More or Less Podcast

Sam Lessin — Selected Quotes

Well, the mission around AI that Mark used to successfully recruit a lot of top talent a year ago was this idea of, like, a personal super intelligence. Like, he really-- And he talks publicly about this all the time, that, you know, so many of the frontier AI models are focused on, like, productivity maxing. But he thinks that humans are gonna find far more use cases and gravitate to more use cases of AI.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 154

I'll tell you the funniest thing of the week in Sam's bot psychosis, which is so fun. Like, it's the funny thing. I'm business skeptical user.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 165

That does not work in a GDPR slash data portability world. Right. And the reality is with these AIs, I get the story. The story is, we're going to have the most context on you. And therefore we're going to, because of that, be able to deliver incrementally better experiences. You're going to have like export data import somewhere else. And like literally in a flat file. the irony is all these social networks spend all this time. that no, it actually kind of did. Right. Like there is no data. Well.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 93

And someone's gonna point back at this and be like, look, the humans can go between companies and take everything they know, so why can't the machines?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 44

But I think especially as we kind of get out of this age where software is exceptional and Silicon Valley is exceptional and like software is just and technology is part of every business. I think there's going to be this real discipline between what are really good businesses that for 10 years grow and you need the founder mode. And then you know what? You want professional managers, you want consistency, you want to deliver profits to Wall Street versus the ones that are like, Hail Mary, the founder has the will for 30 years and like the spirit.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 63

the co-working space of the future. You could even block it on your calendar. You could buy it as like, I'm flying to Tokyo and that's like a certain number of hours or I'm flying to like, yeah, you're like, I bought a Tokyo ticket, you know, like.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 140

Basically, you now have a people that like building reputation on Reddit so they can promote products all over the place in comments, et cetera, all with the ultimate target of being at the top of like these LLM driven models.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 49

your propaganda tool in the US anymore to convince the youth that you own Taiwan. Fine. So at the same time, China says, well, fuck you guys. We're going to like not respect any of your FAA flight zone regulations with the millions of drones we have deployed in the United States. So all of a sudden you have these drones flying into airplanes. And like that's actually how warfare happens, right? It's like we're just like arguing over propaganda versus drones.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 82

Look, that's the beauty of Mickey Mouse, he doesn't age. know, like that's why cartoons are great, right? Like they can live forever.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

super intelligence or AI, it's like much more complicated than that. It's gonna be other models and other things. But it's like a step on the journey of bringing people along and raising tons of money to whatever to then go after the bigger opportunity. And I think the problem with all this for me is it's still very religious, right? Like, you're still when you back it all out, you're like, none of these are actually good businesses, they're kind of like, product and growth shims towards something. But no one can really tell you what that something exactly is, right? Or how it's going to work as a business or what the economy of it is. And it's just a very dangerous game to play.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

Which is not including like, look, it's... No, no, no, the business model clearly matters. But like, again, you know, again, I just go back to the first Prince William's. The productivity use cases of AI, right? Which are real, like for sure. They're definitely real in coding. Like, and by the way, that shows you the whole world because it's coding down really fun again, right? Because you have to write a gajillion tests. It's so fun. It's so fun, right? Like, so that stuff's for sure true. The productivity stuff...

— Sam Lessin, Episode 108

Number two, I'm just saying we really fund Apple as a very hubrisitic, hubistrict, hubrisful, hubrisitic, lots of hubris, lots of hubris. They're never gonna kill Siri. They're gonna like ride Siri to the grave, but it would show a lot of, it would be sure a lot of contrition and a real step forward. I think the stock would go up if they announce a party for the death of Siri. Point two.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 103

my my goal is to have an etiquette school for every legitimate incubator sooner than later. That's because that's what I want to see is I want the people to come out of there who want etiquette school. That's how I'm going to screen them.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 120

It's like, think that going, the idea that a centralized platform, centralized social network would be in the business of fact checking was always one of the most dangerous and worst ideas imaginable. And I was very unhappy when the company went in that direction over time, because it's not complicated. It's just incredibly ill-advised because it's impossible to do well at scale.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 81

But it's not open AI as much. This is actually important. This is actually very important. This is important. This is actually quite, I think this is, you hit on an interesting topic. I think this is, so here's what I say. This is not good for open AI. um This is.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 136

Bex Gentry, so negative on the internet. Like, and you know, Bex really leads where the country goes in terms of the culture. So the culture, she is, yes. Yes, she's ranting at the internet. I will say that at one point years ago, she was ranting about how the moon landing was faked and that really threw me off my riding game because like, I really liked Bex Gentry but she should stay in her lane.

— Sam Lessin, Episode #38: Hartz & Minds_66cc4b089d6d7a010022af1a

kill the jump on to keep a meme stock going. NOISE Robots are fine. Sure, you can make some arguments that makes the manufacturer a little more efficient to justify the spend. But like when you get down to like, what is their fundamental advantage in robots? I just I would love some reporting on it because it doesn't make intuitive sense to me that they have any, right?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 54

It's like they don't understand that, how venture capital works. Yeah, it's like, what's the famous John Doerr-ism? No conflict, no interest.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 163

There are two directions I wanna divert us and jump off. One direction is, sure, I agree with that. But the early OpenAI pitch was, "We're building AGI, winner take all. You're either on our train or st- have fun staying poor." Like, it was, like, a one thing. That has kind of evolved into a lot of people who are really smart being like, "Oh my God, this is the moment where everything matters. Cost of capital is zero. I gotta take my shot. And by the way, I've already punched my card four times. If it does turn out to work, I'm protected. I've got plenty of stock."

— Sam Lessin, Episode 162

It's a... Yeah. That's just an interesting question of who actually is trading this in for what purposes and what their tax structure is around it, because it is a big... I- if you say, "Hey, I have fresh money to deploy, where do I put it?" That's one thing, but what the recycling is just, like, killer. Like, you have to have a very strong anti-thesis-

— Sam Lessin, Episode 144

No, of course not. We never make money on these. just, this is like, we always fund the first experiment and then we lose money because we don't, that's how we do this.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 112

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

meta and Google or whatever and they're like desperate for AI things and like this kind of you could squint and say as an AI thing and so fine if you

— Sam Lessin, Episode 111

I mean, I think, look, I was talking to one of our founders earlier who works on, uh, our MeritFirst testing platform. And, like, it is interesting how that, like, let's just drive hard on meritocracy, and, like, the best people should have it, open competition, et cetera, went from being kind of fringy to, like, completely mainstream. As part... I think we just have this, like, separation. We have, like, Mondami, nihilism, socialism, and then we have, like, a bunch of people that are in the minority numerically, but maybe not in terms of wealth and power, who are just like, "No, like, we want freedom, and capitalism, and meritocracy." Like, that's the trifecta. And so I just think that the world's very split, um, and that's what's making it super interesting. History says we're all about to get guillotined, but we'll, we'll find out.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 157

I, so the, the thing, well, no, the thing I figured out is, which is good is, is I actually think I have to research this, but I think there's a high performance athlete use for this, which is one, I think talking to my trainer, trainer Mike, that what happened yesterday is I ran for 10 miles and you watch your blood sugar drop, but then your body, like it comes back. And I think that's good. I think it means that your body like switches energy production to maintain.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 70

Yeah, but it's not gonna... But like, they're clearly gonna... I mean, like, look, the, that is the correct intellectual lawsuit, but that lawsuit, I just can't imagine that OpenAI, the cat's out of the bag. Like, it's just not gonna happen that that, that lawsuit will be successful. It's, like, a good... It's like standing on good moral ground, but it's like, that's never gonna happen. This is the wrong lawsuit. It's happening, whatever. It's like, it's kind of a sideshow. And then the, again, the backdrop is, is like, this is what always happens in the law is, like, you're litigating last year's issue, right? It's like this is not even the right company to be going after. If you care... I mean, I don't want to go after any company just for the sake of going after them, but it's very funny to me that the trial starts the week that what happens is what we said was gonna happen, which is that Anthropic passed OpenAI.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 146

Well, I do think the story though does, what I would say though is I think it's gonna be pretty hard. think the lesson here again from the don't get out gun is yet again the big get bigger because I do think that in the end of the day we're gonna be reliant upon Facebook, Apple and Google to defend free speech on the internet, right? Because they're the only ones powerful enough, or crypto, or it's like a crypto decentralized thing.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 62

It also has a whole new meaning in this era where Trump's like, we're going to use the military in American cities for like show of force. You're like, wait a minute, those fighter jets, are those the blue angels or something else?

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

It's like in the history of Blackstone, NOISE they've raised, what is it, like, call it half a trillion dollars. That's again, that's not the number, but it's an enormous number of capital. They'd have like one fund in like 40 years that has done more than 3X, right? They're not actually good DPI return investors, but they are is a safe way to stuff enormous amounts of, you know, of money, right, with credibility. And I think that's unfortunately what's happened to a lot of the economy. And that's why I actually do think that it's gonna be some,

— Sam Lessin, Episode 48

No. Well, it depends on you think about it. There's just a relationship between story and money and power and product. These things are all interrelated, right? And they feed off each other. And so I don't, I just don't think you can look at it as just like a single thing. We were very purist in our era, Dave, of product first and whatever and capitalism first. There's an old era of the most profitable companies in the history of the world, which were last generation's tech companies. This generation is just like a very power-oriented world versus a money and capitalism-oriented world.

— Sam Lessin, Episode 119

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