trying sending on sunday vs. friday... humor the experiment
More or Less: Think of the children! — Instagram’s new teen protection stuff, YouTube, etc…. And some interesting conversations about the built in ‘social inflation rate’ necessary to create vitality in social products, and a bit on supply chain security / the future of what security we will pay for given that none of us want cheap pagers.
Some Hot Takes:
- The Aleo Launch — Thrilled to see Aleo get to main net / fully live…. The last of a series of L1s I seeded for Slow between 2016-2020. If Bitcoin is the answer to store of value, and Solana (slow seeded $430K —> $650M+ returned to LPs) is the answer for speedy transactions … Aleo has the tech underpinnings to deliver a next generation decentralized internet (for real) — long road to haul ahead to mass mass adoption, but great to have this out there and another at least mark of a 200M+ return to slow on a 1.5m check.
- The Anti-Hustle Thesis — this really seemed to resonate with a lot of folks-- I really believe in ‘grit’, but for real success I think one of the most important things is to not force things that aren’t working. The grittiest people fail when they FORCE success at too high and too unsustainable a cost, which they sustain for too long — success requires grit yes, but telling people to hustle leads them astray far too often and wastes too much human energy and potential.
- How Extremists Capture Things (and what to do about it) — this one is WILD to me… did you know that the last FOUR presidents of Harvard’s alumni association (HAA) are all members of the same 2,000 person ‘coalition for a diverse harvard’ that promotes things like an ‘ethnic studies’ department with messages that explicitly say ‘there is no ethnic studies without a free Palestine’ … out of 300,000 harvard alumni, this is who represents us?
- Developer Interfaces Matter — when OpenAI was just getting started I remember talking to other tech leaders about why they were winning developer mindshare — I honestly think it has more to do with the fact that they have a simple to use POST api than almost anything else — big companies like google lose sight of the fact that easy onboarding matters so much because all the scale business comes from enterprise … the little guys don’t move the needle directly… and enterprise can put up with your admittedly more secure and better (but hard to use) o-auth patterns, etc… but when it comes to developer mindshare, most big platform leaders really don’t get it…
- The Uber ‘Entrepreneurship’ Head-fake — remember all the early Uber branding / marketing to drivers about ‘being your own boss’ / how being an Uber driver made you an entrepreneur? That stuff really hasn’t aged well…. IMHO it was a hell of a head fake using the American dream of freedom and entrepreneurship to head-fake a lot of folks into being app-order-takers with little to know leverage. My positive spin tho is I think people are wise to this… and I really believe the story of shared equity / that equity and ownership are the key components of long-term American entrepreneurial freedom not just flexibility — has becoming clearer and clearer to most. This is part of what is so exciting about franchises, the next generation of businesses being structured to create entrepreneurial opportunities — they can be capital light AND give a larger swath of folks the key component of equity and ownership (and cough cough crypto really should help by lowering the management and transaction costs of it all…
Sam
FKT West Marin to Grand Teton Summit? The One-Day Grand Teton Smash and Grab — last Saturday at 5pm Vlad, Nate, and I left from SFO… by 1pm the next day we were on top of the Grand Teton in Jackson hole at 13,700… and then by 10pm that night back down — super fun adventure and highly recommend — doing it in one 16 hour day vs. normal 2 or even 3 days was - I will admit - one of the harder athletic things I have done. Highly suggest doing it, also meta ray bans work GREAT for filming hanging on rock pitches over 2,000 foot drops! … also extremely humbling — I can’t believe that some dude just did the same thing car-to-car in 2:50 min (this is far more impressive to me than the 2 hour marathon TBH)
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email [email protected]