Things I spent time thinking about this week / talking about:
More or Less: Founder Mode…. Vs. ‘Manager Mode’ (airbnb vs. uber vs. snap) Vs. Part-Time-Founder Mode (twitter)… we discuss where this thinking is appropriate vs. not & most importantly the technological and historical context to these management strategies… and perhaps the most successful strategy of all — Google — where you give the working optimized cash cow to mr. manager Eric, and have the founders go be founders and spend as much money as possible in Alphabet in a desperate Walter White style attempt to hide all the cash!!
Some Hot Takes:
- I LOLed a bit with Packy’s discovery of vertical integrators… — mostly because this has been a major slow theme for the last 24 months / core to our GBO strategy… as typified by our Metropolis seed —> buyout play.
- I also LOLed at Harry Stebbing shockingly discovers that most investors are sheep and AI investments are going to zero— also love Harry, but what no shoutout to our ‘end of VC factory’ from a year ago :)
- Allbirds 20:1 reverse split to stay listed was a moment…. I remember distinctly our debate in the slow office (having seeded it) about starting to sell out at the ‘B’ because to stay in would require believing they would be the next Nike… We looked dumb for a bit, but ultimately with respect for the product & realization we are investors not traders - business is rational & the DTC Facebook ads thing was a temporal hack.
- Slow Thinking — got to spend some time with Kevin, will and the team on ‘where we are at’ — and some good conversations about the ‘Slow S1’ (high opportunity cost founders shouldn’t be starting companies until they have pre-written a credible S1), Seed investors taking advantage of liquidity in low liquidity world, focus on companies With financial ‘optionality’ post seed, and optionality on how they get big, and of course Following Great Entrepreneurs Away from the ‘Next Zuckerberg’ SV Model of Entrepreneurship to scaling capital efficient profitable businesses... this is where the actually cool kids are going
- Most importantly — I am really interested in platforms for small-e entrepreneurs vs. ‘Gig Economy Workers’
- And I have a new metaphor for these ridiculous $100B private AI infrastructure projects— they are ‘bridges to know where’ (get it, I am proud of that one)
If you care about Harvard … this week’s 1636 forum newsletter ‘big idea’ is a really shocking banger… I can’t believe that the DA is dropping the case against Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo for hate crimes against jewish students on the thesis that since others also did it and could not be identified it would be unfair to prosecute these two — my god. This one for once isn’t directly Harvard’s fault but WILD.
Best, Sam
Caravan Palace - Lone Dinner… this is an old track I forgot about til Spotify resurfaced.. great music video
Lastly, is google maps totally broken for anyone else? For me and Jessica on the peninsula google maps regularly gives us bad directions and ETAs with are 2x Apple Maps (and WRONG) … this has been a problem for 18 months but everyone seems to shrug it off… WFT? Are we in some terrible test group?
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop