Sam Lessin on Social Media & Platforms

Essays

From the Podcast

... it's, like, an interesting counterargument to this whole thing, which is, like, there's random walk... This happened at Facebook. Like, there were so many people at Facebook, right, in the early days, who, like, were very, very junior engineers- And got hilariously uber wealthy in, like, the first three years of their career purely 'cause they literally couldn't sell and it appreciated so quickly, right? Uh, that would've never happened in the public markets because people would've been like, "Oh, I made 10 times my money. I can pay off my mortgage and pay for my mom. Fabulous," right?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 155

Like, the Anthropic thing is so funny, 'cause, like, that's not a natural design pattern. It's also not based on anything other than speculation, really, right? And, like, I think part of the story there is, like, um... Like, here's a funny thing. There's a bunch of people who are gonna make a ton of mo- money on Anthropic purely because they didn't have the time to sell, right? Like, this happened a little bit with Facebook, but it's definitely happening with these companies where, like, if you had gone to a rational early employee and it had been public, hypothetically, and they went from having $2 million to $20 million, they would've been like, "Fuck yeah, I'm out," right? They'd be thrilled. The fact that it grew so quickly is you have this whole class of people that irrationally should never have been concentrated in that asset, and never would've been had they had the option and it had been public. But because they had no option to sell and it happened so meteorically fast, there's all these random people that are now gonna be worth hundreds of millions of dollars by accident, right? And, like-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 155

Well, this happened at Facebook. Like, there's so many people on Facebook, right, in the early days, who like were very, very junior engineers and got hilariously uber wealthy in like the first three years of their career purely 'cause they literally couldn't sell and it appreciated so quickly. That would've never happened in the public market.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 155

Well, and also fact check, Facebook bought WhatsApp for an announced 19, and then it, when it closed it was about 21. So we're, we're in the same ballpark. We're in the same ballpark, right?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 154

Bye, guys. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes, and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @davemorin, @lesson, @jlesson, and as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 156

Except for please stay human, because I really think we're entering the, I know we're already in the loneliness epidemic because of social media, but this is entering this new scary, dark place, I think, where people are alone with their agents up at all hours, not having community and real social conversation, and I'm like really actually worried about it.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 156

Go Spurs go. Bye. If you enjoyed this show, please leave us a virtual high five by rating it and reviewing it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find more information about each episode in the show notes, and follow us on social media by searching for @moreorless, @davemorin, @lesson, @jlesson, and as for me, I'm @brit. See you guys next time.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 152

I like sw- switching roles with you, Dave. It's fun. The counter to all that, and we just talked about Google and the Google Search business. I think the thing that I, with Anthropic in particular, that I just don't know how this plays out, is the beauty of Google and Facebook, especially even Google more than Facebook as the best business models in the history of the world, is they get to turn the dials. Like you need some more money, just add, add another ad. You know what I mean? Like you, you can, you have total marketplace control. The interesting story with Anthropic is, oh, you need to make your quarter? Just like make it spend a few more tokens. You need... You're a little, little bit too much capacity, like a little not enough capacity, eh, tap down the tokens, make them a little more expensive. If they can get away with the dials themselves, it's an unbelievable business because even if for all of my curmudgeonliness, like you'll find ways to tune the dials to make money. The question is, how much of a marketplace is it? Because if they can't turn the dials because it's an open routery situation, oh, they're like cheating me here and I know they're cheating me, so I'm just gonna like use another provider of multiplying matrices, then it's a terrible-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 149

Yeah. But I... Obviously, there's lots of reasons to not want it off-prem. I'm saying the only reason you're forced off-prem is if the giga brain can do something you can't do by ma- multiplying your own matrices, right? 'Cause it's closed source or whatever it ends up being. So it'll be this interesting global tension, which then leads to my thing, which is I, I... It dawned on me recently that, like... So Jess, you'll know this. Like, the Hyperion thing Facebook's building, the $200 billion spend, is that the up-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 149

Y- or Instagram became Facebook. It's like Dave Moore, who doesn't use social media, liked this enough that I got the, "A friend of yours who hasn't posted in a long time is active," and it's like, ah, Dave has been brought back to social media.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 149

Well, also, before Dave gets into it, I just wanna note, you posted on Facebook about this.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 149

Yeah, I do that. I have it log everything. I also have... Like, every single request I make, I have it log all this data. I actually, hilariously, I briefly was spending $100 a day on a Twitter API by accident because I was having it log everything- ... and I had to, like, be like, "Oh, you don't need to do quite this much." But yeah, I mean, like, and look, the reality is it's kind of wild that Western Digital, Seagate, these stocks are ripping. They're up, like, you know, 1000%, right? Not 1000%, but they're up 100X, 100 to 101X in, like, the last month, right? Because everyone's kind of coming to Jesus that, like, actually this... It's gonna be energy and memory. Energy and memory is where the money is made.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 146

Yeah, yeah. I get it. I get it. I get it. I just think it's a really... Like, it's kind of like the, the algorithmic social media problem on, like, massive steroids, right? If it's distributed, you can't even stop it, right? And so it's like someone told me this week, I don't know if this is true or not, but it was an interesting fact. I was in a meeting. They were saying that the Chinese are running an $80 billion a year social engineering budget for so- b- against the US right now, right?

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 146

I- i- i- 50X is a big number, but here's the thing. It, it's the same problem recursively, which is how big can companies get, right? When Facebook was trading at 100 billion, that was a big number. People were like, "A trillion-dollar company? That's insane," right? And what's happened is there's a lot of money that flowed into the system, everything rises, blah, blah, blah. The market is not the economy. And so all of a sudden, the 10X case has nothing to do with a thing you're projecting about the business. It's just, like, a bunch of, like, the world changes. And so for me, the question of, like, is there a 50X on any of these things has so much less to do with relative value than just, like, wait, like, how much money gets printed, and, like, a bunch of other factors like that. How big can things get? How big number go up? So then you're like, yeah, like, I guess it can over a certain period. But it's, it's more of a bet on the secular, like, economy than it is a specific company.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 144

It's like Facebook does 40 billion a quarter in EBITDA. Right? And like now, right? Like, so I'm just like, I just... It's, this is all just, like, narrative-driven. And look, I get it. People need to store their money somewhere, and they need to store it in hope, right? Is the upshot, especially when they don't know what else to put it in, right? You're gonna either put it in gold or hope, and like this is the hope thing at scale, and people need things for hope at scale. So, like, that's fine, but it's like from a fundamental business perspective, none of this makes any financial sense, and it's not going to, right? It's just a question of, like, how that plays out. It could be that because people need to put money in hope, it doesn't actually matter. Like, hope go up and everyone does fine, right? But it's a hell of a narrative to believe. It is quite religion.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 142

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