Jun 16, 2023 · 47m · more-or-less
#2: Reddit and the death of the public internet; the end of the VC "epoch" · More or Less Podcast
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of More or Less, hosts Jessica Lessin, Sam Lessin, Dave Morin, and Brit Morin evaluate the fallout from Reddit's API revolt, the structural demise of the open web, and the historical realignment reshaping venture capital and generative AI.
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 99.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The hosts as informed peer 6.4 Guest teaching 2.4 Guest disagreement 2.6 The hosts pushing back 2.8
speaking balance: gold is the hosts, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 21:44 Outrage over hundred-million-dollar AI seed rounds
Dave forcefully denounces nine-figure seed rounds in generative AI as intellectually dishonest circumventions of fundamental company building.
Hardest push from the hosts ▶ 22:46 Jessica questions the relevance of seed round labelingJessica pushes back on Dave's outrage, arguing that labeling a funding round 'seed' is merely arbitrary venture jargon rather than a substantive transgression.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 36:00 Dave demonstrates ad market dynamism against monopoly claimsDave challenges conventional monopoly framings of Google by citing Amazon's rapid capture of 10 to 15 percent of the digital advertising market in five years.
The host holds their own ▶ 17:41 Sam reframes copyright infringement as information launderingSam demonstrates domain mastery by illustrating why traditional copyright frameworks fail against AI model training, describing the process as untraceable information tumbling.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Welcome Banter, Jackson Hole Injury, and Launching the Podcast | 1 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Light conversational banter about a family ER visit in Jackson Hole, logo design, and early listener feedback for their new podcast. The tone is entirely collegial, friendly, and introductory with no friction or substantive debate. | |
| Reddit API Changes and Evolution of Social Platform APIs | 7 | 4 | 2 | 3 | The hosts and participants draw heavily on firsthand operational experience building and deprecating APIs at early Facebook. Sam and Dave explain the historical tradeoff between open ecosystems and user privacy, while Jessica prompts the group on Reddit's pricing backlash and AI scraping pressures. | |
| The Death of the Public Web and Private Community Spaces | 6 | 2 | 3 | 2 | Sam declares the public web effectively dead due to AI scraping and broken monetization, pointing to walled communities like Discord and WhatsApp. Brit introduces unit economics of Discord moderation from her venture, leading into a unanimous flash poll agreement that the open web is declining. | |
| AI Model Training, Illicit Datasets, and Looming Copyright Battles | 8 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Jessica cites reporting on OpenAI and Google training on YouTube data and questions the durable moat of frontier models. Sam characterizes large-scale model training as 'information laundering,' while Dave explains the mathematical scaling and tokenization constraints of training sets. | |
| Venture Capital Downturn and Outrage Over $100M Seed Rounds | 8 | 4 | 5 | 4 | Dave passionately attacks 100-million-dollar AI seed rounds as intellectually dishonest circumventions of product-market fit. Jessica and Brit push back on whether stage nomenclature matters, while Sam dissects the structural breakdown of late-stage venture capital conveyor belts. | |
| The End of the VC Epoch, Zombie Startups, and Product-Market Fit | 8 | 3 | 4 | 4 | Sam argues the venture capital ecosystem has entered an irreversible end of an epoch that will spawn a landscape of zombie startups. Dave counters with studio venture models focused on product-market fit before hiring founders, sparking an analytical debate over great products that make terrible businesses like early Venmo. | |
| Lightning Round: Antitrust Scrutiny on Google's Search and Ads | 7 | 2 | 3 | 4 | Jessica frames the EU and DOJ antitrust actions against Google search and ad tech, taking a pro-regulation publishing stance. Dave and Sam push back, citing dynamic market entry from Amazon ads and arguing European regulatory enforcement stems from a lack of domestic tech competitiveness. | |
| Lightning Round: AI Beatles Track and Posthumous Death Rights | 6 | 1 | 2 | 2 | The panel discusses Paul McCartney using AI extraction on John Lennon's vocals, evolving into Sam pitching a satirical venture concept around trading posthumous death rights. The conversation remains lighthearted and imaginative, closing with inside banter about fragmented smart TV software stacks. |
Statements from this episode (17)
Lessin: Social platforms failed by offering open APIs without business models
“I think shame on those platforms for being open without a clear business model around it for too long.”
Dave Morin: Reddit blackouts caused meaningful degradation of Google Search results
“I think one of the interesting things this morning was that the somebody did an analysis that Google search results are meaningfully worse off today because of the Reddit stuff going on.”
Lessin: AI is the nail in the coffin for the public web
“Like, I basically think the public web is dead, right? The internet, it's just dead. And like, AI is the nail in the coffin because there's no economic model anymore to publish content.”
Lessin: Adult content will migrate to massive Apple iMessage groups
“I'm a hundred percent a believer in private spaces that will be booted everywhere. And, you know, ironically, like, you know, it'll be places like, you know, where the porn is going to go. It's going to go to like big iMessage groups and Apple won't talk about…”
Lessin: The entire current generation of AI models was trained illegally
“This entire generation of AI models, from my perspective, has basically all been illegally trained, right? It's like, there's all sorts of rumors that are flying on the tech community about how a lot of the kind of more image-based you know, large language, la…”
Lessin: Platforms will shut down APIs to fight a data holy war
“This is why everyone's going to shut down every API imaginable. It's going to be a data. Holy war is like, if you actually have differentiated data Right? That would be useful for a specific domain getting answers through a large language model or refining a m…”
Lessin: Generative AI models effectively function as information laundering
“The problem is that the problem is that all this AI stuff is effectively information laundering, right? Because you can't really point to where the sources came from and people are trying to figure out ways to do that, but it's like kind of antithetical to the…”
Brit Morin: Upcoming $84T boomer wealth transfer dwarfs private equity and VC
“84 trillion dollars of wealth Are about to come online into like family offices and all kinds of sort of you know, financial accounts from these baby boomers. And so the market is actually going to be larger than like PE and VC combined over the next 10 years.”
Dave Morin: Calling $100M AI funding rounds 'seed' is intellectually dishonest
“I just think that it's so intellectually dishonest to announce a one hundred million dollar seed round, and it's like this, you know, do not pass go, do not find product market fit, go straight to series C or D the laws of organization building do not apply to…”
Lessin: The predictable conveyor-belt model of venture capital is dead
“The train tracky version of the private capital tech markets is dead, and the problem is that a lot of firms designed their thesis and, like, the way they're approaching investing over the last many years to just fit on that, like, that, like, conveyor belt, a…”
Lessin: Venture capital will be eviscerated, leaving few survivors within ten years
“And you know, the industry is, I think going to get eviscerated with very few survivors in the next, you know, five to 10 years, just as people run out of capital, et cetera.”
Lessin: Startups will face a lost decade sustaining zombie companies
“I mean, I actually think what's going to happen is like, we're going to have so many zombie companies for the next decade, right? Of people who are like, they've done fine. They make enough money to keep going. Their VCs want them to keep going, but they're no…”
Lessin: Venture capital firms should never invest in media companies
“Which is like, you know, at least I'll say that I think media and VC has always been a ridiculous combination. Like media, VC should not invest in media companies. Ever.”
Brit Morin: Mistral AI's seed round exceeds BuzzFeed's public market cap
“The hundred million seed round that was just raised is more than the current eighty-five million dollar market cap of BuzzFeed.”
Lessin: Venmo is a great product but a terrible business
“I great fucking product. Terrible fucking business.”