Sam Lessin on Crypto & Web3

Essays

From the Podcast

Well, it's usually what actually makes the deal work. Like, that's the irony of a lot of things is, like, a seed fund without any follow-on, the math, especially in these capital-consumptive days, unless you're in, like, a crypto project, really is pretty damn hard if you can't follow on.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Agreed. But then it kind of, the crypto thinking plus a lot of the stuff br- came into the AI story. Now you have these two interesting infinities and zeros. Infinity and zero-one was like the Sam Altman original pitch, which is we will own everything. Whoever gets the AGI first owns infinity. There are no more businesses except for us, and it can only go to zero, right? And so you're like, "Okay, well, the average of infinity and zero is still infinity, so I guess we should invest in this. Who cares what the price is? Who cares how much capital it needs?" Like that was infection one. Now we have the inverse going on, which I think is to be taken very seriously, which is it might be that, it's actually not, and like that was a silly narrative when you think about it, but people believed it enough.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Crypto definitely is part, is a huge unlock for the thinking.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

It's an awesome book, and it's an important one to internalize, I think it talk about what Silicon Valley's business model is and, and kind of where we are. The basic point of the book is that if you go all the way back to like the time of the Greeks and before, the idea of true zero, right, was like highly fought. And so like the, the first historical vignette is the Pythagoreans who wanted to kind of introduce the idea of true nothingness. This is like kind of like creation ex nihilo from the Bible. How do you like create something from nothing? These are very deep philosophical problems, and the West hated it because it's really hard to reason about, and it's really hard to talk about consistent growth and like the things we're good at. Same thing with like infinity, like infinity is a weird concept. Because of that, the zero came from India. The West fought it like hell. The only reason it exists in Western culture is it is just too useful, like you need zero. Like the traders made it happen. The church fought it like holy hell to like keep it out of Western culture. But like fast-forward, if you think about like our markets and the way we build businesses, and we think about competition and compounding and all those sorts of things, they're great at like most normal modeling in numbers that we're familiar with, what we can argue about and multiply, da da da. The second you introduce a zero or an infinity anywhere in the chain, you break everything because the tail, which is infinity or zero, dominates the whole story, right? And what's really interesting, I think, is in some ways, if you look at the story that we've seen in the last many years in Silicon Valley, the tendency towards infinity, which you saw the, the geometric returns on Google and Facebook and oh my God, the world is infinitely large and we can dominate the whole thing, started this. Things like Bitcoin, which is like, oh my God, if everyone believes, then belief is self-perpetuating and it can be in- infinitely valuable, right? And it can only be zero. Then you see like GameStop and like this whole series of things. I think there is this... In fact, in some ways, like the tails infected the entire narrative of Silicon Valley, right? And so that's why we get to the today's-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

Although it's a recent phenomenon, right? Because like even as far as ten, 15 years ago, the businesses that Silicon Valley generated were like unbelievably capitalistic. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't about like moving heavy dollars. Like that's kind of a recent Bitcoin style. There's a series of things. I, I honestly think a lot of like what's gone on has been people learning the wrong lessons from like Bitcoin and religion effectively in this era, right? Where if you think about like this dynamic, it's like you had the era of Google and Facebook, which everyone got wrong from like a storytelling perspective, largely because like, well, how big could they possibly... Even I got this wrong. Like I was like, what is the thing that is more than a hundred billion dollar company? That's unfathomably large in historical context. And so people got, "Oh my God, things can be huge." Then Bitcoin, which again, I was early on, you know, Dave, you were too, and like then Ripple and Solana and like all this stuff taught people the lesson of like effectively the aver-- which I love this line, 'cause it's true, which is the average of zero to infinity is infinity, which is like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 170

But Dave, just to push you, when the- decentralization's a great political movement in a lot of ways, and like there's a few examples like Bitcoin where it's kinda worked. But like, in the Star Wars universe, the Rebel Alliance kinda sucks, right? Like, they're not capable of winning. Like, they're, they're totally losing, and it's only because you have a young Jedi come along that saves their ass, right? And so like I guess the question for me is like do we really believe that like a distributed open movement can win here against empires, or is it more that you need a Jedi?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 160

I, I agree with... Like, th- this is so funny. We've been talking this whole episode, and everyone's talking about tokenomics, and like, it's just a crypto flashback. It's like, we're still selling tokens. It's still tokens. It's tokenomics. It's who's the retail holder on the tokens?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 149

Yeah. I mean, like, this is called Miami Crypto 2000 whatever.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 146

Are you on... Why are you on KuCoin? We're talking about crypto?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 142

right and paper marks, you just like it takes longer, it takes years to even have exposure to it usually, and then it takes much longer to get good at it, right. And so I mean, it's slow, like, we've now sold at all stages in public markets, we've sold private positions, we've sold a lot of fucking crypto over the years, like we finally are starting to care about and get good at selling. But that that's a lagging thing. And you just fewer reps means it takes longer to figure out. And I think that's partially why the market's so broken, is because the market for buying

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 99

It really, I just don't think it historic. I just don't think historically has been that important. And so like no one's cared. And I think it's newly like becoming important, but like, it's just, it's just, there are things I had this in crypto too. I'm looking on a few projects with some friends. We're like, we, and we've talked about sound on Dave too, is just like there's stuff that are not really businesses. They're just missing tools. They're like the utils. Remember like windows, utils, little thing you click on and have like six utilities in it. They're like.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 99

You should, it's definitely online. That's the funny thing. The irony of a blockchain company taking down a video is particularly fucking funny. Cause the whole point is like.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 91

So like, what's the harm? like, you know, it's, it's um, I think the reaction was like, good Trump serious crypto, maybe some real good things happen. But this felt a little janky to me.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

And it's changing how the behavior of the industry because I can say firsthand that a lot of the products were involved in wanted to do things they're worried about and like, okay, this seems like a safe to do. So I think there is a real impact already in the crypto industry. And I think more clarity will come and it'll be actually good. I'm actually quite positive that the reserve stuff if you follow it on Twitter, all the serious people looked at the reserve stuff and like that this is a little wonky like this is not like the best right like people are not thrilled with the Trump coin as a meme coins like it's a bad look for the industry. This kind of Saturday.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

crypto policy on Trump. He's clearly leaned into having clarity, which means we can do a lot more than just crazy meme coins. No, I think David Sacks,

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 89

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