposed to be like, "Oh, you give us data." There was never a clear business case for why Facebook Connect worked.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Oh, I thought you were gonna say something different, which I have a half-written essay on, is that actually the, the fact that Facebook Connect ultimately didn't work and Open Graph failed and had to be shut down is the same story, where, like, there's not enough value trade for the brands.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Because everything, it's just an API. These things can read APIs and documentation. It doesn't matter whether it's MCP or not. It's just ways for machines to talk to machines, right? And so for me, it's when people are like, "Oh, we have new standards, da, da, da," it's actually a very simple thing. It's like either your machine or a service you have has an API in some way, shape, or form, which Dave was pointing out a year ago, even if you don't publish it, I can reverse engineer it now, right? Either it is accessible to other machines, in which case it will be used by other machines, or it is not, in which case you can have something that is protected. And so the entire thing, like these standards and protocols, is all bullshit. What is interesting, though, is, like, I don't know about you guys, I've already noticed from Muse, for instance, Facebook's thing, that certain workflows that used to work have already been turned off, right? Because servers are like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

It's an awesome book, and it's an important one to internalize, I think it talk about what Silicon Valley's business model is and, and kind of where we are. The basic point of the book is that if you go all the way back to like the time of the Greeks and before, the idea of true zero, right, was like highly fought. And so like the, the first historical vignette is the Pythagoreans who wanted to kind of introduce the idea of true nothingness. This is like kind of like creation ex nihilo from the Bible. How do you like create something from nothing? These are very deep philosophical problems, and the West hated it because it's really hard to reason about, and it's really hard to talk about consistent growth and like the things we're good at. Same thing with like infinity, like infinity is a weird concept. Because of that, the zero came from India. The West fought it like hell. The only reason it exists in Western culture is it is just too useful, like you need zero. Like the traders made it happen. The church fought it like holy hell to like keep it out of Western culture. But like fast-forward, if you think about like our markets and the way we build businesses, and we think about competition and compounding and all those sorts of things, they're great at like most normal modeling in numbers that we're familiar with, what we can argue about and multiply, da da da. The second you introduce a zero or an infinity anywhere in the chain, you break everything because the tail, which is infinity or zero, dominates the whole story, right? And what's really interesting, I think, is in some ways, if you look at the story that we've seen in the last many years in Silicon Valley, the tendency towards infinity, which you saw the, the geometric returns on Google and Facebook and oh my God, the world is infinitely large and we can dominate the whole thing, started this. Things like Bitcoin, which is like, oh my God, if everyone believes, then belief is self-perpetuating and it can be in- infinitely valuable, right? And it can only be zero. Then you see like GameStop and like this whole series of things. I think there is this... In fact, in some ways, like the tails infected the entire narrative of Silicon Valley, right? And so that's why we get to the today's-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Although it's a recent phenomenon, right? Because like even as far as ten, 15 years ago, the businesses that Silicon Valley generated were like unbelievably capitalistic. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't about like moving heavy dollars. Like that's kind of a recent Bitcoin style. There's a series of things. I, I honestly think a lot of like what's gone on has been people learning the wrong lessons from like Bitcoin and religion effectively in this era, right? Where if you think about like this dynamic, it's like you had the era of Google and Facebook, which everyone got wrong from like a storytelling perspective, largely because like, well, how big could they possibly... Even I got this wrong. Like I was like, what is the thing that is more than a hundred billion dollar company? That's unfathomably large in historical context. And so people got, "Oh my God, things can be huge." Then Bitcoin, which again, I was early on, you know, Dave, you were too, and like then Ripple and Solana and like all this stuff taught people the lesson of like effectively the aver-- which I love this line, 'cause it's true, which is the average of zero to infinity is infinity, which is like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Well, people are saying maybe four of inflation, four real. Like, there, there's some, like, people are arguing with the numbers. But, like, let's... It's a big number. It's a number much bigger than we've ever had in recent history. So DC needs it. The country in that way needs it, right? Silicon Valley's having a fucking party. And then New York weirdly really needs it too because New York is, like, this is, like, a huge financial engine for New York. Unlike historical tech situations where, look, you can't make that much money on Facebook or Google if you're in New York because they don't need that much money. It's, like, not your business. Now you need s- everything. Every insurance product, everyone's freaking having a party. And so the problem is when you say not, well, what happens if they don't work out? I'd flip it around and say, right now, if you did not have an AI story, we would be in, like, terribly dire straits.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

Look, I'm just repeating what I see on Twitter, but there was like a, you know, the revenue was hooking up, and then, like, basically as token prices have dropped, their revenue, shockingly, just kind of flat lines. And again, like, in a world where we're playing infinity or zero games, which is the whole world right now, flat is very scary, 'cause flat can go up or down.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 169

No, it's just obvious, but it's just a game. I posted about this the other day, which is like, look, there have been three eras of how tech deals with, like, messaging and marketing. Era one, I think we'll call it the Bill Gates era, where, like, you get called before the stand and you're super indignant about it, you're super pissed off, and you look terrible. It ends up being a disaster. Like, it really hurt Microsoft, right? It, like, kind of broke its spirit when the world said, "You're doing something bad." They said-- And, like, it was just the, the indignation. Era two was, like, the Google and Facebook era, where everyone looked at what Bill Gates did and they're like, "Well, that was a mistake, so we're gonna fight this." The fight back has actually worked better than at least what Bill Gates did, right? In terms of being like, "Okay-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 167

... on the kids stuff, they get to blame... I mean, the, the stuff like the, like, age verification stuff would be so easy for them to do, but somehow it's Facebook's problem. Like, they're pretty good at pushing off blame to others.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 164

It's not a biased point. It's very simple. If society had the balls, right, at a national level to say, "We as a society, as a democracy, don't want social media, people to, kids to use more than one hour of social media a day," if we could actually pass that and believe that as a society, then fine. That's the same thing for all the players. This is, like, the equivalent of saying, "Hey, if you're Budweiser, because Budweiser, we don't like Budweiser, or Budweiser's the biggest target or has the biggest checkbook, you can't let your beer be more than 3% alcohol, but everyone else can have 6 or 8% alcohol." What do you think the teens are gonna buy? They're gonna buy the 6 or 8% alcohol. It's just, like, selective bias.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 164

That's what they've grafted to. They said, "Well, we're an internet company, and internet companies that are working grow like this." But it was-- that was a very, very different age. I mean, companies that could control their growth. Now, look, Facebook had a period when it stalled out and had to be restarted and whatever. Like, it's not perfect. But I think the real issue here is when people are like, "Well, the ARR this year is this, and we're gonna hit this number," it's like no one has any idea, right? And the fact that you can accelerate and then decelerate and then re-accelerate, these are things that are acting like early stage companies still trying to find ignition. But they're just so big and went so quickly that they were having these IPO-style conversations about things that aren't. Now, how does it all play out? I mean, like, look Anything where, like, you can accelerate and decelerate and miss is a huge problem for the whole industry, right? 'Cause it just means that, like, we don't know, right? And that doesn't mean you still don't buy it or, like, you know, you do the Kushner barbell thing, buy some sports teams that you pay att-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

Look, I did CNBC earlier today on this topic, and here's the basic way I would look at it. The real story here is the variance quarter to quarter and year to year on how you project these things is God knows what, right? It's, like, an enormous variance, right? And the problem is that's a problem for everyone. Like, people wanna pattern match Anthropic and OpenAI to the rollout of the internet and Google and Facebook.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

Here's the funny thing. So I now have my Sam bot infrastructure, has the ability to run Twitter ads for me. So I messaged it. I was like, "Hey, I had all these guests on. Pull some good quotes from them and, like, just spend 500 bucks and promote it on Twitter." And it's really funny because my totally automated pipeline for doing this did a very good job, but it actually confused the Scotts, right? So it basically put the picture in a thing of Scott Belsky, and then had a quote, uh, from Scott Stanford. So you're not alone.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

I'm with you. I have my own takes on where the leverage and I can deploy on this stuff is. I do think I'm with you ideologically. I do think it's one of the tr- problems of a Twitter or fun podcast with your friends who are all venture capitalists in different places is we can all fervently agree with each other and feel really good about it. Yeah. You guys, this was really fun. I appreciate you all joining. I hope you had fun doing it. Super fun. This was great. Thank you for hosting. So thank you all.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

I think, first of all, it's kind of funny 'cause by historical standards then it was an incredibly meteoric rise. Facebook's valuation grew unbelievably slowly compared to the labs, right? And there were obviously generations. Like, I would argue I was... Peter, you were kinda generation one and a half maybe. I was generation two at Facebook. There's now been generation three and generation four. But there's not 20 generations, right? There was, like, a s- a set of people who worked for 40 years, did great work, and then passed the torch, and that's happened, like, a few times. And actually, the core leadership team at Facebook has been unbelievably stable now for, like, a decade, right? Like, which is a very different dynamic.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

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