Tech Earnings, Destroying Trust in Reality

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Sam Lessin's end of week roundup ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏

More or Less: Tech Earnings & Election ‘Influencers’ — We talk about tech earnings, and the parts of businesses where you should get AI tailwind leverage vs. not.. (should be easy to crank out more revenue, but not necessarily more users)…. Destruction of trust in the ‘real world’ and the flight to trusting ‘influencers’ because it is too hard to figure out what is real.

Some Hot Takes

Deep Fakes Don’t ‘Trick’ Anyone they Just Destroy Trust In Reality.. and drive people to trust influencers / cults instead. The election is going to come down to which influencers have the most pull with Pennsylvania moms ...

Personal Introductions Only — same thing is going on in VC. AI makes cold intros too easy, and too hard for anyone to tell what is real vs. what is fake — so everyone retreats to only taking pitches from personal relationships…. AI makes society more closed system (new aristocracy) vs. more open.

NotebookLM is the new CRM — people liked this… I dumped nearly 10 years of weekly firm updates at slow into notebook LM and guess what, it really works. The era of humans putting data in little boxes for machines is OVER, and I would be very worried if your company is based on humans putting information in little boxes.

All of NYC real estate is $1.5T… so is Meta. According to a questionable LLM response, all of NYC real estate is worth basically the same as meta… and half of apple!? Walking the streets this last weekend it is just a shocking thing to see physically represented how BIG some of these numbers really are.

To be a real seed investor you have to be a professional loser who embraces your job as selling a commodity at astronomical prices. You are not an entrepreneur, you are not a ‘market’ participant, and you are certainly not an asset gatherer. You have to be both thematically and specifically correct, and care a ton about capital efficiency, and eat only what you kill… and you can’t do it for fun. You have to take it seriously as a real vocation, not an avocation. — I am going to have to finally write this book.

Hereticon in Miami — and it was really inspiring… truly — It is really good to get out of bubbles and talk with interesting people…. And this really delivered (thanks for invite)…. New York was also super fun this last weekend/ it is wild how nice the west side highway has gotten for running… and how fancy everything is (even downtown Brooklyn!!)

Sam

P.S. Convo with Larry Summers on Nov 12th?… I am doing a conversation for our 1636 forum with LS on the state of Harvard and road forward… It will be a pretty small group and should be interested (RSVP on zoom)