More or Less: Google Antitrust, and is AI really like Biotech investing? — I was at a secret conference and missed this week’s more or less… but listing to it my take away is that perhaps if I say less, then my co-hosts will be more ‘less-es’ than ‘mores’ ??… great conversation with Jess, Brit, and Dave about google breakup path & the realities of ‘who knows’ when it comes to AI / love the bio-tech analogy jess!— I would say the ‘lesses’ took the day.
Some Hot Takes:
- The Value of Software Is Going to Zero / Software is a Business Tool not a Model: this has been a hobbyhorse of mine for a while… forbes clipped some of my quotes on this… and nice to get the Dave ++ on the pod here! … I am interested / been pondering what happens to the ‘low code’ platforms
- 10 Things That Matter in Seed Right Now: People got excited debating this one on the internet — it is a weird time… but this is my effort to get all the issues on to one page / down to a single screenshot.
- AI is the puppeteer… and humans are the marionettes — OpenAI comically really really didn’t want to make this imagefor me with a ‘realistic human’. This made me LOL a lot…
- Graphing trust destruction at Tesla — Elon is such a frustrating character because he obviously does epically good stuff, and also has no problem exaggerating beyond recognition, etc… Tesla’s stock price after this announcement is a clear graph of that lack of trust catching up — the markets are ultimately rational / eventually the meme-stock thing falls apart… also is this why Lyft is up?
- Companies you should start…. I really want a high end vision board company… also, I spoke to several teams in the last week — and I legitimately think it is time for someone to finally build cancelpidea… (later I am very serious about TBH, we have been waiting for a negative graph / real identity graph for like a decade+)
- Finally time for the ‘Bain Bar’? when I was a consultant right out of college in 2005 (gasp) I convinced my manager to let me and one other guy work on a chrome extension where associates could collectively bookmark resources across the firm that were useful, annotate the web, etc. and then search over the resources — We never could really get the experience right, but it always seemed right that a place like Bain should follow around associates across the internet and build their own search engine… with LLMs the time for this seems now and obvious for any knowledge work firm…
- The Boston Globe wrote a nice piece about the ‘State of Harvard’ deck I put together along with some other stuff by this guy called ?bill Ackman? :) .. stay tuned soon for a very interesting deck from 1636forum on the state of the business school.
For those fasting… have an easy fast…
Sam
P.S. I got some book rx this weekend from a well known science fiction author I really respect… I am checking out works by Joe Abercrombie and Matt Ruff…
P.P.S. the northern lights are great… caught shadows of them in Montana Thursday night, but reminded me of how truly mind-blowing they were in Alaska 2 years ago — I honestly think seeing this is a peak human experience. Worth flying for.
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email [email protected]