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.
why aren't all 3,487 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 88 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lessin argues consumer hardware hits Ring and Nest weren't strong companies
“The track record of venture capital going into consumer hardware, there are a few examples of people who just barely got out by the skin of their teeth with reasonable outcomes, right? Ring, Nest, etc. But those were not actually fundamentally strong companies…”
Sam Lessin: Late-Stage Venture Capital Is a Terrible Asset Class
“It's the same thing with like late stage private capital. It's like, it's just a shitty asset class, right? Like, it's like, I understand why you want to be a hyper profitable, super Thingy AI companies with infinite pop side and tons of control of their margi…”
Sam Lessin: AI Capabilities Are Asymptoting Faster Than Admitted
“I'm an asymptote guy, and I think we're asymptoting faster than people want to admit in this generation of technology.”
Lessin: Tesla is just a car company with a GameStop premium
“I think it's a car company. I think it's always been a car company with a GameStop slapped on top, right?”
Dave Morin: Tesla is like Apple right now, but mis-executing
“I would argue that it is right now, but it's mis-executing.”
Morin: Multiple AI teams knowingly chose data theft over paying publishers
“Here's a bunch of teams, not just one, but many AI teams standing on the precipice of making a moral decision. And they knew they either needed to pay for it or steal it. And some of the teams chose to steal it instead of paying for it.”
Lessin: LLMs break internet economics by stealing without returning ecosystem value
“The problem with these kind of LLM things is they break economics because they steal, but they give nothing back. And so even like a cents on the dollar licensing deal or whatever, that's not investing in the ecosystem of knowledge of information globally, rig…”
Lessin: AI is a deeply communist technology against the free market
“AI is like a deeply communist technology, right? It is against the free market. It's again, like in, in every way, shape, or form.”
Lessin: ByteDance investors ignore national security risks for massive financial incentives
“Oh, they're pretty smart guys. They know exactly what's up. They, they're trading between what is obviously true to any American versus their enormous financial incentive, and empathy is a great word for that.”
Sam Lessin: The foundational AI tool business will become an utter bloodbath
“So it's turtles all the way down, which is why, again, this industry will make a lot of money for the end users that are, like, getting value from these tools. But the actual tool business is going to be an utter bloodbath.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is probably not worth $100 billion
“I gotta tell you, Sam Altman, our business is not as good a business as the high-margin software business. Still a good business, but it's probably not worth a hundred billion dollars.”
Lessin: Traditional software venture capital is dead
“The answer might be that software venture capital is dead. It's over.”
Jessica Lessin: Big Tech AI acqui-hires are tailor-made to skirt antitrust
“There are laws designed to protect, you know, companies from getting so much market power that they're anti-competitive effects, and these deals are tailor-made to skirt those laws.”
Sam Lessin: An outright US ban on TikTok will never get done
“I think saying ban TikTok, that's a thing that like candidly might be marginally better, but you'll never get done.”
Morin: China has laid groundwork via TikTok to sway US youth on Taiwan
“And so Sam's analogy earlier that like if China decides to invade Taiwan and they want the American youth on their side, they've already laid the groundwork. Like we've seen it time and time again.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI Pulled a Skeezy Bait and Switch to Access Data
“The problem with this is that open AI convinced everyone because they were a quote unquote nonprofit to let them have a bunch of data that they could work with that they otherwise would never have had access to. And like, that is super skeezy. Right. And like …”
Sam Lessin: AI Base Models Will Either Be Worthless or Have Two to Three Winners
“There's no stable configuration for the base models where there's like a hundred of them. There's either going to be Zero that make any money. So they all are worthless, right? Cause it like, cause it is everywhere. And like, for what it's worth, that's been m…”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI's top strength is marketing, not artificial intelligence
“In credit to OpenAI, I think the thing that OpenAI is best in the world at right now is not AI, it's marketing.”
Lessin: Sam Altman's $7 trillion pitch just tries to outdo Elon Musk
“All Sam Altman's doing is trying to one-up Elon Musk in absurdism, right, which is like, oh, like, we're gonna, like, list that we can do self-driving cars a decade before we can, or, like, we, at least, like, or we're gonna be like, we're going to Mars, even …”
Lessin: Asking for $7 trillion is the act of a religious leader
“When you're like, I want seven trillion dollars, right? Like, that is the statement of a religious leader, not a disciplined business person.”
Casey Neistat: TikTok is a platform for sensationalism, not creativity
“I don't think it's a platform for creativity. I think it's a platform for sensationalism all the way through and through.”
Sam Lessin: Believing fintech startups can outscale incumbent banks is silly
“So you basically have to have this theory that for some technological reason or customer acquisition reason, you can basically overcome all of that and scale so big and so fast that it doesn't matter. And I think that's like, again, is it, if you want to dream…”
Sam Lessin: Building a Consumer Hardware Startup Is a Disaster That Always Fails
“The thing I don't get is why make a hardware device? It's such a disaster. They always fail.”
Sam Lessin Predicts OpenAI's GPT Store Has No Chance of Platform Success
“The thing with the GPT's launch is the economics of it make absolutely no sense for a developer, which means that, like, ultimately there's no chance That this will be a successful platform.”
Sam Lessin: Elites will retreat to smaller, expensive private newsletters
“What's going to happen is what happened after the printing press was invented, which is elites and people who care about the real world are going to retreat to expensive private newsletters that are great businesses, right? And smaller. And the vast majority o…”
Sam Lessin: Blocking Big Tech acquisitions forces startups to build profitable businesses
“I think this is like pretty good because all of a sudden as a startup, you'd be like, you actually have to build a successful business to go public and make money and like be a successful company. You can't just build a product that's strategically valuable to…”
Sam Lessin: Remote startups will all underperform compared to in-person companies
“People are just saying, like, you should not invest in companies that are remote, because, like, they're all gonna underperform.”
Sam Lessin: America's tax-exempt nonprofit model was a mistake
“Given the incredibly broad swath we have on these nonprofit ideas and how much money gets stuck in this industrial complex, I think it's, like, pretty reasonable to just say that, like, it was a mistake.”
Sam Lessin: Ultra-wealthy institutions use massive endowments to ignore external feedback
“The problem is these organizations say, no, no, no, our mission is X. So we will take no external feedback, right? And we can afford to not care about you donors, right? And I actually think that in their minds, I totally get it. They're saying we're independe…”
Sam Lessin: The NFT market was 'fucking stupid' and cult bullshit
“Like, the NFT thing was obviously, I'm happy to say we stayed out of it. It's obviously fucking stupid, right? And that was, like, all cult bullshit.”
Sam Lessin: Elon Musk runs an entirely cult-based stupid cryptocurrency
“I mean, Elon runs an entire cult-based stupid coin.”
Lessin: China will weaponize TikTok algorithmically if it invades Taiwan
“But the second they want to go invade Taiwan, which they've said they want to do, you better believe that they will use their for-profit company, right, with, given their ulterior motives at a higher level, right, to soften the beaches by using AI to just kind…”
Lessin: China won't manipulate TikTok yet to avoid burning the asset
“People are like, well, do you think the Chinese are manipulating it? And my general answer is no, because I think they're too smart to do that. Like, why waste the tool, right?”
Morin defends Adam D'Angelo as highly rational and principled
“Adam is one of the highest integrity people that I've ever worked with. He's a very principled person and he you know, he's a very deliberate, very rational very serious actor. He's a very serious person, and so it does bother me a little bit that there's a lo…”
Lessin: Altman is an AGI fundamentalist, not a business pragmatist
“Sam is being painted by the media as like, The business person versus the fundamentalist, but he's like as fundamental as it gets. And so like, to me, it's very hard to like, imagine that being a healthy, stable situation for the future.”
Lessin predicts Microsoft will absolutely not fund AGI development
“Microsoft's not going to fund AGI”
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: 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…”
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: 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…”
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: 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…”
Sam Lessin: The Facebook developer platform died and failed
“Yeah, but Facebook platform died, babe. It didn't work.”
Sam Lessin: AI progress is asymptoting with no major breakthroughs coming
“And I think I'm, as you know, extremely skeptical in the, like, this is some sort of like, this is asymptoting. Like we know what this looks like and it's going to be useful and like, it's good. I don't think there's some like major next breakthrough.”
Sam Lessin: The era of frequent tech IPOs is permanently over
“It's not that it won't happen. Of course someone's going to go public. It's not going to zero, but like the era of like lots of IPOs for tech is just done, right? Like it turns out that these are pretty shitty companies in general.”
Sam Lessin is very skeptical of artificial intelligence investing
“As you all know, I'm very skeptical on AI investing. I don't really believe in it.”
Jessica Lessin: Eric Schmidt drove Biden's AI executive order
“I mean, this is driven by Eric Schmidt, let's just say it, which I don't think is like good or bad necessarily, but like, you know, I think he went in there and said, here's what you should do, and they did it. That's my read of it.”
Sam Lessin: Open global internet is over, requiring national tech stacks
“The internet is done, right? The open global internet is over and needs actually is like a problem at this point in certain ways. And like, We do need to go to, like, national tech stacks in various forms with stronger borders”