Things I spent time thinking about this week / talking about:
More or Less: Pavel & Telegram - WTF…. The story here is that in 2024 no matter how strong or principled a person you are, if you are human you aren’t strong enough to fight the state(s) — if you want to talk a game of privacy and security you better be able to technically back it up (encrypt and throw away the keys)… and show up to the table with a state-sized war-chest of profit, lobbyists, popular advocacy, etc… and it isn’t just messengers - you can’t hide from states under the ‘internet’ banner broadly anymore, this shit is feudal (cough cough airbnb)
Some Hot Takes:
- Funding Digital Pirates / Not the Navy this seemed to resonate with folks — reminder of just what a hero Jack Sparrow really is.
- AI accelerates the ‘fully digitized’ world disconnection from the physical world… and all the value / real value in the world is systems and platforms which bridge the digital and physical worlds (financial markets, social networks, etc.) — with all the nasty drift associated with their imperfect mirroring of reality.
- What Nike is telling us about cultural shift — the message is no longer inclusion / find your greatness of the last decade… it is ‘be a killer’ / I am a bad person :) — probably partially nike’s cultural drift too far to the ‘mainstream’ and losing their cultural sports credibility — but there is something deeper going on here.
Tax Lady Cometh : This Harris tax silliness isn’t over… not even close — Aaron Levy has agreed to pay all our tax bills if she gets elected and gets this done — but more serious people point out that the real game is about the senate. Nonetheless, I really hate that people are excusing these ridiculous policies by saying ‘she is just saying that / she isn’t serious about it’ (isn’t that exactly what other people say about the other guy!!!) More serious proposals would be to tax borrowing against assets as income OR let’s talk about non-profits?
Harvard — for those following along here is the deck I published (with a few key bits of feedback from folks on this mailing list / thank you!
Hiring Two Roles for Slow (Hiring) — pls share - looking for investment associate and content marketing help — oh, and if you want to try standard aptitude my AI enabled testing platform, take my ‘Peter Thiel’ test
Best, Sam
Graffiti War with SF The level of twitter indignation about fines for not cleaning up graffiti was pretty LOL to me — this apparently is ideal twitter fodder.
Oh and let’s not forget the Woodside Village Pub — hadn’t been there in years til date night last night.. good food, HILARIOUS place. Set aside running into every VC I know, and every cool kid working on AI — their pricing is so funny. Fixed menu but basically everything is a surcharge is very funny (jessica’s favorite — the ‘deconstructed’ tomato basil mozzarella salad - where the mozzarella is an $8 surcharge! This is why you love Silicon Valley — the restaurants are leading indicator of new business models!
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop