Sam Lessin on Social Media & Platforms

Essays

From the Podcast

That's what they've grafted to. They said, "Well, we're an internet company, and internet companies that are working grow like this." But it was-- that was a very, very different age. I mean, companies that could control their growth. Now, look, Facebook had a period when it stalled out and had to be restarted and whatever. Like, it's not perfect. But I think the real issue here is when people are like, "Well, the ARR this year is this, and we're gonna hit this number," it's like no one has any idea, right? And the fact that you can accelerate and then decelerate and then re-accelerate, these are things that are acting like early stage companies still trying to find ignition. But they're just so big and went so quickly that they were having these IPO-style conversations about things that aren't. Now, how does it all play out? I mean, like, look Anything where, like, you can accelerate and decelerate and miss is a huge problem for the whole industry, right? 'Cause it just means that, like, we don't know, right? And that doesn't mean you still don't buy it or, like, you know, you do the Kushner barbell thing, buy some sports teams that you pay att-

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

Look, I did CNBC earlier today on this topic, and here's the basic way I would look at it. The real story here is the variance quarter to quarter and year to year on how you project these things is God knows what, right? It's, like, an enormous variance, right? And the problem is that's a problem for everyone. Like, people wanna pattern match Anthropic and OpenAI to the rollout of the internet and Google and Facebook.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

Here's the funny thing. So I now have my Sam bot infrastructure, has the ability to run Twitter ads for me. So I messaged it. I was like, "Hey, I had all these guests on. Pull some good quotes from them and, like, just spend 500 bucks and promote it on Twitter." And it's really funny because my totally automated pipeline for doing this did a very good job, but it actually confused the Scotts, right? So it basically put the picture in a thing of Scott Belsky, and then had a quote, uh, from Scott Stanford. So you're not alone.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 163

I'm with you. I have my own takes on where the leverage and I can deploy on this stuff is. I do think I'm with you ideologically. I do think it's one of the tr- problems of a Twitter or fun podcast with your friends who are all venture capitalists in different places is we can all fervently agree with each other and feel really good about it. Yeah. You guys, this was really fun. I appreciate you all joining. I hope you had fun doing it. Super fun. This was great. Thank you for hosting. So thank you all.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

I think, first of all, it's kind of funny 'cause by historical standards then it was an incredibly meteoric rise. Facebook's valuation grew unbelievably slowly compared to the labs, right? And there were obviously generations. Like, I would argue I was... Peter, you were kinda generation one and a half maybe. I was generation two at Facebook. There's now been generation three and generation four. But there's not 20 generations, right? There was, like, a s- a set of people who worked for 40 years, did great work, and then passed the torch, and that's happened, like, a few times. And actually, the core leadership team at Facebook has been unbelievably stable now for, like, a decade, right? Like, which is a very different dynamic.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

No, that is true. Peter, we used to have meetings for what we should buy, and my pitch was always that the Facebook should buy the DMV.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

Yeah. No, a hundred percent. I mean, I used to... We used to talk about, I mean, like, you talk about the composer and Facebook era, it was a data pump, right? It was an efficient free data pump to bring data online that couldn't exist anywhere else. And the reality is, if you go way back in the Facebook history, the real story was on day zero, internet's scary, so no one wants to post on it. You're never gonna put a real photo on it, da, da, da. Facebook created the trust and security for people to take a bunch of real world data, photos, relationships, messages, et cetera, and bring it online, right, for the first time, and created an enormous amount of value doing that, right? And so now we're in this weird multiverse where it's like the internet has all been scraped to hell, right? Like, good luck, New York Times, with their lawsuit, right? But, like, that has been, like, copied a thousand times and distilled a thousand times. You have personal private digital information, what's in Gmail, what's in da, da, da, where people have some say in theory as opposed to it just all being, like, dumpable effectively. And so that's where we were talking about the trust, things like that. There's then, like, the, the whole class of companies that are out there trying to, in some ways build new data sets, the Handshakes, the Scale AIs, where you just pay a ton of money and you turn financial capital in some form into, like, unique data. And then there's all the offline stuff. And so I guess the question for me is, like, assuming that multiplying big numbers is a commodity and will be, right? Like, is the story you just, like, really... You go back to day one, which is, like, if your data isn't unique, you're not gonna be valuable long term.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

Hello, and welcome to a ridiculous episode of More or Less, where my co-hosts, Dave Morin, Brit Morin, and Jessica did the terrible, terrible judgment error of letting me host without them. They're all actually on vacation, and I am actually also on vacation but pretending like I'm not on vacation. So I'm thrilled to be here. We have assembled a world-class community here. I think this group represents every flavor and every area of venture capital investing known to man, as well as, like, every product experience you could imagine. So I'm very, very excited to have a great group here to run through. First, we'll start with, we have Peter Dang here. Um, Peter actually has a distinction. Peter's the one who brought me into Facebook in a lot of ways. He was running profiles right before I was, and so when I showed up on day one, he said, "Great, someone else can run this," and taught me everything I needed to know, and then was very happy to peace off into his next project, which ended up being Instagram and then Uber and then Airtable and then big role running product at OpenAI and now is a dirty venture capitalist like the rest of us. So Peter, welcome. Uh, it's good to have you.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 162

Blah, blah, blah. It's silly, but the point is that, like, this is just, like, the opposite of it, which if you're Elon, you're gonna price to perfection 'cause you can. You're gonna, like, get the headline number, the trillion number you wanted. You get a bunch of money for the company, I guess, or the, at a high price, and then who cares what the stock trades within reason? It's fine. He got everything he wanted. He bailed out his xAI people. He bailed out his Twitter people. He bailed everyone out, right? So Elon gets to be the guy who makes everyone money. And if you're a SpaceX shareholder, you're like, "Whatever." You kinda got robbed on a few things, but number big.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 161

Look, I think, honestly, I'm very pro... I mean, as a user, I've consistently used X since 2007, although admittedly when I was at Facebook, I didn't engage that much for a few years. But it's always been great. Um, I think Nikita's been doing a great job, and I think it's better now than it was before. I think the conversation's stronger there than it ever has been. It's also really funny. I mean, I also use Threads. I use Threads out of loyalty, and I will say that it's pretty funny.

— Sam Lessin, More or Less Ep 160

... 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

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