The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Lessin: The factory model of seed investing is dead and won't return
“My view when I say Seed is dead is that I think the factory model of Seed, which supported massive scaling of it, is dead. And we're kind of back to where we have been historically, which is Seed is a bespoke It's a bespoke thing. Some people can do it well. I…”
Lessin: I will not fund Stanford graduates trying to be Elon Musk
“So yeah, of course, like the kids coming out of Stanford who like have this, like, I want to be Elon Musk thing. Like, I'm not gonna fund those people, right? Like, you know, every once in a while, I'll miss one because like, I love the founders fund guys. The…”
Western democracies lack structures to re-examine constitutional governance for tech
“For instance, I think that things as basic as, you know, the Constitution, et cetera, really are going to have to be reexamined in a lot of ways, and I don't think that we have the social structures to do that very well in the West.”
Lessin: Society will rent everything; only poor people will own items
“I think we're going to live in a world where the only people who don't rent everything are the people who can't afford to. So ironically, it will be only poor people, right? Who won't be completely rental based.”
Lessin: Capitalism cannot survive an ultra-efficient, deflationary world
“So if we get much more efficient and you live in a fundamentally deflationary world, like I don't know how capitalism survives that, you know, which is going to be, I think, really exciting.”
Lessin: Founders will prefer 80% of a $50M business over VC scale
“I actually am very optimistic that there's gonna be a whole generation of people like, oh shit, I would, you know, I, it is a much better life to own 80% of a business that has fifty million top line than on 10% of a business that does 500, right? With a bunch…”
Lessin: Slow Ventures will target sub-$5M valuation, self-sustaining seed deals
“I am very excited to fund a bunch of companies at five and under in weird things that are coming to you because no one else will give them money that are going to be highly profitable on the way up and create option value down the line. Right. So it's kind of …”
Cities will not allow scooter companies to be meaningfully profitable
“I don't think the cities are going to let the scooter companies be profitable or be meaningfully profitable.”
Media trust will collapse when AI deepfakes reach human-level realism
“But that trust is going to go away as soon as we have algorithms that can fake video and photos as well as, you know, we can tell with our eyes, right?”
Lessin: Display advertising will become irrelevant in a bot world
“You know, I think obviously in a bot world, a lot of the display driven, engagement driven advertising that, you know, we're all used to seeing as the way services monetize and exist becomes a heck of a lot less relevant.”
Lessin: Auto industry won't survive as required car volume collapses
“I think it's going to be pretty hard for the auto industry to survive at all. Right. Because just the number of cars we're going to need is going to go dramatically down.”
Lessin: Private car ownership will end in favor of shared vehicles
“I cannot come up with a possible world where we don't end up sharing cars. It just, I literally, it does not, maybe in a world of infinite free energy and, you know, zero pollution and no resource constraints, everyone owns cars, but x that, there's no possibl…”
Lessin: Future of VC is $3M capital-efficient, profitable startups
“I think the future is in these companies. There are a lot of companies you can put three million dollars into and get to a place where like, you're pretty sure it's profitable. It's going to be worth, it's worth a 102 hundred, and you have an option on somethi…”
Full AI adoption in knowledge work will take 15 to 20 years
“It's going to be faster. Maybe it's 20 years, right, for AI, or 15 years for AI to be adopted, but it's also not tomorrow.”
Knowledge work will shift to on-demand cloud infrastructure
“And I think, you know, the future of work probably looks a lot more like this kind of cloud metaphor where, you have kind of the ability as a firm or as someone who needs to get a task on a turn on or turn off capacity. Utilization can go up. You know, you hav…”
Another wave of consumer apps is not coming anytime soon
“I would love to see some form of consumer apps come back. I think we're at like a pretty boring place for consumer apps for the last bunch of years, and I don't think we're done building them. That's kind of, I don't know how that would happen. I think you'd n…”
Lessin: Universal Basic Income is inevitable
“I don't actually know what Tim Draper's view is on it, but I think there's no possible way that it won't happen.”
Lessin: Co-living communities will inevitably standardize urban living
“I just like fun, again, like there's, this goes on my list of course, this is the way the world will work. I can't imagine a world in which, you know, everyone's living in these kind of low, these apartments where they don't know their neighbors and there's no…”