More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

But that's, think the, like, this is the interesting thing. I really poo poo what I'll call momentum investors. I won't name names. There's a lot of people out there that clearly the strategy is as venture capitalists, whatever they're doing, they don't really start from first principles. They see what's moving and then whatever is moving, they just double down. It's like the classic see a line, go to the front, get out in front and lead it type thing. And I find doing that extremely cynical.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 73

I think you should start absolutely. And there could be a spin-off publication called Tennis Mars Today. And I bet people would sign up for that.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 90

I'm a SpaceX shareholder, I love SpaceX. I have millions of dollars personally in SpaceX because I love, I think it's an amazing fucking company. What they can do is amazing, they're ahead of everyone. And by the way, Starlink is fucking sweet. So like I'm all into SpaceX, this is the same thing with, so Sam Altman sells AGI to get cheap capital to build pretty basic AI. Elon sells Mars to get cheap capital to build space internet.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 90

Well, yeah, but that's in all fairness, that's just because like I did this really quickly, right? Like I can, I'll get it more sophisticated for you.

— Sam Lessin, Episode more_or_less_indian_wells_2026_03

I think they have generally lost to lead runners. Yes. But look, I just think it's interesting. It's feeling we're having this conversation about a brand and a product. Right. And the thing I go back to is like, yes, there are still brands in the world. I just wonder if their relative importance goes down when it's like, don't really care. Like ⁓ I like Hoka shoes on the margin. If there are four things and I'm like, okay, I know these work for me. I know they're good. Like fine. I'll just like trust them to a point. That's the brand value.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

I just like the tweet I saw was just saying that it was like, Meta sets down Verizon's universe. Both users are very upset.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 140

I think that's like, if he wants to go deep on this and the markets will give him the latitude to ensure, but it's not like because they have cars and they have some advantage in general robotics. Like I just don't understand how that connects at all.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 54

I mean, clearly nay. But like, why? Because these people, like people will just play games with it. You'll just all of sudden have 50 companies that have contracts with each other. They're all night. I like, just, I think all these arbitrary rules end up getting hacked around anyway by overpriced lawyers. So like, I just think it's like, the simpler the better. I mean, I don't like, I agree with you, Dave, that like, there's kind of derivatives, all sorts of games being played. But I guess the flip side to all of it is

— Sam Lessin, Episode 115

that that's going to be for ads for the next many years. Everyone's excited about the stock price at all time highs, it should be. Then there's this like, how do we get pervasive human connectivity for all the other things we want to do like AI, where I think the Ray -Bans are a great story and they're a great product. And then there's the long, long -term thing, which is yeah, Facebook's going to keep spending 5 % of its market cap to make sure that they're first to this long -term vision. And I think they've made Apple look pretty silly.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

Well, there's a bunch of aspects to it, but the short version is I kind of don't buy that people are going to want the AI girlfriend straight up or that's going to be like a dominant force over creators. Like there's this history of social media where people tell the story. I I've written this myself where it's like, look, Facebook, your friends were more interesting than people magazine. Right. And that's why you ended up with Facebook. It turned out that professional friends, influencers,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 101

me, but the interesting thing for me, so my experience is, again, think about like a lot of the cursor, you know, vibe coding type projects you'd over the summer and then transitioning into kind of this more consumerized version with open claw. Now, the funny thing for me is I know how all these things running around doing things for me that I don't even really care about, but it's like, not even worth shutting them off, right? This is like, this is this is like, this is heat of the internet is heating up with all these things doing things. And it's funny, because a few things that I've been messing with over the summer, I like stop

— Sam Lessin, Episode 136

know. It's like what would be like in some you get out you mean you got a lot of board decks, you know, like I wonder, you know, but the problem is, is like the firms are so small. It'd be very hard to place a spy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 91

It's just, well, the biggest problem is they don't actually, they don't have the inventory they say they do. Like they like to claim they have all this access they don't have and like, and like these bids they don't have. And so these guys have crossed me one time too many, which means I'm just going to take away their business.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 99

Now it doesn't matter. And so, like, basically, as long as someone in the world provides some digital service, it will be found, and you can instantly use it, which means that there can be no rules.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 142

She should probably start smoking cigarettes. Like publicly. I think like if you want to be, I don't know. I think what's interesting is like we had old man versus old man. Everyone was sad. We now have like very old man, right? Versus like young black female, right? And like, it's just going to be really interesting because they're going to run completely opposite strategies. And like, if this

— Sam Lessin, Episode 57

You c- you can't put whatever you want in the App Store. Like it's totally locked down. Now I'm not saying like you can't like... It's just interesting, like Linux is open. I don't think Apple's an open company.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 160

I think I've like, I think I've been three. I mean, I think I've been, so I've been three or four times, but I think my sum total of days is like six. So I'm like, I'm a very in and out Burning Man. I'm not a real burner by any means. I'm a very heavy user of the Burning Man airport.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

Well, no, no, I'm just like, I've actually had legit and I will say that the big thing for me is I like building these things every once in a while with the newest, you know, and really like refreshing them because you see how far the tools have come. And the answer is from a production, make something good perspective. The last year has been good. Like modern Gemini is like quite good, right? In terms of like what's ability to do modern Gemini. Well, two, two five is like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 105

Why would number go up? Like, this is like, you know what it is? It reminds me of, like, the Bill Gurley thing. You know how Bill Gurley always likes to talk about how bankers rob startups because they under, they, for the pop and ba, ba, ba, ba, ba?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 161

I think financially I can get the... I can totally understand the Anthropic bet over, or the SpaceX blah, blah, blah. I just, like, I'm fully okay with the fact we live in, like, a memetic cult war thing, and it's gonna be interesting. We've just seen, like, a mini skirmish in the cult war of Altman versus Musk. I think the next cult war will be Dario versus Elon.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 149

they don't do what we're taught they're supposed to do in terms of discounted cash flows and printing money and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But they're still really valuable, right? Because if you own them, like the option value and the strategy value of them, and leverage and other things is just massive, right? And I think there's like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 118

Well, and I think it goes to the conversation we had before about pipe size, right? Which is like in a constrained mass media environment, you're super, super scared of like one wrong thing going through the pipe, right? In internet era, the reality is like, it's just noise. It just raises the volume of more noise. There is an impact, which is it devalues the Nth thing even more. Cause you're like, ah, it's all just noise. Who cares? But like, it just raises the temperature on everything.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 72

Given all the smack we talk about, the lessons talk about Elon, I'm like just worried that with their self -driving might be a little different for us.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 37

Brit, do you understand how bad, listen, do you understand how bad the engineering of Twitter is? Twitter was at one point relying on a single Mac mini to stay on the internet. is no way, again, the same guy, you're seeing the guy who's responsible for Twitter you think is a good enough engineer to have built to come up with Bitcoin. No chance.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

Which, yeah, like it's good for me. Like, I think it's funny, but I can understand that it's not funny for a lot of other people, including probably our friends at Meta. But for me, it's funny. Like, how great would it be if he just started posting great content?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 151

No, I think this is like total misinformation. We can end on this, but here's the thing. We now live in a world of ladyfests and things that are a lot of men, but there are also ladies. There are no manfests because we somehow convinced ourselves that manfests is canceled. And I don't think this is fair. I think if there's ladyfests, there should be manfests, or you should invite me to ladyfests.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

I agree completely. I mean, if, if, if open AI actually pulls off a deal of substance this way, right? Like not like I'm, there's some 15th app somewhere deep in some menu, but like, it's actually like the default. If they are able to pull it off, whoever does that BD deal is the greatest BD person in history and will have made the entire value of the company there. Cause otherwise I just don't see a path forward for them. Right. So my sense is, is like, it probably won't happen that way. I also can't.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

That actually is a pretty good idea. That's a good idea. If you just had a run out, that would be a thing investors would look up just like the rundown of days and week and like the policies in one shot. It's like we talked about, we talked about, we talked about like a year ago that you should, that someone should do an in -person ETF where you just buy the companies that are full five days a week in person or more. like that's, can just do the, the, the media business model for this is what Jess does. She just publish and trade for it.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 60

You either go lower level, right? And you say, look, the LLMs, they're going to evolve as they evolve. One might be marginally better or worth whatever. It's a long game of iteration. There's not going to be like fundamental ROI tech leverage in that, like return on capital perspective. So we're going to use it to raise a fuck ton of money and go deeper in the stack. Or you say the opposite, which is like, it's just leverage for customer stickiness and acquisition. And we're to go higher in the stack. But I don't think anyone currently believes there's any sort of like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 118

There still isn't like a really wildly there isn't like an easy way that I know of to like do that right which is kind of insane. It says something. It says something.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 127

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