Nov 17, 2023 · 1h 2m · more-or-less
#23: Why (and How) SMBs and Creators Will Win With AI, the New Financing Contracts, and More · More or Less Podcast
0:00 / 0:00
▶ Watch on YouTube →
gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of the More or Less podcast, co-hosts Dave Morin, Sam Lessin, Brit Morin, and Jessica Lessin explore how artificial intelligence and alternative financing models empower small businesses and creators over centralized tech incumbents. They debate the future of venture capital, the perils of automated content farming, and why durable human communities remain the ultimate economic moat.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The hosts hold 99.4% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 5.5 Guest teaching 4.3 Guest disagreement 4.2 The hosts pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 52:06 Sam dismisses SEO and content businesses as worthless
Sam forcefully rejects Brit's defense of AI-driven blog generation and SEO rankings, calling those operations 'shit businesses' that will get obliterated by algorithmic shifts.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 30:41 Jessica rejects creator crowdfunding equity schemesJessica openly challenges the creator financing thesis by citing Substack's writer equity rounds, calling them deceptive moves that pull the wool over writers' eyes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 47:59 Sam schools Dave on the historical reality of mechanizationSam dismantles Dave's optimistic tractor analogy, demonstrating that increased agricultural output led to lower farmer incomes and structural commoditization rather than prosperity.
The host holds their own ▶ 5:22 Jessica shares firsthand reporting from Gina RaimondoJessica leverages her direct access and on-the-ground reporting with Secretary Raimondo to correct assumptions about tech lobbying and voluntary AI model reporting.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The hosts as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The hosts pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| More or Less Official Podcast Opening Sequence | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Casual banter and housekeeping opening the show. Brit and Jessica discuss facial treatments, osteopathy, and franchising the Face Gym concept before transitioning to tech topics. | |
| APEC Summit, Diplomatic Encounters, and AI Regulation | 8 | 2 | 2 | 3 | Jessica demonstrates strong journalistic expertise, detailing her on-the-record interview with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo regarding APEC, the AI executive order, and big tech regulatory cooperation. | |
| National Defense, Autonomous Drone Swarms, and Dirty AI | 5 | 5 | 5 | 4 | Sam forcefully rejects conventional AI regulation debates, mocking VC armchair politicking and arguing that 'dirty AI' and drone warfare pose far greater near-term threats than speculative AGI. | |
| Building Custom GPTs and AI Tools for SMBs | 5 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Dave explains how he concatenated podcast transcripts into a single file to build a custom More or Less GPT, playfully mocking Sam with AI-generated roasts. | |
| How AI Empowers SMBs Against Tech Monopolies | 6 | 4 | 4 | 5 | Sam lays out his VC thesis on how AI benefits massive platforms and lean SMBs while squeezing mid-tier firms. Jessica pushes back, questioning whether this mirrors unfulfilled promises made during the social media era. | |
| Alternative Financing Models: Creator Contracts, DAOs, and Franchising | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | Sam details his creator equity financing contracts as an alternative to debt, while Brit shares her Bobby community SPV structure. Jessica strongly pushes back on similar models like Substack's writer crowdfunding, characterizing it as predatory. | |
| Venture Capital Momentum and Startup Projections for 2024 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | Jessica questions the narrative that traditional VC is dying when multi-billion dollar mega-funds are still raising capital. Sam uses a runaway train analogy, arguing institutional inertia keeps them going despite broken economics. | |
| Executive Attendance Demands, Remote Work, and AI Faking | 5 | 3 | 4 | 4 | The panel discusses Evan Spiegel demanding employees return to the office, hybrid work impacts on female executive progression, and Dave catching colleagues using AI-generated boilerplate in pitch meetings. | |
| The Tractor Analogy: AI Productivity vs. Real Value | 5 | 8 | 7 | 4 | When Dave uses a farming tractor analogy to argue AI will elevate skilled labor productivity, Sam forcefully counters, explaining that mechanization commoditized farming, decimated wages, and created grueling monoculture work. | |
| Commodity GPTs vs. Building Niche Communities | 5 | 6 | 8 | 6 | Brit defends using AI to double blog output and maximize Google SEO traffic. Sam bluntly dismisses ranking games as temporary tactics rather than sustainable businesses, bluntly calling pure SEO plays 'shit businesses.' | |
| The Rise of Personalized AI Bots and Social Media Evolution | 6 | 5 | 4 | 3 | Dave and Sam map the trajectory of social media from friends to influencers to hyper-personalized AI bots, noting that automated content threatens generic entertainment but cannot replace human networks. | |
| Content Maxis vs. Network Maxis in the AI Era | 6 | 4 | 3 | 2 | Dave synthesizes the episode by separating 'story/content maxis' from 'network maxis,' emphasizing that AI will commoditize mere content while resilient value belongs to localized, trust-based communities. |
Statements from this episode (30)
Jessica Lessin: Big Tech agreed to alert government when training AI models
“Meanwhile, Secretary Raimondo is telling me that all the big tech companies, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and so forth, are cooperating, are, and down to the level of agreeing to tell the government when they're running their next model.”
Lessin: Ukraine Is Burning Through Roughly 60,000 Drones a Month
“You know, I heard a statistic recently that right now in Ukraine, I could be off by a little bit, but they're going through something like 60,000 drones a month.”
Lessin: AGI Risk Is Dramatically Overstated Compared to 'Dirty AI'
“I personally, if it wasn't obvious, I already think that the AGI risk is dramatically overstated. Right. And not what we should be talking about largely because I think I'll call it dirty AI, like dirty nukes. Which is like partial AI solutions or shitty AI th…”
Lessin: AI Empowers Big Platforms and Micro-Startups Over Mid-Sized Firms
“AI clearly benefits the really big platforms. I think we can all, I think we all agree with that, right? Like if you're a huge platform, you're going to make bank, right? Cause it's just obvious how to slot in and make your ads more performant or like things l…”
Lessin: Offshore Workers in Developing Nations Will Be Displaced by AI
“Who loses out of that are all the people in Indonesia who see this stuff for you, right? So it's like the lower middle class. Yeah, those guys are all screwed, right? Like, if that's, like, the level of automation that we're realistically talking about is, lik…”
Dave Morin: Fiverr Designer Revenue Fell Meaningfully in Recent Quarter
“There was a chart that came out last week that suggests that the, you know contractor revenue going to designers and things like in Fiverr and whatnot is already down quite meaningfully in the last quarter.”
Lessin: Slow Ventures invests $2M for 5-10% of creators' 30-year earnings
“We've started in the last two years financing creators specifically. So people who have like a big YouTube following a specific niche and saying, Hey, we will give you two million bucks for five to 10% of whatever you do over the next 30 years.”
Sam Lessin: Slow Ventures Is Actively Backing New Franchise Models
“Franchise models, which historically VCs hate, we've started doing a bunch of them, right? And financing interesting new franchising models are really cool”
Brit Morin: Bobbie's Series A Customer SPV Filled in 90 Minutes
“We did a, an SPV for the customers of Bobby in the Series A wherein we could raise up to a certain threshold of capital from individuals at like a, I don't know, five, 100 to a thousand dollar price point to put in. So very small, but these are people that are…”
Brit Morin: Bobbie Customer SPV Investors Are Up 10x
“Well, the Bobby investors are very happy. It's up 10 X since they invested”
Sam Lessin: Seed Investment Teamshares Has Acquired ~100 Small Businesses
“One great example is a company I'm very proud of having seeded is, you know, as the first investment called team shares, which has bought like on the order of a hundred small businesses and is growing super quickly.”
Lessin: Almost all of American business is not monopolies, defying Thiel
“I actually think we're now seeing like the reaction to that, which is no, actually almost nothing's a monopoly. There are some that occur sometimes if you want to play monopoly games, fine, but like almost all of American business is not monopolies at all.”
Jessica Lessin: Coatue is raising a venture fund without management fees
“As we report in the information, COTU doesn't have management fees on this fund, right?”
Sam Lessin: Founders will increasingly pitch rounds aimed at immediate profitability
“I think in the next 12 months, I will get more and more pitches of people who are like, I don't need two and a half million dollars to prove one statistic to try to hail Mary and A. I actually need like four or five, but on the other side of it, I should have …”
Sam Lessin: Startups are almost never killed by direct competitors
“The number of companies that are actually killed by competition is so small, right? Like the story is, oh, I need more money to like me. And then look, it happens like Uber, Lyft can like slug each other to death. You know what I mean? Like there are places wh…”
Jessica Lessin: In-Person Face Time Is Essential for Coaching and Career Development
“FaceTime still matters, and I think if we're sending the message that it doesn't, we're actually not. And not FaceTime from like a, you know, kissing the boss's ring perspective, but to be able to coach people, develop them in their careers, have them see what…”
Sam Lessin: Jobs Made Dramatically More Efficient by AI Are Probably Stupid
“If you ever have a job where like AI can make you more efficient dramatically, your job is Probably stupid.”
Sam Lessin: Ad Copywriting Jobs Will Disappear in Three Months
“They're not going to have a job doing that in like three months.”
Brit Morin: Middle America Companies Won't Adopt AI for One to Two Years
“These middle America companies, I think, will not catch on to the AI stuff for a year or two.”
Lessin: When everyone's productivity rises in competitive markets, income declines
“And so the reality is, yeah, sure, your output is up, but, like, everyone's output is up, and it's competitive market, so actually, Your income is down.”
Sam Lessin predicts custom GPTs will become commoditized noise with no value
“I think what they should be doing is going and building loyalty and brand and community, right? Like the GPT, like these things will be so pervasive. There's no value in them, right? Like they're just going to be all, it's like, but it'll be just like millions…”
Brit Morin: Creators must build custom GPTs even if they are commodities
“It's like the thing where like it's commodity, but that means you have to have it. So you have to at least start sometime.”
Lessin: Writers must build niche communities and act as curators, not build GPTs
“I mean, the reality is people who, like, what the writers should be doing is building a rabid fan base around them and a specific niche that they own, where those people are gonna trust them, they're gonna, like, hear from them, they're gonna, like, care what …”
Sam Lessin: You Cannot Win a Content War When Content Is Free
“You're not going to win a content war when content is free, right? Like, you know, and like, as a result, like, the reality is, is like, that is a tactic, not a long-term strategy.”
Sam Lessin: Algorithm-Dependent Traffic Is Not a Durable Business Model
“Particularly like a Buzzfeed, right? Like they played a game for it. 10 years, it was all about effectively ranking, feed ranking, and things like that. There's not a durable business model. Like you're always one click away from getting swiped when the algori…”
Sam Lessin Calls Allrecipes and SEO-Driven Media Sites Bad Businesses
“Those are all shit businesses.”
Lessin: Personalized AI bots of oneself will replace human influencers
“The ultimate winner over influencers is going to be some weird reflected version of yourself that you're going to get deeply obsessed with. And like, that's who you're going to hang out with.”
Lessin: AI bot content will commoditize entertainment, shifting value to communities
“The bots And that content wipes out all the entertainment stuff. Like that's just going to be noise. And like, it's a, maybe it's an acquisition strategy, but it's not a business. All the business has to be on that. What's capital rich. And I think that will b…”
Lessin: Generic influencers like MrBeast lack durable businesses because content is replaceable
“I'm much less interested in generic influencers, and that's everything from the Kardashians to like Mr. Beast. I get, I totally get it. Lots of distribution better. I just don't think it's durable, right? Because all it is is content, right? And like that is u…”