More or Less: Elon’s $97B Bid & More on Memes
We discuss Elon’s $97B bid for the OpenAI nonprofit and the Altman clap-backs as cultural moments / new style all out lols-warfare… some thoughts on how broken google maps is, and some discussion of slow creator fund 1
$64M - Slow Creator Fund I We announced our first dedicated creator fund at slow… This is something Megan and I have been working on for years (with support from the whole slow team) — excited to have it live and public (and closed so the SEC allows us to formally talk about it!)
- On This Week in Startups — If you have 15-20 minutes for this —=Jason and I discussed it on his long-running ‘this week in startups’ show… and I think the overview hits all the main points of what is up.
- My Note Announcing It — — If you have 2 minutes for this here is what I wrote when we launched it and links to the official materials
- Axios - — If you have 1 Monte for this - Dan Primack hit the highlights in Axios
- Pomp — gets the comment of the day — the point — which is that the interesting part is the structure we have come up with that aligns incentives with capital and creators (and lowers cost of capital for creators / fixes a lot of the unique issues with creator investing for funds)
Overall the reception here has been great… thank you all for supporting us on the way — as I have been saying for a long time, I am sure we are thematically right, now we just have to prove it by doing awesome deals :)
Merit First
Continues to gain a lot of momentum — the bottleneck ironically is bringing on enough people / hiring the right folks to run the org and build out standard aptitude — hundreds of companies have asked to be onboarded, hundreds of applicants have started the process… and we have dozens of As scored on the test so far.
- For companies — you obviously want the best candidates possible… and you probably hire based on ‘credentials’ mostly because that is what you can possibly filter… if you want to add unbelievably high quality candidates to your pipeline / fast track-em from our tests OR you want to use MF to give candidates who don’t have the ‘credentials’ you are used to a second chance in your hiring pipelines before rejecting them? Give us a ring….
- Looking for a great job — take the test :) — so many good companies are lining up to fast-track evaluating candidates coming through our service.
- It is so obvious the moment for this is now — credential based hiring was just a hack because it was impossible / to expensive to build good tests for roles & to grade applicants at scale… but this is a place AI really does matter / have leverage on how we can operate.
More on Meme Coins
I spent more time this week going down the rabbit hole that is crypto in 2025… and the community around meme coins on Solana… it is absolutely fascinating — and a crazy intersection of worlds / incentives:
- Meme coin universe is a taste of the future: bots and people competing against each other, it is impossible to tell what is real and fake, total information warfare… deep asymmetries, people desperate for narrative, community, something to believe in— it is WILD and in some ways a return to the ‘unwashed’ internet pre-real-identity social networks, but global and far higher velocity… if you are interested in playing along with experiments I am working on — drop your solana address here
- Crypto meets AI storytelling — when it comes to narrative construction / messing around with storytelling, mystery, and community building you really see where these things intersect — working on building memes around 300baud and watching them explode aided by AI is wild… making videos, writing poems - spreading cryptic sayings…
- The tools of the trade are amazingly developed — as a hedge fund friend pointed out — one of the amazing parts of the whole ecosystem around meme-narratives is that the TOOLs that have been developed to understand (and trade) this ecosystem are amazing at this point / better in many cases than what exist for the traditional markets — it is wild how lopsided development gets when regulation lags — crypto has becomes so so over-developed / made such progress trading memes and stories largely because it has been blocked out of participating in ‘real’ assets by lack of regulatory clarity.
- … and for those of you playing along eeawwww
Enjoy the long weekend,
Sam
p.s. I am thinking a lot about spheres of influence in all things — HT LF.. I think in a world of no natural barriers / no friction — it feels like the inevitable organizational direction not just for nations, but for communities, and individuals — looking to carve out niches of purpose and place.
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email [email protected]