I joked on Monday it was like watching the crazy one-shot movie Saturday Night … about getting SNL on air… and it turned out to basically be that this week! Day one technical issues made for a wild ride, but proud of Jess and team for what they have accomplished here… Jessica’s Interview with Mark was Great… and I did a little first song and dance on Thursday — it has been fun to watch Jess and team figure out how to do this, and as an interested observer to the future of media, it is clear that platforms like TI are coming for the last bastion of cable - live. It just makes too much sense for them not to integrate live video into the overall content and community ecosystem as a key feature / loop… maybe Jess should hire Colbert to do TI late night? .. and I really want a gameshow… (wheel of fish?)
At a certain point maybe we should just rename more or less, “more or less AI” since that is basically the debate every week… the interesting point of this episode we got into was certainly this — both Dave and I are having a LOT of fun vibe coding… as much because it is a super fun game as for any other reason / playing with really great lego set — so much so that it makes evening TV less appealing with the wives … and maybe been doing less doom scrolling?
We all know that a certain set of mentally ill (and very lonely) people are going to be sucked into para-social relationships with AI a-la her in recent history… or the mental illness of addiction to memories from the 1990s classic “Until the End of the World” — but if Dave and I are basically chatting with / burning compute and tokens ‘for fun’ with AI coding… is that the same thing? And is that a threat to social media attention hegemony?? This is a big question because we know that AI productivity / business to business is a race to the bottom… but maybe not on entertainment??
Hot Takes:
- Nearlyfreeshares.com — you might remember that we are working on pi-bb.com to create a trusted community for swapping private company shares (everyone knows it is important, why is it so hard! … but new marketing alert… we are going to add a section around nearlyfreeshares.com where you can buy failing startup equity for a dollar or so (so the seller gets the write-off) / the dollar store of equity — this is going to be very funny… for a while yoni at slow wanted to do this ourselves writeoffco.com — but it is just too annoying / complicated… better (and funnier) to facilitate the transactions…. And just like in the real world, those dollar-shares every once in a while turn out to not be worthless!? Sign up for pi-bb.com if you want in, lol (but seriously)
- Creator Newsletters / Marketing to Attract Creators to Invest in — here is th open hand poker — you probably know that one of my favorite narratives / the second-order impact of AI commodifying software is that company building is going to more and more start with trusted people / brands first, products for community later — this is the thesis of our creator fund… here is the thing a bunch of months in, even more than for seed investing you have to drive inbound vs. trying to go outbound to find creators who are the right mindset … it is ALL about top of funnel… so, we are getting as a fund beck on that motion / telling the story… billy had a really nice piece lamenting vidicon’s lack of evolution / understanding how the creator economy is changing — and Megan’s blog‘slow upload’ is very good FYI. More soon.
- “The Children Yearn for the Mines” — this has always been a hilarious meme to explain Minecraft… take the kids out of the mines, they want to go back to the digital ones because kids LOVE mines. Here is the thing tho - based on instagram advertising.. I think that the adults seem to yearn for the plow — an era before domesticated horses it seems… in all seriousness though, niche advertising is getting VERY niche — the true expression of capitalism + AI is this.
- Simply having a big code base is no longer a moat — this is an interesting pattern I am seeing — there is no question that having an enormous code base to service crazy niche bespoke workflows and finicky customizations was once a real moat — it is just too painful to disrupt / copy / and no one good wants to work on it — but one thing with a lot of hands on time with AI is that this really IS what it is good at / where there is leverage … being enormous / lots of code is no longer a defensible position to work from.
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No seriously, you can’t hire people anymore who don’t ‘code’ even for generalist jobs… I spent a lot of time this week building out an end-to-end platform for the creator team at slow myself… take all our internal notes, pull out the proper nouns, figure out which ones are related to ‘creators’ and what people are saying about them, use those categories and comments to find way more categories and relevant people… find all the best podcasts for each category, find all the guests on all the podcasts, build a master-list of leads - score the entire list, build a tinder interface to manually over-score and provide feedback, build a system to go pull emails of interesting people, etc… this would have been 10x more work before cursor / etc. but now you can cowboy pretty effectively in a week and setup a system that does hundreds of thousands of API calls cheaply and easily to build your data-set… and my god is it powerful … I just don’t see how anyone who doesn’t figure out how to do stuff like this for their jobs can compete anymore…
Best, Sam
P.S. laser levelers - that is all.
P.P.S —if this isn’t a true American baseball experience… I don’t know what is