More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

Partners, man, but they are actually, when they are developer conferences, they're really partner business conferences. And the story is build on us, build on us, build on us, build on us, because it locks in our ecosystem and we need entrepreneurs to sit on our platforms, right? And so.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

Guys, in the end of the day, crazy people talking, no, I think it's just crazy people with a valid, the thing that's like true north is keep you talking and validate you. We'll just like spin you into crazy fucking dimensions. And look, absolutely. It's like you.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

Adam's friend. No, I just think like I mean Quora is a great example though, by the way again I when Quora launched I was really excited for it because in the fundamental idea right of being like ooh, like Wikipedia is not gonna cut it, right? How do you create an incentive flow around answering real questions? Honestly, is it social capital? Is it financial capital? You guys remember Biz Stone's jelly, right? Like people have tried this so many times and like

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

I gotta tell you, our, like, creator fun w- day hackathon was the opposite. I've, like, never seen such a hungry group of people excited to engage with using this shit to build- Their empires. So, like, I think it depends, like, but yes, I agree. Just as the monks would go to Germa- Germanic tribes and just get com- literally killed for cutting down sacred trees, the anthropic engineers will go to Middle America, and they're gonna need a large security force.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 148

from a, you know, antitrust perspective, regulatory perspective. And, and so you're just in the zone where like, this is a big technology story, but not every big technology story is a thing that where there's a startup angle or like a venture capital angle to them. And I look at this stuff and I'm like, yeah, I'm thrilled as a consumer. I'm thrilled as a shareholder, but this is not part of my like VC investible narrative at all. Right. Despite the fact I'm excited.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

with trillion dollar companies for this nut. They just can't afford it, especially when it's free to a trillion dollar company. So it might not be free to trillion dollar companies someday. The market might say, oh, we don't believe you anymore. That's a very big difference. But so long as the market, I agree.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 88

Yeah, it's distributions, distributions to pay it in capital, right? Like that's, and look, so, but Dave, guess, are you saying that there's like no question about having any DPI in long -term? Like I don't really buy.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 61

Guys, I was invited to Half Moon Bay to learn how to play golf with a bunch of VCs. And I was like, of course, because as venture capital just becomes traditional asset management investment banking, the last step to total conversion is to play golf. So I went, here's the thing. I was so excited. I was like, this is it. I'm finally going to become what this industry should. It's not for me. It's not for me. I don't get it. It's not my thing. It's not.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 67

How can Digby and Advertising be so subscale? They're not going to have an advertising model. It's going to be like some sort of fucking coin bullshit thing. you can't build an advertising model like this. I think you can for sure build.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 89

I like the idea that our entire, that half of our listener base has to go to Sun Valley. We're a little bigger than that, Jess. NOISE

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

uh And today's point, mean, like, look, if you look at the history, so, you know, this is this very deep relationship between who can control records and information and power, right? So this is like the whole history of Bismarck, right? Like Bismarck and the social and the social security and the early like increase in power of the state really all came down to like modern record keeping, right? was Ludwig von Bismarck.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 101

It's like, that'd be pretty cool if United had a little like thing where like you pay more. It's like your sleep score will be impacted negative 30%. How much is your sleep score worth in United points? There's like some sort of exchange rate.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 129

If every person in Venice had gotten an invite to the Jeff and Lauren wedding party and it was cool and it was a great concert and it's pro, then they would have been like, yeah, that's awesome.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 105

But this is exactly what's, I mean, in some ways, I think what's interesting is I spent a lot of time last year on the university problems. And this is just like the university problems on steroids, right? It's kind of the same thing. Like you have the wrong person going into a leadership position or setting things up. All the donors are like pretty aligned. This is a terrible fucking idea, right? Just as they were like, you know, at Harvard, et cetera, you have a bunch of polling showing it's horrible shit, right? But then the question of like the gears of change, like how that actually affects, it's like the actual governance structures are so far removed.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 54

Yeah. I think there's a lot of truth to that, and also, I mean, that's the flip side of being private for so long. Like, we talk about, you know, all these companies staying private for so long, but they do amass, not sizable in terms of the whole TAM of investing, but in terms of the private markets, a lot of investors. Couple weeks before the IPO, when I was talking to the world's largest asset managers about the SpaceX IPO, they said, "Look, you know, we're gonna get as much as we can," because there just aren't that many 20X stories in the market now.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 154

How could they? It's like, that's, maybe guys, that's gonna be the HP application is when you wanna print your porn, it's gonna be like, that's AI. The AI will say, no, no, no printing porn.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

It's much more, it's much more cynical than that, which is basically in the early internet, you had Google and Facebook, which had two things. One is they had explosive user growth. had unbelievable. They had all these amazing, they were also unfucking believably good businesses, right? From like a fundamentals perspective, the costs versus the potential that monetization was like off the charts. Good. Right. And a lot of people of our generation experienced that. And it was like the most exciting, most amazing world changing thing you could possibly experience.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

Well, the story I've heard, which I buy is the story of like, again, just optionality, which is like, look, what we really have to do is renegotiate the debt, right? Just renegotiate it straight up. And like, it's pretty hard to do when everything's ripping. So you're like, ah, we'll push the economy down. Then we'll just like renege slash renegotiate the debt. And then we'll come out stronger on the other side. So it's kind of like, it's the classic strategy from Top Gun, which is like you hit the brakes and they fly right by.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 90

I, if in the history of world, if Mark ends up making his fortune on music, that would just be wonderful. Like it's like 2100.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 73

Trump make poor was really happening. All these numbers were going down and people were feeling sad. And so I guess on Saturday morning or Sunday morning, they decided that'd a good time to announce a Trump make rich. And they were like, this go down too much. We say thing. And the thing they say, the funny part about the announcement, I just as someone who really believes in crypto, I'm actually very happy we have people who care about crypto doing this stuff. But like, the announcement was quite funny because he did not announce that Bitcoin and Ethereum would be in the reserve. He just named all the

— Sam Lessin, Episode 89

And so the vast majority of tokens and spend in the market, the good marking, the Good Morning America audience is going to be going for cheap Qwen effectively-

— Sam Lessin, Episode 146

So one business you shouldn't get into that will be taken out by AI is writing PR press releases. That's not a business anymore.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

Isn't there, there's gotta be some raise now and then like, or, like do some sort of swap on a prediction market that kind of hedges out the risk, right? The, the look, look, I think.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

that that is highly controlled, right? Because that claim, if that claim isn't true and no one can trust the truth or dis truth of that specific type of claim, then like it's extremely hard to have a financial market around hard assets, right? And so that makes sense. And I think that will happen. there, but like, I just think you have to think about crypto has been pigeonholed as like, just that. And it's a much broader ecosystem, right? And I that's going to be the clarity that's come in that helps people. Secondly, I'd say is like, look, with the email thing with a lot of things,

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

But the whole point of a palette cleanser is it's not to anyone. It's just being like, I'm just done. I want to eat my amuse -bouche in peace. This is what I think. Let's move on.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

in Ukraine has dramatically propped up their economy, right? Like, very cynically, right? Like, it's but it has propped their economy. And like, we didn't have AI right now, we'd all be in a world of hurt. We need narratives, we long term play building a bunch of computers long term, probably is helpful. No one knows exactly how. And right now, we're kind of on these like hype wavy things we know don't end anywhere that important, but they're better than nothing. You know?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

It was re -humbling. Nate and I, Nate and I, with another friend, left at 5 p .m. from San Francisco, flew to Jackson Hole, woke up at four in the morning, we're climbing by five, summit at Grand Teton around 1 p .m., and then climbed down and ended our day at about 10 p .m. back in the parking lot. So, it was a 16 -hour hike, 7 ,000 vertical feet, 20 peaks.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 65

Well, because you do. You do. This is what we're talking about with AI, which is like, unfortunately, venture capital went from like a niche cottage supporting industry, which to a thing that's big enough and influential enough that it actually is accidentally shaping the narrative of what companies show up, right? And like, it's basically become a reflection of itself in a lot of ways, and a lot of bad pride. Now, there are other factors, like, look, I do think that you can't discount the fact that

— Sam Lessin, Episode 50

which is, you know, was thinking rock rock is great for men of leisure, such as myself. You know, we have a free hands. We can walk around with our rock rock and our coffee, but there's a lot of people, believe it or not, who still like, you know, have like real jobs and like use laptops or phones a lot. And for those people, we're going to cut, have weighted cases coming. So I've been, I've been buying a lot of tungsten, um, on the internet and which is very heavy metal. And so I'm going to make, I'm going to

— Sam Lessin, Episode 97

live stream it. Let's like have the 20 engineers like be in that we can like open source, like have their check in their daily check ins.

— Sam Lessin, Episode #85 - Take 01_67a508fc24f2a63a2b06e1af

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