Lessin: Only 0.1% of startups have breakthroughs powerful enough to ignore etiquette
Sam Lessin · How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook · Jan 15, 2026 · at 8:46
Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin discusses why social etiquette matters for almost all founders except the rarest breakthrough deep-tech inventors.
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“It is true that if you bring manna from heaven, right, like you invent something that is literally the next Google or whatever out of pure thought, That sometimes none of this stuff matters, right? Like if you just, if you fully, that's it, you know, it's like, it's literally like that happens. It happens very, very rarely, but it does happen. It is not what 99.9% of startups are doing, but if you have that, yeah, you basically can get away with anything.”
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