Sam Lessin

“So I literally now have a pipeline where I ask a question and it fully produces and deploys YouTube videos that are three to seven minutes that are excellent on like any topic I want through to YouTube.”

“So I actually just gave my cloud cloud and this thing's full control of a Mac mini down to screen, like full, full, full control. So that it can deploy through test flight all its own apps from single commands.”

“The email agent thing, I was on with an entrepreneur, actually two in the last week, and he's like, well, I have, like, the, I call the agent, and I text the agent, and I was like, yeah, but email's by far the best, and he's like, yeah, it is. Email's sick. Th…”

“We had a great podcast episode and I can't promote it because we mentioned the DT name.”

“Customizable software is not going to lead to restraint. People are like, I want more powerful marijuana strains. Like, they don't want less powerful shit, right?”

“And like, by the way, you know, I have a desktop, like sitting in my computer in my room where I just like logged into my son's iMessage account. And I've sit there and fucking screenshot it all day long algorithmically. Cause there's no APIs to it. So I can p…”

“On the kids stuff, they get to blame. I mean, the stuff like the, like, age verification stuff will be It's so easy for them to do, but somehow it's Facebook's problem. Like, they're pretty good at pushing off blame to others.”

“This is my being really cynical snarky, but the cynical snarky take is in about 15 years, you can supply chain optimize the hell out of a company and make stock go way up, but then Apple better figure out how to not be Nike, right, and come up with the innovat…”

“My bot is running about three grand a month of infrastructure, database, App servers, et cetera.”

“If your data isn't unique, you're not going to be valuable long-term”

“Peter, we used to have meetings for what we should buy, and my pitch was always that the Facebook should buy the DMV.”

“That was the most cynical bullshit I've ever heard from my perspective, even though I do actually like Trump accounts and the idea of the index.”

“Historically, if you were an IQ 100 person and worked hard, you'd do fine. If you had a shovel, then it was like, oh, just go to school, and you'll do fine, because there was so much demand for, like, intellectual jobs. Those stories have run out on the capita…”

“It's not clear what the next story is, but the story of, hey, here's a thousand bucks, hopefully it compounds in the market, I don't think solves the underlying problem of, like, how do you create opportunity for people and, like, the American story of capital…”

“So I put a three million dollar check into Airtable at a 90 post in between rounds early on, because this is now probably in 2012 ish, maybe that era.”

“It's the same. It's the same investors. It's exactly the same cap tables.”

“I think both are almost certainly true in that I am sure that it is true that people lifted a bunch of IP out of Apple on their way to OpenAI.”

“The best move in an email if you want to meet with someone, Is start in the middle of a conversation as though you have already been talking to the person. Because then you're like, oh shit, like, and then it's a lot of work. I have to like figure out if we ac…”

“Listen, this stuff is all bullshit. I got Aura saying I'm seven years younger. I got Dexa saying I'm, like,”

“In practice, like most of what people say isn't that valuable. So I don't know that like passive listening is actually all it's cracked up to be in the end of the day for usefulness. It's mostly a lot of ums, but look, marginally lowering the barrier to record…”

“My biological age is like a variance of 10 years based on whether you Dexa or Garmin or whatever the hell, like they're all different. It's all bullshit.”

“I think effective altruism is stupid because I think that they have a really false sense of how they can calculate.”

“But it is also, like, one of those things where, like, the only way we do this is for distressed situations. It's crazy for us to not do this, so they're distressed. They're distressed.”

“If you wanna hang out with really rich people, this is a great sport to learn.”

“The big delta from today versus even a few years ago is it's shockingly easy to validate IDs, right? The APIs are now really robust for it. There's Persona, there's Stripe.”

“In twenty-twenty six, you can't take someone who's like the nice guy liked in the community and build a media strategy for them. You need them to already have like a media footprint themselves.”

“That if you truly had the American internet or, like, the French internet, this can be global in various ways, it is so much more moderate than what you get on Twitter, right? Like, it would, like, it would be so much more moderate”

“It actually is pretty freaking good, and, like, the fact that I could, like, Build that in a few days, but like honestly on boats, like texting my, or emailing my bot for changes is like pretty sweet.”

“This is the future. It's all about having your community, which is very small, For which you are relevant.”

“I agree that it's extremely unlikely that a enormous company platform will successfully launch something as avant-garde as a, it's not impossible, but very unlikely.”

“Everyone's model looks like this infinity or zero and probability of infinity.”

“No, never give users choice. You have to tell them what to do.”

“I believe that in a recent survey, AI has a lower approval rating than Jeffrey Epstein. It's, like, six percent.”

“I will say I use a lot of 11 Labs because I just only listen to podcasts I make for myself. I'd say most humans are like, I don't like listening to my voice. I apparently am fine with it because like in our car, I'm just constantly making new podcasts for the …”

“The irony is no one watches any of this stuff live. Like the TPPN has a tiny, had, I don't even know now, had a tiny actual Audience for the thing. It's just the clips moved, right? Like, so there's no one who's ever watching it anyway, right?”

“Because it's all about the attention and narrative economy anyway. We're financing. We actually are doing film finance at this point. Like Silicon Valley has just taken the job of Southern California, and we're way better at storytelling.”

“My Oura Ring, it's like my HRV went through the roof. Like, it doubled. My heart rate dropped.”

“The anthropic engineers will go to middle America and they're going to need a large security force.”

“The answer is it's Postgres. My Postgres bill is the thing that's gone up the most. It's databases.”

“So now whenever they want to listen to something in a car, I just email my bot. I say, make a podcast on how Minecraft was made, or how the history of Nintendo, or how EI Sports FC Mobile XXX was made, or Jetpack Joyride.”

“The subscriber number on YouTube is clearly fake, because I just like, Literally paid 300 bucks.”

“And it's like, actually, this was the entire marketing strategy. Right? Like, if you think about it, like, the irony of the whole thing is everyone's like, everyone hates that. It's like, well, your money-raising strategy has been to run around, including the …”

“As I've shot my mouth off a lot online, the problem is not basic income. The problem is meaning, right? You can't just, like, pay people and make them happy. They'll just be sadder.”

“Then it was the B. Because it was getting so, it was great product. Like we love the product. Great, great products. But the math became simple, which is the only way it made sense to hold it is if you believe that Allbirds was the next Nike. And we're like, w…”

“I asked by CRM, I was like, hey, we're doing this creator bot school. Go find the 20 to 30 most important people that creators would want to meet with in New York, I'm sorry, in San Francisco, and invite them if they want to stop by, and like, you know, it pul…”

“Assembly AI, which by the way, we received investors in. I put a hundred K into their first round, but they're crushing it.”

“That's why I'm so bullish on software and so negative on software businesses, because I'm just like, I don't like, just, these are just tokens.”

“And like the reality is the fact that I can just sit there and in three commands while I'm doing other stuff, do that is mind blowing, but it means there's no lock in on anything. I'm just going to sit there and price and quality optimize. Right. Like there's …”

“I've done, I've built like six apps this week, like literally, I'm not even exaggerating, but like I did bought, I did first build a quick version. I basically took our, all of our transcripts. I ripped through them, had to build personality, psychographic pro…”

“To admit that you are worried about software taking your job as a software builder is to effectively say that you are a bad software engineer, right?”

“But you don't need standards. It doesn't matter anymore.”

“I hate Apple, but Apple's lack of CapEx has made me start liking them, because it's just so great. They're like, fuck you, no CapEx.”

“200,000.”

“And so to me, I think that's really the, you know, we talk about where the world is going and, you know, people are like, oh, AI is going to make people work less or whatever. No, I think what's happening is, especially right now, it's just created a work cycl…”

“My bet is I'm spending, my bet is my full, like, AI tinker budget of things running around doing things for me is on the order of like, 2500 or 3000 dollars a month.”

“And so I think there's this big schism of like, you either are a secret company or you're the most obvious company in the world, but you leave the narrative. You can't be in the middle.”

“Cursor split the store from VS code because they want to, like, create their own ecosystem that's independent, etc. And the way it all plays out Is VS code is like, no, like the package you need to install to do Garmin watch faces. We're going to control that.…”

“I do think there's gonna be all sorts of weird business development games that start getting played with locked down app stores, locked down code bases, who has access to what. All of a sudden, Garmin is going to be like, Hey, guess what? We had a whole busine…”

“The upshot is like, in some ways, all that AI is doing is rationalizing effectively the world of APIs and the world of programmatic access. Because when you drop access, where it's not just like really sophisticated, smart people who can kind of do stuff and y…”

“I think that seed stage investing is the most defensible part of the entire investing world. Everything should get more efficient ETFs, algorithmic trading. Does that come down market? Of course it comes down market and it spans. But any idea That a bot can ro…”