More or Less Deepseek madness shows even more how ‘meme’ dominated investing is… (and how hilarious it is for ai companies to be mad about ‘distillation’ after distilling the entire web)… We also go further exploring how memes with liabilities in the real world and competition are highly volatile (vs. pure ‘messianic’ memes outside of reality)
Some Other Hot Takes:
- A burning pile of cash is the AI moat — more on this soon… but hilarious time trying to get OpenAI to make me a picture of a castle using piles of burning cash to defend itself as its ‘moat’ — I am not done with this image :) … or I drink your milkshake…. Also, I can’t believe the SoftBank timing… it really makes you think you live in a simulation.
- Meta Goes Up Either Way — spending $60B… stock goes up… deepseek makes AI better and cheaper and undercuts spend… stock goes up.. I actually think there is a deep logic to this — you don’t bet on power, you don’t bet on picks and shovels as tech changes… you bet on the easiest purest point of leverage and profit— and/or you know how this ends if you grew up playing starcraft
- WTF VC in 2025 — been working on this — a bit derailed this week… but time for an update to the classic 2023 deck wherein I mostly take victory laps, but slightly expand on a few new ideas :)
- Jelly - My - Jelly… $0 to $260M in 4 hours?! —well this was the wildest ride in recent history for me… talking to Iqram leading jellyjelly (a company we seeded), Dave, Kortina, etc. we got excited about the intersection of the new media format he is working on and crypto… so being good citizens of 2025… I of course launched a meme coin for it — and this was the wildest experience I have had in a long long time… the thing went from $0 to $260m market cap in literally 4 hours…which has to be the fastest crypto ‘moon’ ever. millions and millions of dollars changing hands, etc. I gained ~40K+ twitter followers in hours, we hosted livestreams with thousands… the like 2 Solana I put in to seed it was within hours worth almost $5M (I haven’t sold any / won’t because that isn’t the point / wrong thing to do) … the app got 10,000 downloads, etc. Talk about the meme economy in a totally frictionless world being reality — tons to learn and debrief from this re: worldview (people LOVE you for 'making them money', and hate you when they don’t) — but net net great moment for jellyjelly and lots of work to do integrating ideas for the app <> crypto since there is clear excitement and demand.
Sam
P.S. Make the Internet Fun Again — more reflecting to do on jelly jelly meme coin… wild moment / but for all the crazy and FUD — and the total rawness of the meme coin world… biggest take away is that this week for me really did feel like early internet days of wildness and fun. It was a nice flashback to an earlier simpler time.
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email [email protected]