More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

Yeah, we were like, doing the Google thing. We're competing. It's a, you know, consumer thing plus some API's, right? And like becomes a more sober story. I don't know. I know it's like, one of those things where like, at some point, like you become, it's a too big to fail thing. And to some degree. And so I don't know, I just think it's like, it's an interesting one, because you have to have this like crazy all everything narrative for them, because they're trying to do this legal thing plus the sobriety thing, or they're just like, yeah, well, we already like raised all the money. Now we're gonna pull up the ladder.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 113

No, but we could have, it's an inefficient experiment. I mean, like my basic view is the key to Silicon Valley. I couldn't agree more. What makes America special and then Silicon Valley in America is that we don't give a shit if you failed last time, you get to play again, right? And that means you get to take bigger risks with your time and effort. You can play higher. You can be closer to risk neutral. There's like so many amazing properties. My concern is twofold. One is just because you can take more risks doesn't mean you should take stupid risks.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

digital ocean and then like having a worker go and by the way, turns out that you're to time out on turning even like these emails into JSON because, all the freaking, cause they're like, cause like you can't, you have to do it asynchronously. And then because these things are slow.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 100

Yeah, but it just attention is too splintered. It's a loss the cut me we were all picking up dribs and drabs. I don't know. I think the whole follow the Olympics following everyone down into the cult sport thing. There are parts I like because I like the sports but I think overall is negative.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

No, I don't have the distribution. need Brian Chesky's and his distribution of hotel, of fake hotels in order to like have my jugglers work.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 99

that all play out from my perspective. We'll see. I mean, I'm obviously inherently skeptical that we pull it off, but it's a fun game to watch.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 81

No. So I think I really have always wanted I've wanted this for years. I've always wanted a tent. Well, feel that I've always wanted someone to make a coffee tale book of billboards of the one on one where you just take a photo of every single one for like decades because it's fascinating to watch the turnover in them like goes from the the iPod nano mini to the blah, blah, blah, blah. Here's my basic thing. When my mother comes to town for 15 years, she'd like, I don't know what any these companies are, what they do, or like, and that's true. She doesn't. You see Apple.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 129

Which by the way, if you think about the capital stack there, it's really easy to read it. Sam Altman, fine, he doesn't care. It's AI, right? Lockheed Group, he doesn't care, it's AI. Then you have a bunch of strategics and family offices because no smart people would invest in this, right? Like that's like how you end up with strategics and like hedge funds is when like the serious venture people are like absolutely not.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 87

Plus it turns out that like the four zip codes in America control 90 % of the wealth anyway. So like you only have to cover four zip codes. You don't need national delivery.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 117

It feels very unstable. But also to Jessica's point, like every step is logical enough, right? And like that the party will probably continue, you know? The key is you just don't want to be like a company in the middle.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 135

which literally just had the exact same steps like in the post, you're like, Oh, that's cute. The quote unquote AI just lifted the answer out of the Reddit page and stuck it at the top of the page. But since it's quote unquote AI, NOISE it's like gives Google the license to one box, whatever they want and just call it AI. Right.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 47

I like to suggest things in the background. I let someone else be the undersecretary or whatever. No, I'd like to think I'm the whisperer. That's kind how I see my own role in the world. But look.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 77

I will say in closing, want to give you one other, I want to give you one fumble fun bubble watch that just came into my inbox that I'm clearing as.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 129

But the thing I like about talking about like DPI right now in this moment is in some ways it's like the hardest thing for anyone to achieve. It's like the, you know, versus other things. Like it's easy to tap dance a good story to the middle East and raise a ton of capital and television of VC or vision of the future. It's easy to, you know, mark things wherever you want with it, you know, but like DPI is DPI. So I like focusing on it because I think it's like the hard thing, which is you put money in, you get more money out.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 66

a little bit a little bit but it's one of n things and it was in advance right that you were earning back is very different than a than an equity investment. So the upshot is yeah.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 86

was either proxy, you want to be the proxy, you know, like the proxy is the platforms, right? Which is like, yeah, the big advertisers tells you does pays for all the experimentation and builds all the data. And then not directly, you just indirectly retail it to all the little guys, right? Or like, it's the same thing with like content and open AI, you like scrape the internet with all the expensive stuff that people spend a lot of money building. And yeah, you know, you repackage it enough so it doesn't look the same and you remarket it, right? And like, so it's just like, that's like the game, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 104

I feel like it's time we talked before about how we've gone through a super cycle of internet. It's come back to reality. I this is the internet invading reality Burning Man zone. like, there'll be there'll be something new. There'll be some there'll be some some extreme new thing that comes. I just don't think it'll be Burning Man. You know, there'll be something. Something else will happen.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

there's all these people, all these people, I have lots of films, all these people in my life are now into watches, right? And I'm like, whatever, I'm not into watches, I have my Garmin watch. But then I start getting ads for them everywhere. And after a certain number of ads, I'll just buy anything, right? And so I got piled out and piled on and piled on ads. As the friend, he was like, walking around, went to a watch shop, I'm like, I'm not buying one of these, but cool. And then I walked in to buy a Leica

— Sam Lessin, Episode 120

You should, you should definitely all sign up for OnlyFans. Well, I will tell you, I actually, I've had a funny experience, I really wanted to start an OnlyFans for years and I started one like many years ago.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 101

Do you think they have this coming? Everyone has it. It's like, everyone has Ozempic. Everyone has Ozempic and everyone has sleep apnea. And I think Apple, yeah, and Apple can.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 64

That certainly happened. We'll see if there's a new inning coming up now, right? Where that's different, right? I don't think there will be,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

Why don't they just Google us? I just don't care. I just don't care. I only do this to hang out with you guys once a week, which has been fabulous. And it turns out that you want to listen in. And if I introduce, can't introduce myself to Dave and Brett. It's ridiculous. You guys know who I am.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 91

from a cultural narrative perspective at the heart of Silicon Valley, not necessarily global, not necessarily the world, not necessarily like taste making and everything, but for like the beating heart of like tech and venture capital, it's unbelievably dominant. I think it's more dominant now than it was a year ago or two years ago. And so it's a really interesting, I mean, in some ways, Elon really has pulled off the kind of truth socially, like what does it mean to be an individual influencer and control?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 78

society in the biggest, biggest picture around meaning and things like that. think it's a real problem. But as purely as it's fun to build things, like it's never been a better time. You might not make money, but you have a lot of fun.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 135

for truth, right? Because you just get a reflection of whatever the economics are of the system. And if the economics are, oh, we're just going to like, there's no way to monetize it, you know, or even now, it's like, it's easy to monetize hot takes, but not actual information or truth, then like, you're screwed, right? You're just going to end up like completely stemming the entire information as an information machine. So I don't know, I think you're right that that's the direction we'll head in. But it is like a total tragedy of the commons, where like, these things are going to consume themselves and die.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 72

Well, but here's the fun, but here's the thing. Here's the thing that's interesting about that day, which is you end up in this thing where like it's content, but meaningless. I had a funny experience like this today, which is I opened a deck from a startup someone sent and Google very aggressively prompted me to like summarize this deck in like, was extremely aggressive in the test, whatever test that meant. And I'm sitting there thinking, this is fucking hilarious. Cause on the other side, Google probably generated the deck, right? So like some guy probably wanted, and it was

— Sam Lessin, Episode 58

Well, was gonna say, know what, your, Gella actually did a very important thing for me, which is I've been searching for a new athletic goal because I get very sad when I don't have an athletic goal. just like, I'm like a puppy dog, I get very depressed. And, and I think that Britt Gella inspired me. I'm thinking it's going to be some sort of gymnastics routine, like a floor routine or maybe rings. Like, so I think there was a bunch of acrobats.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 126

Well, except for the fact that Uber is a shitty company until they get rid of all the drivers and then it's actually kind of an interesting company. So the question is like, what happens to the hardware? Does Uber get access to

— Sam Lessin, Episode 59

TPU story, lots of other suppliers of the chips. They don't really have a monopoly on this stuff. Like their price, China, China, China. They'll be fine. Like to be clear, it's a huge fucking company. do good stuff. think we're gonna come 15 % down and I think Google comes 15 % up, which is a fine year for them. It's not like a blowout year. It's probably outpaces the market, but it's not like crazy. And then...

— Sam Lessin, Episode 130

I just like that there aren't even in ads in open air. It's like, this is the classic, like the narrative front runs reality. It's like, this is like the, the moment we live in is just, gotta keep remembering that narratives move faster than reality and people trade the narrative. Right. And like, so I, I think it's actually pretty hilarious to do like a anti ad thing for a thing that doesn't have ads in it. It clearly got to open eye other Kato Kate Neil, uh, Kate O'Neill who's great. Uh, I, I saw this because of her tweet, uh, sorry, Kate Roche now. Um,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 135

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