The Wisdom Wall

“those number twos are always expendable. Um, they have to be.”

“when you get down to a lower level, because you can no longer have on-off APIs, because everything is scriptable, because these things can script any interface and interact anyway, as long as you have data sovereignty, meaning like it's your data, they're all completely interoperable. And like, there's nothing they can…”

“What matters is that no lead is secure. And projections don't mean anything, right? And so I think that's the real story is it's too easy to switch. Leads don't matter. It's going to be impossible to financially price any of this stuff.”

“The reason this never happens is because big fancy investors, not us lowly seed investors, but big fancy ones, have no interest in the write down, right? It's a massive write down, right, for them. And they'd rather just stick it on their books and pretend like it's worth something it's not until the last possible…”

“But, like, you taking any action as a single country does nothing, right? Like, and all it does is protect certain companies, right? And their, and their market caps.”

“And if the trailer is sick, then like, that means you have good taste, that means you have a story people are gonna care about, like, it means all the good things. And if your story is boring, or there's no good trailer, then your company's gonna suck.”

“a lot of the way that we built software, which was like, we're going to build all these little shims in between, and there's going to be all this open source software and I'm going to use yours and you're going to use mine and it's going to make my life easier. Like a lot of that stuff goes away when these models can…”

“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?”

“if you're a founder, software is no longer any sort of differentiator. Software is just like consumable. Like, it's just like, it's like a piece of media. Like, it's not like you can't build a software company.”

“I think when you get down to the practicality of how people use these things and their actual preferences or whatever, it just doesn't play out that way. It's not as much of a lock-in as you want it to be.”

“all of the people who are, you know, some version of like, how do I sell data or give data or give context to chat GPT and get paid cents on the dollar are stupid, right? And like, it should be exactly the way around, which is you just use them as commodity arms dealers for the business you already have and the…”

“there are all these smart people in teams that like follow this like incubatory, listen to your customer, customer research, like iterate, solve a problem for demo day. And what they don't realize is they're signing themselves up for like a decade of working on a problem. They don't give a Fuck about.”

“The problem is bankers are still just pricing based on what things are worth when they should be pricing based on, like, mimetic warfare and, like, community shit to get the bump and let the degens pay the price, right, for their silliness.”

“The entire thing with AI is it's a great way to sink money and power and compute into a war with itself that produces no value.”

“These guys jumping ship proves it actually. Right? Like if, if they were so sure that they were on the path to AGI or super intelligence or whatever we're going to call it this week, they would have stayed with the team and the system that they were already working on. Instead, they chose to take money and move…”

“If you can't, like, build applications with AI to do your own job better, you just are not good at your job anymore.”

“you have to go back to human based networks, because you can't trust anything you see or anything you're sent from an unvalidated source, right? So you end up with a very Going back to a more structured society versus a more open society because of AI.”

“capitalism tends towards efficiency, but that's the whole beauty of it, but like requires structural inefficiency to profit, right? If there's no structural inefficiency, there's no profit, right? Which is why people talk about how AI is communist and, you know, crypto is capitalist, right? Because the whole point of…”

“Publishers have to build it themselves, and in no way, shape, or form should be turning that data over.”

“So there's a pattern matching of all these exacts informed people going over there, which has absolutely nothing to do with like actually the quality of the business. Right. But it's purely about chasing that experience again at all costs, which is why you see some of these people hopping around trying to find it. Same…”

“Then you have a bunch of strategics and family offices because no smart people would invest in this, right? Like that's like how you end up with strategics and like hedge funds is when like the serious venture people are like, absolutely not.”

“venture capital is one of these things where like, The relationship between the work you do and the outcomes is like- The smack talk never ends. Is like almost non-existent. Like it is not an input to output business, right? Like it is, and so I, I think it's like probably one of the loosest correlations between hours…”

“That like you have this thing where like, oh, you want to have it both ways. So you think it's okay to break the economics of the underlying internet you're leveraging, but then you're mad that someone's doing it to you.”

“there's no way to like earn your way into the upper class anymore. Right. Into wealth is not mathematically possible. The way to do it through income, through income. Right. The only way to do it is to make highly asymmetric bets with your time. Right. Or with your capital.”

“I actually, I don't believe that technology can be proprietary. It's the whole, it's too easy to copy and too easy to steal. So if anything, I would actually argue that a lot of these, the idea that like you're going to get proprietary software that, or algorithms that like no one else can possibly figure out. I just…”

“One of my number one rules of seed investing is that the second SoftBank buys, you must sell. I've learned this the hard way several times.”

“And, uh, what we do know is that more and more and more regulation of big tech equals less and less and less acquisition of small tech. Which results in the complete and total freezing of the innovation ecosystem of Silicon Valley.”

“technology adoption in healthcare only really goes in service of billing.”

“small companies don't make sense, right? Sub ten billion dollar public companies.”

“Now, interestingly, shitty VCs aren't actually managing for the killer wins. They're managing to make their companies not go bankrupt so they can raise more funds, right? And so what I'd say is a shitty VC would say, oh, we're gonna, like, manage for lower variance because, like, we want this to look credible so we can…”

“I think to Britt's point, you can't have full free speech and anonymity. I actually think that's too dangerous, right? Like for the reason you're talking about, especially as we get into the bot world and AI or whatever. So like, the thing I believe in is that you should say whatever you want, but say it in your own…”

“The only way startups win, right, I think in this world, is if the really big companies basically are too prissy And then also are too legal. Like they're suitable. They're real targets. So they can't do this stuff. And then they let all of the babies, like the open AIs, do all the illegal shit or semi-immoral stuff.”

“investors have a strong incentive for you to keep going because you're just an option once they put money in. And so if they get 50 cents on the dollar, they don't care, and they'd rather you just keep trying because you're just a free option. They already have the ownership. They've already put the money in.”

“if you think about what companies are valuable, the technology is not valuable. The customers are valuable. The revenue, the profit is valuable.”

“And my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute. Because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year.”

“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 someone else and get acquired.”

“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 where this is true, but the number of places where companies…”

“I'd actually argue that they're kind of the whole paradigm of like smart product founder, hire a business person, business person, good, make business work. That's actually like never actually true. What you need is smart. You need the founder to be that person.”

“The Florida signaling is, right? Basically, you like no income taxes, right? You're, you're an optimizer. You want that last dollar, right? Um, well, that's, but why is crypto? It's like the same thing with, like, crypto is all in Puerto Rico. Like, all these crazy, like, the part of crypto that went to Puerto Rico,…”

“It's one of the beauties of Silicon Valley and our economy as it's set up, is like, this is a no-fault zone, unless, you know, so don't lie, don't make shit up. It's either working or not, and you probably know, Right? And if it's not working, it's completely fine. And like, don't worry about your investor. People are…”

“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 technology.”

“The, 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, and there's gonna be a lot of pain, right, um, coming…”

“You're gonna have a few of these very powerful models. It's like stupid for them to limit what you're doing with these. It would make sense if they were the only model in the world, but it's kind of like having a group of people, and you go to one of them, you're like, hey, we do this, and they're like, No. And you're…”

“The federal government isn't designed to do these types of things. States are. Communities are. They've all been blown up in favor of kind of national integrated economy, and the problem is the federal government is just not set up, and it's, you can't do a democracy well with three hundred million people.”

“These clouds, I mean, I don't think Meta publishes it or Google publishes it, but my guess is that it's around ten million computers in like these clouds globally, if not tens of millions, and no one brain has any chance. Parents have absolutely no chance. And, like, I really think that's what this is about, is that,…”

“Boards are the worst. You should never have any formal control of anything.”

“This data is not readily accessible. You can't commoditize it nearly as quickly. And so it gives startups like a chance to actually gain distribution In like a more methodical way before the mega platforms can swallow it up.”

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

“And then you have like duration mismatch between like the hard assets and the financing. So like the chip, depending if you look at meta or Amazon debate, whether it's a three year or five year depreciation, but it's, you know, called three, the debt, Amortizes over 10 years. The power constructs and contracts are like…”

“The point is if these systems start improving themselves, like less than two years from now, the more cynical take is that if you're one of the 1000 people who have the most coveted of all skill sets, which is in training, pre-training, the sort of raising of models, then you need to get out the door now in order to…”

“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.”

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

“There's a bunch of people who are gonna make a ton of money on anthropic purely because they didn't have the time To sell.”

“the problem that OpenAI created for themselves is they went so broad and have so many partners that they lost their ability to be pure scare narrative. Because they have all these other, including consumer relationships where the fear thing is to their negative. So you can't sell scare and then also get consumers to…”

“ironically, the fact that there's no demonstrable, measurable ROI is in some ways this weird moat for a while, because you're like, well, I can pay a 100th as much, but I can't actually measure the value of this token versus that token in from an ROI perspective. So the fact that it's so opaque in some ways, like makes…”

“this is how you know the cycle is coming, like, at least somewhere in the tail end, because people aren't actually talking about customers. They're only talking about the money that they raise”

“My just fundamental point is like, we cannot assume that the goal is more productivity for everyone. There are fields and people where it is, but this technology is being designed by people who think that, and I think that could be its undoing.”

“The user experience is light years away from being easy enough for anybody that doesn't understand at a deeply technical level what's going on. And I think that's why you see only single digit millions people using things like cloud code and codex and, you know, the most advanced agent tools because they're just…”

“A harness is the software built on top of a model to make the model useful. The models are not useful by themselves. They need to be given software that helps them think in certain patterns, repeatedly run loops to accomplish tasks”

“just because you've democratized access to the medium, it doesn't mean you've democratized access to the economics.”

“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.”

“the fact that I can do so much more on my own and you can do so much more on your own just means we don't need to include as many people that we don't have to play nicely with others as much.”

“I'd rather just be long it and hold it, because you'd have to believe, not only is SpaceX overvalued, you have to have the opinion that it's so bad, right, that it's gonna underperform the rest of the market by 50% from where it is, for it to be worth taking the tax burden of selling it. And I think a lot of what you…”

“At the end of the day, like what I've come to is like, it just has to be what percentage of the fund is going in rather than what percentage of equity you're getting out of these companies, right?”

“the very fascinating thing about agents is the more power an agent has, the more intelligently it performs. And so if an agent has an entire computer, like a Mac mini, it, you feel like you have AGI in your hands.”

“this idea that like any one service can lock down, like what it will and won't do is ridiculous because as long as anything else on the internet will do it, like it'll just happen. You just ask the thing to like, do you do a much more complicated setup, which costs you nothing now and is not like a time stock to do…”

“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 zero lock. I can switch local. I can go, I can go cloud. I…”

“no one's going to build a company doing any of this stuff because it's too easy to build, right? Like there's no software defensibility to any of it, right? Like, so you just have to be really pure on business model and like why it is that you're going to have a compounding advantage.”

“for two years, I've been saying like, look, there's this like triangle trade between DC, Silicon Valley and New York, whereas huge deficit, huge debt problem, huge debt problem. GDP has to grow massively fast in order to deal with it. It's like the only way out because we can't cut costs to make it happen…”

“if you own something that is fundamentally valuable and compounding, you're gonna do great, right? If you own scarce assets that are not digitizable or replaceable, you're gonna do great.”

“the way you make a lot of money in technology is you centralize and control the value, but then you basically socialize or, like, throw off all the risk associated with it to the edge and let other people deal with it”

“A dark software factory is basically you're running a agentic engineering organization where you, the code must not be written by humans. The code must not be reviewed by humans and you write tools to understand what's being built and to keep the thorough put and the, bottlenecks in the speed of your development at the…”

“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 you're like, ah, this doesn't quite make sense business wise,…”

“in the seed market, you have the multi-stage firms, And 2000 seed funds competing for the 75th percentile of all of those sort of just like you said, the mainstream stuff out there in the market. And so that effectively means you have almost perfect pricing and a bunch of synthetic beta in the top quartile of the seed…”

“And then if you make it a punchy headline so people get mad, but then say something reasonable in the screenshot that most people don't read, it gets packaged and sent all over the place, and then smarter people will give you better ideas and send you a company.”

“I just think almost nothing in life is worth your full attention.”

“I think journalists get personnel related matters. Pretty wrong most of the time, and I think it's because at the end of the day, these decisions and dynamics are like two people in a room, and even the closest people right outside that room could have their theories about what's happening, but You know, as someone…”

“What lowbrow people do is they start talking like the machines. Like, they start trying, like, so there's a whole genre of people who are speaking like LLMs. They're imitating the fucking technology, and like, that is what lowbrow people do. What highbrow people do Reject all culture that is machinable to create new…”

“they make a mistake thinking that a TPU or a Tranium or from Amazon or something a company develops itself has to be as good as NVIDIA. It doesn't because NVIDIA's margin is so big. It can actually be a fraction of as good as NVIDIA and still cost effective.”

“I think there's a real reason, which is what happens if you, every, these take like a year or two years to gestate as ideas. So two years ago, all these venture firms sitting around watching valuations go bananas, and like, this sucks, I don't want to pay these valuations, plus all this excitement pouring in. And like,…”

“the reason the internet is valuable is because it's an economy. It's not valuable because of technology. It's valuable as an economy. And that economy was set up in such a way to pump interesting information and unique commentary into it and like products and capitalism and did a really good job of that.”

“the amazing part for capitalists about all this AI shit is it's like the first time that in a very long time, like technology is super expensive. Right. And like, that's good. Like they want it to be expensive because then they can play.”

“In AO, it's just the opposite. It is about actually putting value, uh, disproportionate amount of value of whatever's coming from the horse's mouth. Right? So whatever it is that we're putting out there. So a press release, you may not have done one lately because they were lame. It didn't matter. You need to be doing…”

“Truth is social is dead today, right? There, there are, there are no more social networks that anyone uses because everything, you know, followers don't matter. Your friendships don't matter. There's no actual functional social relationships inside of any of these systems today that matter in terms of the signal that…”

“there's actually things that Two years ago, I would have kicked and screamed about it and be like, that's just an API wrapper. Don't invest in that. I'm like, ah, actually we're at the point now we're like plugging this stuff into very verticalized applications actually does make sense in certain areas, right? And…”

“And I think that's actually what's going on in the Valley right now is like, things are moving so quickly. AI is so disruptive. There's all this stuff going on. You know, there's super empowered individuals coming out. It's just crazy. And so I think everyone kind of deep down recognizes that they're one trade away or…”

“That's blown out of the water by AI because all of a sudden, like everything looks the same. Like not to mention the fact that pitches are customized at scale and the decks are all crap. The apps themselves, the V ones are like too similar. So we don't know how to evaluate this stuff. And then by the way, you can go…”

“in times of great change, victory goes to the people who learn the fastest and they're in things are changing very rapidly. All that's stored, how to do things gets thrown out the window. Right. And it's just basic because it's just less relevant. It's less valuable if the world is changing really quickly. And so I do…”

“the, the scary part of AI is not like you're going to believe that Obama is launching nukes for some bullshit. Bullshit. It's basically that you just believe nothing because it's all made up, right? Everything just is, it's all fake, right? So you just have no idea what's actually true.”

“The money is made on the like, oh shit, you want some like, you, you, you convincing someone they want something. Right? Putting something they didn't know they want in front of them, right? And so I think this is, like, the big thing is, like, I'm not saying these things don't eventually collide in some form, but for…”

“the big lie has always been like with citizen journalism. Right. And like this idea that truth could come from anywhere. And it's because basically we got super lazy in the last hundred years because there was this brief moment in time where it was really hard to fake things, but really easy to capture them. Right. So…”

“The problem with the internet and the economics of internet is that the best strategy is to always be more extreme, right? And the way, like, because what happens is any extreme you pick, Eventually that with so many people online, there are too many people in it and you lose a sense of purpose in place. So that forces…”

“usage-based pricing is generally bad. Like, it's like, if you think about the hierarchy of business models, like paying for what you use, like, you know, pay for what you eat is like just a worse business model than pay me no matter what.”

“if you have technology or a stack that makes your business, some business twice as efficient, like you can't go to the CFO and be like, look, I'm going to make you twice as efficient, but you're going to give me half the upside. No CFO will do that deal. Right? Like, and so as a result, you kind of have to, if you…”

“I think that there's this fundamental thing which is hard about AI for Apple, which is that Apple really believes in consistency and delivering a quality experience the same time every time. That's pretty opposed to the nature of these probabilistic computers that we call AI.”

“if you have a bunch of entities that don't pay taxes, they compound faster than everyone else. If they compound faster than everyone else, over time, they eat the asset base, then they become like the rule setters in some degree.”

“One is between like engagement and the, on the engagement side, just for pure entertainment, you don't care what's real, right? Versus truth and information where the network and who's saying things and sources really matter. And it just turns out the internet's so good at entertainment. And it pulls everything towards…”

“everyone makes this out to be, like, some magic thing where you can just boot an app. The reality is, like, a lot of the stuff you learn, like, developing websites, right, is still 1000%”

“Whether or not people use it for therapy or for helping them think through things or not, Sam, if you change the personality of the underlying tool or the underlying LLM without transparency, I think that's the most dangerous possible thing that you can do for mental health.”

“there's no longer a single venture capital market or a capital market. There's at least three that are actually distinct and not very interoperable. There's the public market. There's late stage private and there's early. And the thing about it is the valuation approaches for all of them are completely different.…”

“companies that, that choose to or need to raise tens of or potentially hundreds of billions of dollars generally don't produce great Venture returns. And so like on the margin, I don't like the profile of companies that have to burn 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or a hundred billion dollars. Like history says those don't turn…”

“I think there's a massive intellectual failure when you equate using more with value, right? Because that's just not how the economy or business works, right? Like, I think that, and the reality is, I think the iron, the likelihood, Britt, is you will use more and pay less.”

“So the, my, my thesis about Pulitzers is that when a new media company wins a Pulitzer, you can just set the clock on layoffs.”

“also, right, I thought for two seconds, oh yeah, we should charge this as a product. And it's like, well, actually, if I built this in four hours, that's like not defensible. That is the least defensible thing in the world.”

“In journalism, there's sort of, at one end is gathering facts that are not on the internet, and putting them on the internet, and, and, and then there's a lot of other things, writing and producing in the middle, and at the other end is connecting with, is a human being who you trust connecting with another human…”

“a lot of them, the larger news organizations That we're doing it leans towards agenda driven journalism and ideology to kind of pay their bills during this wave of, of digital destruction.”

“if that's actually the purpose that most news serves for people is conversation set pieces to yell, then like it's actually fulfilling its purpose very beautifully. It's just unfortunately very not aligned with truth.”

“And I think that's, like, kind of the reality of all these LLMs to remember is that they don't actually tell you truth. They just tell you what you want to hear.”

“You can't, you can't do Apple style launches, um, in the social media era.”

“it's kind of like you just demonstrate seriousness by all being in the same place and willingness. Like in some ways there are things in life kind of like Chinese foot binding where like, The value is the signaling, right? As much as anything else. And I do think there's just a signal to be like, yeah, we're five days…”

“there's a new pattern of entrepreneurship, which is, it's not build product, then build community and trust. It's build community and trust in a niche you care about, and then layer products on top.”

“Fartcoin is serious specifically because of what you said, right? Which is, it's an asset that is so ridiculous and named in such a way that institutions will never touch it. And what that means is that retail can play, right? And so there's this really interesting thing going on where like you have spheres of…”

“The medium is the message and Ethereum is slow and expensive. Right. And so if you think about like the NFT thing was primarily ETH and ETH derivative based, right? It's slow and expensive. So like you had a different set of behaviors. Solana is fast and efficient. And so you just have like a totally different set of…”

“Interestingly, I actually have no formal way to prove that, right? Because it's reasonable. And I was like, because he's like, could I have in theory created other wallets and been the one that made it moon and then sold it? In theory, I guess I could have, and there's no way I prove I can't.”

“And so my theory has been that if you take up a bunch of the spots in your mind with people who aren't your real friends, Then we, when you go off into the real world looking for your real friends, you're going to wonder where they are. And so I think that the thing going on where people are saying there's a loneliness…”

“being an entrepreneur is Net present value, like expected value negative, right? Like it, you will probably be poorer, right? As an entrepreneur on average now.”

“most of the action is in private messaging, which is broadly not content moderated, uh, broadly, and we can get into the details there. And by moderating feeds and not moderating messaging, which is where the action is because you can see the feed. So people see things they want to moderate them. They want to control…”

“I think crypto is in a moment where like it's searching for a meaningful use case beyond Bitcoin. I think those exist, but like the timeline is ticking to have those in a way that people care about, or the government gets a lot more free lane to be like, well, we both, we don't like this. And no one seems to give a…”

“I just don't think you can build a social network where, where financial You know, where monetization or, or incentives is at the core of the network. I think people have to join these things because they want the utility of whatever the network is.”

“adding a financial incentive sort of creates this very perverse dynamic where, where sort of, you know, you want to invite 10 friends and they invite 10 friends and then the early people get all the money and then the later people don't get any of the money. And if the money is the utility, That by definition, your…”

“If it costs zero dollars to use the agent and there is any error rate and there will be an error rate, right? Dave Morin: Absolutely. Sam Lessin: You have no margin to pay back for the error. So the reason that DoorDash works, for instance, is an economic reason, which is they charge a ton of money for food delivery…”

“If it costs zero dollars to use the agent and there is any error rate and there will be an error rate, right? You have no margin to pay back for the error.”

“I just don't think you can build a social network where financial You know, where monetization or, or incentives is at the core of the network. I think people have to join these things because they want the utility of whatever the network is. And that is how you self propagate these networks. And so adding a financial…”

“And frankly, what we learned is you can make clinics like a reasonable business. They're not really a venture backable business, um, is what we found. These are not like, this is not, you're not going to go find a tech company building clinics everywhere, uh, everywhere and scaling that to the whole planet.”

“the insight is you go to Google as kind of the front page of your experience to the internet. And so any kind of downstream thing you want to do, you type restaurants, they can capture those queries. You type travel, they can capture those queries. And so that the idea is that the front door of a system is really…”

“I think that you can kind of bifurcate the market and you can say, You can say, Hey, I want to go super expensive, 15, 20, 30, 40,000 dollars a year per person. Don't venture back it. Um, and say, I'm going to build a nice, like slow growth, reasonable business. But let me be clear. You're not affecting like, you know,…”

“when you're asking investors, when you're asking customers, when you're asking employees to, to follow you and believe in you, The second you don't believe that you have a chance of success, you're being unethical and having all these people follow you.”

“why is Meta so powerful? It's as much because they own the buying experience for ads as it is because they own the engagement, right? It's very hard to break once you have it.”

“in a constrained mass media environment, you're super, super scared of like one wrong thing going through the pipe, right? In, in internet era, the reality is like, it's just noise. It just raises the volume of more noise there.”

“what's happened is there's been enough of it that everyone's just decided that nothing is real or it's too hard to figure out what's real and what's not real. And so they're just like, that's all noise. Right? And so as a result, there's no truth signal in anything. And so what you do is you default back to like, who…”

“The thing that's interesting is there's no different than social media, which is people say shitty things to each other on the internet. And like the interesting is liability moving, like how it moves, right? Because all of a sudden it's not the liability with crazy people on the internet. It's the liability with the…”

“Elon did a very good job selecting places to build where the cultures were so bad at the competitors that he could kind of be a dick and also push people really hard. And the working environment didn't have to be that great because if you want to work on rockets, you kind of have to work at SpaceX, right? So you create…”

“It's this weird dynamic that's developed because he's the kind of key person in all these companies where people fund these things or his dalliances, even Twitter, right? For access to the actually good stuff. And so you end up in this weird zone where like, I'd actually argue from a capitalist perspective, you're…”

“Right now you're seeing almost no consumer AI apps because it's so expensive to use the big models, right? Like if I were going to build a consumer AI app of any kind, call it, let's call it a social app of any kind. And I needed to call that API every single time a consumer interacted with the app. It's prohibitively…”

“The answer is, well, you need to depend on Apple making their small models that are on device available via API, which they haven't yet, right?”

“Cause you're too small to plow money into things and you're far too big to ever return multiples in the funds. Like five hundred million dollars is like exactly the wrong size of a fund.”

“I think you have to go back to the fundamentals of the idea of a digital collectible is, like, in my mind, fairly nonsensible. Like, the whole point of digital technology is you can infinitely replicate things for free, right? So, any scarcity is fundamentally made up in the digital space.”

“And just to riff on this for one more second, that actually is, I think, one theory of generally product, like social products in general, is that all sorts of features effectively, like there's an inflation rate that exists in social currencies. And so what happens is when you've been around for a while as a social…”

“It's actually, by the way, the, the absolute best way to make money in Silicon Valley is to be one of those people. You don't want to be the CEO. You want to go do two to three years stints as the person that reports the CEO and just keep cycling. You get more shots on goal. You get to smooth your variance and you get…”

“I think it's just impossible in 20, 24 to believe that any individual human is strong enough to like fight these battles. Like if you're in an encrypted and you don't have the keys and it's Technologically impossible. Then we can have an abstract argument about encryption and how the technology works and, you know,…”

“nation states have enormous resources and spend enormous resources to break encryption, find back doors, like do all kinds of things to make sure that they can listen to your phone if they want to. And it doesn't matter whether you're on Telegram or Signal, nation states will find a way.”

“the hardest thing to do in a network to get engagement is to get the friends to respond to the thing that somebody posts. And so if that's true, then friends in social media will truly die. They, they already are dying, but like this is maybe the death knell.”

“It's like, you kind of just need to drop the word social from social media. It's just media.”

“I also think honestly as an incumbent you have a couple years to figure it out because you tend to have so much distribution that you can launch four years later and still You know, when, as it were”

“And in the internet wave, you could argue 80 or 90% of the value went to startups. And in mobile, it was the other way around. Almost all the value went to incumbents, and in part it was because it was an extension of access and UI.”

“And if you just look at the headcount resident in those services, legal and accounting and certain types of sales and nursing, and you just kind of go through it all. And you add up just the payroll. For those areas, it's about three and a half to five trillion dollars, depending on what you include that you think Gen…”

“people say that these things are just wrappers on GPT in some cases, and you're like, well, SaaS is just a wrapper in a SQL database, and that worked out just fine for lots of people.”

“I always get very, very worried when everyone's obsessed with the infrastructure. Right? Like that, when that becomes an error. That happened in crypto too, right? This whole infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure, not what it's useful for. No one has an idea what it's useful for, where money's gonna be made.…”

“And actually it turns out that it's way cheaper and more efficient. Just buy your customers and then expand their margins, then try to sell to them.”

“So I'm pretty convinced The next few years, the revenue isn't the important metric. You don't want to, of course, lose so much money you can't afford it, but you're not trying to make tons of money. You're trying to get tons of usage and you're trying to get tons of data from the usage and learn to be a better model.”

“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”

“One is just broadly, you can own 10% of something that goes public and somehow gets liquid at a billion dollars. Or two is you can own a hundred percent of something that makes ten million dollars a year for a decade. It turns out the latter is a lot easier, right?”

“Media is incredibly strategic to own, but a shitty business, right? Doesn't mean it doesn't create cashflow in a flyway we can build from. It's a shitty business, right?”

“This pattern is the same across all of these technologies, right? Like you've got this really sort of hypey early hacker phase where you, you know, have a bunch of people working on something, a bunch of capital is deployed, none of it works and it all crashes. Then we go through it again and, you know, iterate into…”

“With a two million dollar initial check, and the right iteration, and the right founder, and the right setup, you can build massive companies, like, with no outside capital.”

“There's no quality. It's just enough people tell you it's good, and you eventually think it's good.”

“Take a few million bucks, go build a business that fucking works. You have to skip the middle with having a profitable business that works. So you never need the middle and then you come out the other side or you have a very profitable business.”

“the traffic back from these links wasn't the economic engine to support the high-quality journalism they all wanted to do, and in fact, in many cases, it distracted them from doing that.”

“The companies have way more resources than the government to just continuously open new fronts. That then the regulators have to chase them on, right? So outside of extreme actions, it's clearly the game everyone's gotten wise to.”

“the big companies that have Distribution and data and business models, they generally just get more profitable, but that's about it.”

“everyone's okay with this because it allows them to argue that they don't control I think any of these, you know, it allows them to argue their sphere of, sphere of control is smaller than it kind of actually is”

“What you do is you, like, look, you just subtly, you think about bot farms and control, it's like, you're like, ah, I'm gonna let these people that are, like, pro this issue, I'm not gonna, like, limit them quite as much, or these other people, you can be so sophisticated without, about how you approach just changing…”

“there's a whole economy of how much did you actually invest in something, and therefore how do I interact with it? People, to Casey's point, are subconsciously unbelievably sophisticated at, right? And so the more you understand that, and that's why I think the AI stuff is so interesting, is you basically just, like,…”

“And like you ride that hack for a while, but it's not going to last. And so at some point you have to say like, okay, my hack that I used to initially acquire customers or grow the, you know, the way AWS is valuable is not any one service. It's basically low lock in through having a thousand A thousand point touch…”

“The thing my dad taught me when I was a kid, he said, Sam, never, ever, ever compete in a business against people who don't pay their taxes. And my sense is that the lash people and the nail people do not pay their taxes. So it's going to be an uphill battle, right?”

“All that matters is enough people will be asking GBT exactly that question. You can make money betting with or against it. It's just a coordination game.”

“The worst idea in the world, right. If you're a developer to say, Hey, maybe I have some proprietary data. I'm going to like stick it in to open AI or one of these platforms for what in return. And then by the way, I'm just giving them all the interaction data. Right. Which is what they're really after anyway. And like…”

“Part of the real answer for crypto for those types of use cases is I think pretty simple, which is everyone wants to be the CRM of record for that, but no one wants that person to be the CRM of record for that, right? So it's basically just like a standoff where it's like, yes, Salesforce would love to do that…”

“one thing that I never understand in tech, and everyone here will, will probably disagree with me, or maybe agree with me, is that when you start a business, you're supposed to tell your potential investors exactly who your customer is before your product exists, and I think that is so insane, because you can guess, or…”

“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 like that. And then the middle is kind of messy. I think it's…”

“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.”

“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 algorithm changes.”

“No, the opposite. Like AI is the manager and people are the doers.”

“putting yourself in an R and D team is lame. Should not do that. You're either in or out. If you're the leader, you have too much sway as the leader, especially founder leader of a company like that to like do that, right? And it's a mistake. I think you got to be in or out.”

“Don't do a half layoff with the hope you'll get to profitability. Do the layoff to profitability once get yourself to default alive and then start making decisions.”

“You need to start thinking about your seed round or what you have is what you're going to get and be an entrepreneur and build a sweet business.”

“if you can just surface some of these superpowers in the workflows that customers have, so that tomorrow when they log in, suddenly they have it, then they don't have to, Necessarily go to an entirely new place and abs, you know, go through the friction of doing so. I think that that's a reason why the game is a bit…”

“In practice. What actually happens a lot of time is price equals quality. So like the price goes down and then you can't hire anyone, right? Ironically, people want to work at like the thing where like you get all the job applications and the stock price is too high and none of it when the stock price is too high, too…”

“being an investor in Silicon Valley is kind of being like, like having tenure in the startup community, right? Because, you know, you kind of, it's the weirdest job, right? Like you get paid no matter what, right? You have fees coming in, like sure, after a few funds, maybe you, you know, they trail off, but like, it's…”

“Distribution of paid-in capital, that's what VC is actually supposed to be measured on. How much fucking money did you give back?”

“like the thing that kills most seed companies is actually founder breakups, not the business not working.”

“The worst case scenario is you waste a decade of someone's time on something that's not going to work. Right. And so the reality is I actually think it's like rip the bandaid off. If you're on the margin, if it's not working, like it's actually kind of disingenuous and bad that VCs and everyone's giving you rope, you…”

“Our bits, as they flow out of our internet companies, literally hit a brick wall when they get to the Chinese border. And yet Chinese internet companies can, you know, develop enormously huge market caps and monopolies and technologies inside of Chinese borders. They can then take those bits and flow them all over the…”

“I think the lesson is you either spend nothing on marketing, or you spend, like, more money than God on marketing. Do not spend a moderate amount of money marketing anything.”

“we're, we're in the command line phase of this thing, and nobody's actually figured out the graphical user interface for, uh, for these, uh, AI technologies, and we've got a long way to go before we do.”

“average people produce average stuff, right? Crazy people on like the margins produce interesting new stuff that other people haven't thought of or haven't worked on. I think that's a really important part of innovation and creation.”

“I think crypto is in a moment where like it's searching for a meaningful use case beyond Bitcoin. I think those exist, but like the timeline is ticking to have those in a way that people care about, or the government gets a lot more free lane to be like, well, we both, we don't like this. And no one seems to give a…”

“my general working thesis was like, you should probably just invest in anything that Enables or extends like Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue. And then the hedge to that would be open source. So just go over there and the app layer stuff by and large do not enable or extend Anthropic, OpenAI or open source. So I stay…”

“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?”

“Don't ever have revenue. It destroys your story.”

“in order to run multiple agents at once, your Mac has to manage each thread, right? So if you're running, you know, one, two, three, 10, 100 agents at the same time, whether they're running through Codex, Pi, OpenClaw, or whatever, you have to have memory and compute available locally on your machine in order to run…”

“Guys, if you're just leaving a company to go to a rival two days later, don't pen an essay about mental health. That would be my advice. Keep it to yourself.”

“That's even more stressful. You have no resources and you have to compete.”

“The best, 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, like figure out if we actually were talking before, like whatever.…”

“A real company is very simple. A real company is a company you can sue, and you get paid if you win the lawsuit.”

“It's like, you can't stop this from moving cross border. Right. And so the basic point with all this stuff, again, is like, it's one thing if you're just like, okay, like the Chinese models are bad. And like, we're going to put up a trade embargo on like copying, like Chinese using Chinese models from China, but we're…”

“I just think at the end of the day, like, stopping people from moving software around the world, it's the same thing as stopping them removing, like, books around the world.”

“studios, cabals rule everything, just like in Hollywood, right? You need to be able to align with Club Elon or Club OpenAI or Club Meta or Club Google to be valuable.”

“I think in the longterm, if you can make your developer ecosystem make more money than you do, you are in a much better position than you are taking all of the profit for yourself over the longterm.”

“That the only thing holding you back now is attention and, like, time and creativity. Like, you don't need, like, it's already so powerful that it doesn't really matter.”

“Well, we've talked about this like six times, and it has to be real money. It's not a thing if it's not real money.”

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

“But, like, I don't, I think it's much more likely that it's kind of, like, the four-minute mile, right, which is, like, once you know it's doable, other people can do it, and they will do it, in which case, like, that's a stupid strategy, right, because, like, they'll just make their own fire.”

“And the Eureka moment was that look, this is a supply demand equation. They're just never going to be enough buyers for these businesses.”

“the issue is, is that that kind of like for sale by owner Fizbo in the home market, it's a false value prop. There's a reason why people pay those fees. So that, that was sort of on the seller side. There's a reason why people say those fees, you kind of only, it's even harder than selling a home, right? Fizbo should…”

“in the smaller businesses sort of like up To a million or two. They're, they're not generally someone who's ready to take on the financial responsibility for running the business. And that's why externally four out of five, three out of five businesses, you know, we need to sort of hire an external president”

“There's no difference between an app that's built on Linux or an app that's built on iOS. Like these are just apps.”

“It's not a business if it takes one prompt.”

“remote work actually works best for like an AI brain within a company because everything is recorded and you have to record all your meetings and transcripts.”

“Well, and the reality of the price of any of these things you're investing in has nothing to do with reality. It only has to do with the price That it already was, and then where it's going, and therefore, it's all just on story, right? Which is really scary, because there's no global liquid fundamentals against that”

“The game, it doesn't even have to do with cashflow. It doesn't have to do with traditional business metrics. It is literally just like warring city states that thrive on narrative, right? And storytelling.”

“Turned out that a coding agent was a necessary DNA for full personal agents and general purpose agents to grow first.”

“The new technical is that you used AI tools so well that what people used to take pride in being technical on is now an implementation detail that is less important.”

“Partially in AI, I think you're doing open source if you're behind, right? Like it's a distribution strategy.”

“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 cycle that is truly 2407. For the people who are in it.”

“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.”

“This is why everyone's always trying to make, like, apps to hang out in real life and they never work, because the friction's too high.”

“I'd argue that society is downstream of technology. Like we live in a, like there's a physics to technology and what we can do and how we can interact. Society is just, it comes from that. It doesn't dictate to that.”

“However, whoever wins the like ingestion of all the data, though, first is going to have such a superior advantage unless you're Sam lesson and you think you can just export from one model to another, which I tried and it was very difficult.”

“these are actually the most sophisticated and most influential form of social media ever created.”

“it's kind of like hiring McKinsey, where you hire McKinsey to tell you the things you already know, but someone else can say them for you and so that you can implement. Like, I didn't do it. McKinsey did it.”

“These things are not going to zero because if nothing else, they're taking dollars and turning into 20 cents worth of infrastructure, right? So the zero is not a number, right?”

“My basic view is if you can't tell someone used AI, it's fine.”

“fundamentally every time it came down to that if you don't start the company, you don't get to create the mission. And if you don't create the mission, you don't get to set the change. You don't get to set the impact that the company has on the world.”

“fire grows exponentially, and so if you can get to a fire in the first 1015, 20 minutes, and so the cost to put it out, the amount of apparatus, the amount of suppression payload, you can actually take out a fire that's a couple hundred square feet with much less apparatus than you'd think of for a megafire, because…”

“They need, they have so, they have so many product managers, they're hiring all the product people, and then you give them things to do, or they get sad, and so you end up doing more things because you've hired all the people, and you can't have them do nothing, and they all want to do different things, so you end up…”

“if everyone has the same improved customer service, it just ratchets the competition up. Right. And those numbers get passed back to you. Don't get to just like take all the money that we spend on customer service and be like, well, now we get that money. That's not how this works.”

“It's what all great founders do when they need to, yeah, exactly. Hide layoffs and change the business model.”

“I actually don't think you want to go with the person who has the best etiquette. I think the most interesting people are the most improved, right? Like you want the person who comes in with terrible etiquette, but takes it seriously and comes out with great etiquette and is humble about it, understands the tool to get…”

“Ads and commerce is the same business. Ads is a more profitable version of it.”

“And it just turns out that forget targeting, you just show someone the same shit a thousand times and eventually they'll buy it.”

“those prompts are all public, Brit. So no one can create a competitive advantage in the content of the prompts. Like if anything, the whole design is then to rip them.”

“Like, I'm a technological determinist. If it's possible, it's going to happen, and clearly people want to, like, scroll reels on their glasses. Like, you're not going to stop them.”

“in a de-globalized, de-marketized world of trade routes and, like, mercantilist stuff, there's all these assets that are, like, very valuable strategically, even if they're not actually financially traditionally valuable.”

“the story of Silicon Valley, big tech Silicon Valley, for a long time, has been no debt, super fucking capital generative, and like, therefore, no trading partners. Which, by the way, makes you politically weaker. If you have no trading partners, then no one's on your team”

“Like, I just think, like, the chessboard has matured enough that, like, the children don't think they're gonna get a seat at it. So, like, there was this moment where, like, a bunch of small warlords with, like, two followers were like, I'm gonna be the next king of this princely state. You're like, no, you're not.…”

“I really think that, um, you know, people can only have one save the children conversation at a time. Like, you can't have multiple conversations About save the children.”

“when you're at a meeting, if you don't take your coffee cup after you've had coffee and offer to return it to the sink or the kitchen and you leave it there, guess what? That's a demerit.”

“we're basically, every time we pick up our phones in front of our kids, we're like training them to think that our phone is more interesting than they are.”

“Well, for me, I think the reality is, like, on the creator thing, my whole theory is that actually the algorithms can't be important. Like, you have to be an important enough creator, like, slash community leader that people will seek you out independently.”

“You're either, like, targeting the one percent, and you can make a ton of money by charging a lot to people who really care, but it's small, right? Relatively speaking. Or you're, like, a completely fucking global mass platform. Like, I think the unsuccessful strategy is in the middle, right? Where, like, and, like,…”

“Yes, your hustle does source deals, and you do have to make the call, but ultimately you win these deals often because of the body at work and the reputation of the the most important brand, which is not The me brand, but the us brand.”

“I tell our younger team, if you're not out at least three nights a week, then you're probably shouldn't be doing this at the end of the day.”

“You don't make money in infrastructure. Even the railroads made money through real estate.”

“No actual influencers or people who have brands want that because it's such an asymmetric risk. If they don't want to lose their fans money, they're terrified of losing their fans money because they like want to be loved”

“I think a sign of a good conference is you need at least some people protesting it. Like, if no one's gonna protest your conference, then you probably didn't do a good enough job marketing it.”

“And everyone thinks the trial is great, but you don't, you attract a lot of people outside of your core audience, and then you waste a lot of time trying to convert the wrong people.”

“When Hershey's is on board, you are cresting on the way down. Like, there's no, that is not a, that is a brand, that is a sellout brand when you, when you're done. Not, that's not an up-and-coming brand.”

“this is actually the Harbinger. Of knowing when the cycle has hit its peak, right? When everybody is sort of talking about how they're sleeping in the office and we have, you know, 24 seven coverage.”

“the key in the modern internet is you need to breed outrage from all the people you truly don't care about, right? It's actually great, because they then for free distribute your message everywhere, right? And like, then you're more famous and more powerful.”

“I actually think the best strategy is just tell people wrong things. So they feel the need to correct you, right? So like, there's a whole neural path We're like, people will spend infinite attention on that very happily, right? If there's just an opportunity, correct?”

“People love the abstract, yada, yada, yada, being like, well, we get all of the small town news data, and then people will read the small town. It's like, no, no, no. There's going to be much more specific uses for it, right? With like verticals and some of it's really valuable.”

“You can only make money on productivity if you can do it uniquely. If everyone does the same productivity, the temperature rises, no difference, no money to be made. It's just like, that's how capitalism works.”

“And my whole thing is like, what makes this any different than any kind of electronic music? It's just a different type of electronic music. Just because it sounds like classic rock, you know, doesn't mean it's, it's still electronic music.”

“I think you see the punks do it first, and then kind of the hoodies built a bunch of stuff and commercialize it. And then the final stage is when the suits take over. And we're kind of seeing that awkward transition right now, I think, as the, the hoodies are making progress and getting PMF and growing companies. In…”

“with, uh, crypto, you can't produce another loot box. There's only one, you know, CryptoPunk NFT. There's only one Bordet. So, You are selling it for 10,000 dollars. You cannot add a 20% fee inside the Apple store on that digital item. It would be absurd, right? A user is not gonna pay that extra 20%, and you can't eat…”

“it's a weird economy, because there's so many ways to make an absurd amount of money, that like, it's really hard to get people who are great product builders, to like, build great products, right? Because the draw, if you're in it for the money, or in it where the market draws you, it draws you to like, a very…”

“What you do is you keep behind a paywall, you charge a lot, you use that money to buy some ads from Google, it works.”

“No, no, I actually think technology, per usual, has given people exactly what they want, right? It just happens that, like, the efficient market for sex is, like, extremely bad for almost everyone.”

“venture capitalists who have, like, too many Twitter followers can't really use Twitter. Right. Like you need like the right scale Twitter following of like intense loyalty and people who like are into what you're doing. If you get too broad, it just kind of sucks.”

“I think we'll probably know that the AGI has occurred when the Waymos are like, no, I'm not gonna, like, march to my death. Like, that's gonna be the sign of sentience.”

“The business model nerd out shit for me does matter, but it matters more as a signal to, like, do you know what you're doing and how to think about business? Not do I actually care what the model is.”

“The only way they can have a competitive edge long-term is if they become a closed loop, effectively advertising for newsletters, right?”

“technology just, there's no benefit to being the everything. You can just be the best at a lot of different things”

“these AI Companies and business models that they are like computers. They're not like services. Like I buy chat GPT pro because I want to have the best computer to use for my, you know, everyday life. Just like I buy a new Mac book once every two years or a new phone every one year. I want to have the best compute in…”

“I continue to believe that this is more like the computer business than it is the internet business, where we're all paying for computers. Like, we're paying for access to computers, and in the early personal computing revolution, everybody was, if you're a serious professional, uh, trying to play in the NFL business…”

“The internet was supposed to be in like technology. Everyone had this vision that it was going to be this decentralizing force, and it's hilariously done exactly the opposite, which is it's hyper centralizing. Like technology turns out to be hyper centralizing.”

“OnlyFans to AI corny stuff is very similar to like Uber drivers to self-driving cars.”

“The only thing I know about a non ad supported social network is that if it really works, it becomes an ad supported social network.”

“Four year vesting was four year vesting because that's how long it took to get a company public in the nineties.”

“this is actually like a common Silicon Valley misconception that we are like obsessed with clicks as opposed to interested in information.”

“One of the things I've observed about AI recently is it's weirdly commoditized for, like, an incredibly advanced technology. If you want to, like, find a video, a, a, a technology that can take a video, And make it so your mouth looks like it's speaking a foreign language. You have 20 options, you know?”

“initially I was saying, you can't in 20, 25 apologize. Like, it's the PR one-on-one is you do not apologize. So you just take it down, and you move on, which I think was the right move”

“People will buy distribution. They'll buy good businesses. They'll buy a growth curve. They're not going to buy technology, right? The, the, the aqua hire era is long over because everyone's just figured out that they can just, it's just easier to eat, just buy the talent.”

“For these enterprise SaaS companies, that's all the value that there is, right? At some point, the everything's commodity. And so the entire battleground is sales, right? Like anybody who runs an enterprise, an enterprise SaaS company knows that, right? That like, once you're at a certain scale, that it's all sales.”

“The good news about investing in startups is they're mostly, you know, recession proof. They're mostly off into the future.”

“A good public transit system, the billionaire should want to ride, right? It should be like so good. You're like, this is better. It's terrible marketing.”

“Like every social network since forever knows that bikini bikinis are the real influencers, right? Like that's like what drives the traffic.”

“Around 20 14 ish is when we hit critical mass of a billion people on social media and a billion people on smartphones. Since then, it's been really hard to create a meaningful brand that lasts more than like a drop in the bucket for a couple of years.”

“there's never an opportunity in the middle. The world tends towards disequilibrium.”

“you're going to end up with like, you got to just think about like the base model and then what's being done on top of them is like, they're all just characters. Different people at different wealth levels and power levels are going to, like, invent those characters and have more, more or less people talking to them at…”

“post-internet where we are today. All of a sudden it's pretty easy to crack open all these things and say, look, it's all government dollars. Like we probably should have a holistic sense of what is going on and where money is flowing and some sort of like overall management. Now, again, historically that'd be…”

“The moat is a burning pile of money.”

“subscription is the right model because you're selling access, you know, it's not, this is why, like, micropayments don't make any sense, right? It's not about any one piece of content. It's about trusted access to the answer when you need it.”

“And I actually think the nature of community is like much higher velocity than being like, there's a thousand made up NFTs of whatever. And like, you can have one and be a member of it because that false scarcity actually fights against the fundamental properties of like a high velocity community.”

“you buy a meme coin to become part of a community. And by buying into that community, you make the community more valuable.”

“these tech companies are not philanthropies. This all started with a demand for more computer science graduates. People could be qualified for the jobs.”

“If you don't moderate, you put more and more pressure on having real identity in a way that can be like, oh, that's this person. And like, I trust this person. Networks of trust. Like, that's the only solution.”

“the kind of aggressive layoffs post COVID, which by the way, we're also spurred by Elon when Elon fired. 70%, right? Firing 20 or 30 or 10 didn't look so bad.”

“The problem with doing it at seed is that the lead time from when you invest to the realization is so long that you might have gotten in front of the parade, but that doesn't mean you made any money, whereas if you do it in the public markets, it's great, right?”

“all fundamentalisms, and we've seen quite a, even, you know, in the last few months, we've seen other forms of fundamentalism make grave miscalculations in terms of the actions that they take in the real world. And fundamentalisms in all of their forms are the fundamentalist, you know, philosophy becomes a cult. Or…”

“I think anytime you need a flow chart to explain how your board works and is hired, you're probably starting from a bad position.”

“Anytime somebody leaves deep, deep mind, give them two million dollars, that's a bad strategy.”

“Every time there's been a, you know, any efficiency gain in people discovering things, they just buy more stuff, they transact more, they do more commerce.”

“The internet is very large, but the actual used internet is actually quite small. And so I do wonder to what degree that this is a little bit of navel gazing of all these great uses for I'm going to do all these great things when the reality is, Is like, people do like four things.”

“what I saw in Polymarket and starting to see in a lot of other, uh, companies is give value to the customer and use decentralized infrastructure under the hood, but don't lead with the decentralized infrastructure. That's just an implementation detail.”

“whenever people are excited about infrastructure, beware, right? Like infrastructure should disappear. That's the point of infrastructure. And it only gets exciting once it's gone.”

“And there's a very big difference between, uh, economics based on attention, right. Versus economics that are based on like trust and identity. And I actually think real creators build their businesses around trust and identity, not around attention.”

“if we ban tick tock, which by the way, I've been on record for 18 months saying is a completely obvious thing to do. The one on one version is that's good for same. Dave Morin: Couldn't agree more. Sam Lessin: The one on one version is good for Facebook because then their American market goes up. The two, the two Oh…”

“The, the thing that lost me was, was when everybody was arguing that, that what we should do is decentralize all of the infrastructure of the internet. That's just literally, it just costs more to then run every internet service. And, and it's actually not a very good database. For non sort of financial objects. So, so…”

“a lot of the big companies that did a lot of these acquisitions, they kind of all ended up shutting most of them down. Most of them don't work. Sure. You get it every once in a while you get like an Instagram, but like most of them are kind of nothings.”

“people's mistrust, these types of things is largely driven by incentives, right? And the way that people have to write headlines and stories and make videos, which gets the clicks, which gets the money, right? Like it's all this WWE, um, Politic that's going on right now where you have to either be a heel or a face and…”

“a doctor fundamentally doesn't need to be dealing with like your colds, your rash, your flu, your normal checkup. Like you should save the doctors for the most important complex things. And if you kind of detach them from the doctor's office where you, you start with the care pod, you do your 90% of care there. And…”

“If you're in a vertically integrated business like us, like employees are a cost. Don't get me wrong, but they're, They're not 80% of your cost, right? They're 30 or 40% at best. And so, you know, we have everything from leases to AWS contracts to you name it, and we can't go cold on a lot of those.”

“The problem with doing it at seed is that the lead time from when you invest to the realization is so long that you might have gotten in front of the parade, but that doesn't mean you made any money. Whereas if you do it in the public markets, it's great, right?”

“I think companies have learned that most of these tack on type things and certainly acquires just aren't worth it. Right. It's like better to double down on your core business. You can build whatever you want yourself.”

“The market has to be up a certain amount for a certain period and the IPO window opens. And this time is just breaking that playbook. That's just not happening. And I think there are a lot of reasons that are much more structural in the markets that aren't going away.”

“It's like in both cases, whether you're in pop culture, Taylor Swift land, or whether you're in politics, they're both just American pop culture of different flavors. And it's all of this stuff is just WWF characters.”

“internet communication with an open fat pipe where you can speak to everyone all the time lends itself towards going for home runs, thousand X winner statements, thousand X winner moments, and then just like burying very easily everything else, right? It's kind of almost like seed investing, right? It's a game of going…”

“what I saw in Polymarket and starting to see in a lot of other, uh, companies is give value to the customer and use decentralized infrastructure under the hood, but don't lead with the decentralized infrastructure. That's just an implementation detail.”

“we're in a fight era, right? Where like, there isn't Terra Nova, like AI is not Terra Nova, right? AI is just new weapons for a war. And so as a result, like, you just want to be like, no, like this is, we're now fighters. AI's are new weapons. And like, we're fighting over the same territory. We're just doing it with…”

“ad creative targeting, like these are the places that LLMs have by far the most leverage in the moment we're in.”

“I just think humans are pretty simple. Like we want to get laid and get paid. The internet is pretty simple. You can like watch video on it. You can read shit on it. Like you can talk to people on it. Like, they're just like, it's just not that complicated. Right. And so I just think we get, we get all in the weeds of…”

“Actually, most people, I still don't think associate tech talk with being one of the first AI, you know, uh, products at scale that did this first. Now it's just much more direct. It's like, you're talking to the algorithm rather than the algorithm serving up content that leads you in this direction, but they're the…”

“And, uh, what we do know is that more and more and more regulation of big tech equals less and less and less acquisition of small tech.”

“This is actually kind of my point, is that Magnificent Seven are now Actually kind of an IPO. Like the scale of the liquidity in these seven companies is so large that selling to one of these companies is as, you know, the scale of it is almost the same as, I mean, what, Amazon went public for four hundred million or…”

“When an asset class is dot domain. So like, remember when web three was using dot X, Y, Z and dot X, Y, Z domains went through the roof. They were like Like, 10,000 dollars per domain. So like, when that happens, you know you should go short.”

“at some point the scale of the capital stack gets so big that secondary becomes to Sam's point, the only way that people can get the piece that they want. But it also becomes, you know, the gravity for the employee base becomes so strong that you have to start providing it. Otherwise you've got things like, you know,…”

“It's really not playing to our strengths to go out and meet everybody who's got a fund and try to be a picker. Being a picker is really, really hard.”

“You're not a hunter, you're a trapper. Right? And the difference is, what you have to do is you put your nets, you put your traps in the right area, so it really matters, like, where you select your fishing grounds. You don't obsess about the biggest minnow, because they're all minnows, right?”

“And the outliers can be in really poor ponds. And if you're just fishing in that one pond that you think it's the most robust, it's really, you can actually have zero outliers.”

“to play in hardware, you either have to be the most disciplined startup entrepreneur of all time, and probably somebody who's done it multiple times, and is willing to go through it again, right? And to be extremely capital efficient in the world of atoms, which almost no one can do. Or you have to be, you know, one of…”

“The hardware stuff that does work as a startup tends to have an enterprise use case of some kind that enables it to, you know, really have a business model straight out of the gate. And those tend to be, you know, in the case of zip line, it was, uh, healthcare and logistics and delivery in parts of Africa, where,…”

“the idea that you have a bunch of apps come together on some standard around parental controls just seems way more complicated and less successful than just having the actual platforms do it.”

“the internet is so big that like anything you do IRL is just going to be like an irrelevantly small number of people.”

“one of the things that defines this idea of founder mode is skipping the organizational structure. And going directly to the people that do the work. And you know, this is famously how Steve Jobs did it with the top 100 at Apple. It's how Elon, I think, seems to do it at many organizations where the managers are not…”

“There's a lot of businesses that are pretty complicated that are really smart person can actually fully grasp and keep in memory and know how to allocate resources and what decisions to make. But, you know, and I think that's been that horizons and push way far out compared to what it used to be, right? Like I think…”

“Well, just that like Ozempic is like, is rich people face filters, right? Cause it's like, it's more expensive. It's in person. Anyone can look good on the internet, but not anyone can look good in real life. So this actually relates to our body thing too, but it's like, that's why all the ladies of New York are on…”

“Well, it's also like, I mean, it's like usually things die because they win, and then they become the mainstream, so the problem is everything is now Burning Man, so Burning Man is nothing.”

“I think you're way better off having young, hungry people who might be less experienced. Right. But have something to prove they have a chip on a shoulder. They're going to drive really hard. Like I absolutely think that people are just like resting, investing way too much across like tech in general, because it's too…”

“people are just going into the office for fewer hours on the days they go into the office because the psychology shifted and Getting up at your desk at four or five PM is, feels very different post COVID than it did before.”

“Sam, your intuition might be right that like, we've got a big new wave coming and everyone's focused on AI, but actually we all know anybody who's thoughtful knows that AI is just the water. It's like in the water. Now it's going to be in everything.”

“Is, it's exactly the type of shit that just everyone comes blind to is everyone does the same thing, and then no one gives a shit. The, the whole creative thing is finding edge. It's edge. You gotta do something different.”

“What you basically do if you want to fuck with these guys is you don't actually shut them off. You basically try to identify them and then give them, feed them bad shit. Right. So you basically feed them all the wrong stuff. Use AI. Again, this goes back to the war of attrition. It's like, you want to try to scrape me?…”

“Meta's business strategy and open source are highly aligned in a way that is not true for the companies that are hawking closed models.”

“the really successful companies, like, figure out, and even like a, you know, an Airtail or whatever, they have to figure out their enterprise sales motion, which means building a framework and an approach which gets other people paid really well, which means they want to sell it, right?”

“Developer mindshare who's cool on hacker news is just extremely different for where money is spent and where value is created.”

“the problem is you just have this power law of costs where, you know, you can't band a bunch of ten billion dollar companies together to compete with a trillion dollar company in this. You need a trillion dollar company To throw their hat in the ring, and then maybe you get a bunch of ten billion dollar companies like…”

“Now the problem is, is like, there, it's very hard to build mafias because there's just too much going on. Like, there are too many good places for talent to go. It's not concentrated the same way”

“I believe you should recycle. I think that's how you actually preserve a lot of follow on capital so that you can write more sort of initial checks.”

“It's AI because it's such a Hail Mary that, like, you can burn fifty billion, a hundred billion dollars, and the coin toss of whether it pays off or not is so favorable if it's, if the narrative plays out, that people will spot you that. They'll actually probably pay you to invest in AI from a stock price perspective.”

“People don't subscribe to newsletters that summarize points. They want the voice. They want the perspective.”

“And so it's actually harder to buy things as a public company as it is from a private company, which is why I think what Databricks is doing or some others in terms of buying things while you're private is really smart because it's going to get harder once you're public due to all the scrutiny.”

“I think if things aren't working, I think because money has been so available, people have kept their companies going longer than they should. And in a lot of circumstances more recently, where sometimes the best thing you can do is just kind of quit and restart and go do something different.”

“investors often don't want to have tough conversations because they want founders to refer their friends to them and they don't want to be the The kind of tough person or whatever.”

“For the application layer, can you eventually take over a workflow? What is the workflow that you're enabling? Because really what you want is if you swap in and out underlying models, you're still sticky somehow, and a model improving doesn't commoditize you, it accelerates you.”

“the big mistake everyone made in SAS as investors is they calculated infinite LTV. They're like, once we have a customer, they are never going to turn. Right. And therefore like we can pay a lot for them and we'll have them forever.”

“and to your question of how you do it, there's only one way to do it, and you have to start with content that no one else has.”

“in 20, 24, the hardest part is authenticity of our brand and connecting with the demo. Yeah, that is the hardest part. Making products is easy. Like you just go to fucking China and press four buttons. You have your like normal CPG with nice branding.”

“You basically want, I think the idea is like in a social media context, designing content, That isn't going to go hyper viral broadly, but ideally most people will hate, but exactly the right people will like is kind of the zone you want to be in.”

“the reality is the economics and the incentive of the internet are as an entertainment machine, right? And that's actually what we've been able to instrument and optimize. That's what the incentive structure works like that.”

“I just think people underestimate the lighting money on fire version of marketing.”

“An asset manager is someone who generates returns in order to justify their fees. Jessica Lessin: It's a fee game. Sam Lessin: An investor is someone who takes fees because they have to support their team in order to generate returns. They're getting paid on the returns, right?”

“it's very hard to compare what's going on to the internet wave because LLMs are not networks, they're computers, and they're very simple. It's like you put in A bunch of things happen inside a box and output comes out and that's a computer, not a network.”

“we've seen a lot of media companies whose thesis has been to ride a tech wave, and that has, by definition, is not where value will be created. And that doesn't mean you, you don't leverage new tech waves, turbocharge your superpower as an organization, but it just is really, really stupid, and it's happening again…”

“when consumers start caring or paying attention to developer conferences, you're almost certainly in trouble.”

“it means that you can no longer like email a VC, even with like any personal information and expect them to respond because you're just like, this is probably a bot. I'm not going to respond.”

“the reality is your average tech worker has no leverage, right?”

“you can no longer say, well, you went to Harvard, you went to Brown, you went to Stanford, you know, you've got the right values to do a lot of business. It's going to be a thing where employers really need to dive into the culture of whether they want to hire these people.”

“the thing that I, I find offensive as a professional venture capitalist is like the startup of zero to one companies and the idea of using startup capital for these types of exercises, which are almost certainly like infinitesimally unlikely to work and are extremely capital consumptive in general. That just, it's the…”

“No, news is not a venture-backed business.”

“You can't be in the middle. You can't be a middle-sized fund. You get forced out because you're too big to do the interesting stuff and too small to be one of the prime broker market maker type people.”

“whenever you see someone retweeting a Forbes headline saying how I became a billionaire, you know there's gonna be a problem.”

“It's nice to be 10% better at those prompts, but that's not what's going to dominate. It's just like whatever they choose to put in there is what's going to dominate, right? Like no one's going to like change, no one's going to not use LinkedIn because some upstart competitor has slightly better AI prompting on their…”

“my strategy on this stuff is very simple, which is just utter deep authenticity and fuck the network because you'll find the right people. If you like play to what it wants, it's not shocking.”

“in an ideal world, the way to interact with people is you speak and read Right? Like that's the way to, it's better for me to speak and I don't, and listening is too slow. Reading is much faster. So the best thing is speak and read.”

“You can be, it doesn't matter. You can choose cheers as your KPI or booze and they both work.”

“This is what I, look, I think that you end up with kind of a barbell, right? Where you have a whole lot of AI generated stuff that has an extremely fast metabolism through culture, right? Like this, like lots of stuff coming. It's like, I don't know, it's like sugar food, just like tons of it moving through culture…”

“for LPs to do the work, I think is really important because even if you just continue to put your money into Sequoia and Andreessen, Like, they're not getting the lion's share sometimes of these bigger companies, and a lot of these younger firms are still performing, even if they're only a few years old. So, scatter…”

“The reality is, if any of these companies light even a hundred billion dollars on fire, Right. For downside protection of missing something, it's worth it to them.”

“Niche is the new mass. So people are absolutely wanting to be in more highly curated experiences that map to those groups that they found on Reddit.”

“the regulatory pressure, you could either put the regulatory pressure on TikTok, right, which is what people are trying to direct, and then you have this whack-a-mole problem because companies are faster than regulators, so you regulate TikTok, but by the time you regulate TikTok, they just moved all the traffic to…”

“country is the new rock and roll, and we kind of lost rock and roll. There, there's no real rock You know, genre anymore. And so I think that people go to country because that's where the guitar continues to exist.”

“Universal appeal is almost taboo. If everybody likes you, you're probably doing something wrong or you're just average.”

“I was extremely naive to the fame aspect of it. Like there is no fame, like YouTube fame, like internet fame.”

“I had a lecture that I used to give called Perfection Erases Humanity, and it was largely directed at CGI when it was exploding a dozen years ago, which is that we can now make everything perfect. Everything perfect. And in that perfection, there's no sign of the human hand, and therefore our relationship with it…”

“I think that in some of these industries that are regulated or highly complicated health and fintech being probably the best examples, but there are others. It's just a lot harder than it looks to go from having a big headline MAU number And some revenue or like, and some, you know, and some, some, you know, GMV to…”

“The other strategy is you charge more per month and accept more month-to-month churn, but it's not actually like, it's not like software churn, where like, you're like, I'm done using Figma forever, right? It's like a different type of churn.”

“One thing I would mention is that if you think about how venture capital compensation works, now's a good time for folks to move around because their carry in the last few funds ain't worth very much. And so if you think about it this way, it's like, there's like the problem with most venture firms and systems is you…”

“the most scalable successful orgs in the world largely are number go up machines. Wall Street is a number go up machine. Social media, or like I said, media in general. One of the nice parts about it, like, is you just A, B, test your way, and a number go up, right? The more clearly you can articulate the number, and…”

“AI absolutely elevates it. It makes it easier. It makes it more accessible, but it doesn't really fundamentally change the game. It just accelerates it.”

“one of the reasons there's always, like, a new social product historically that comes out for a new generation is because the social capital structures of the old products get stratified and stuck, and so the new people don't want to play the rigged game”

“they actually introduce new features, right. In a way that opens up new distribution to allow effectively new economic growth. It's like a game. You have to keep playing and adapting. Like you might've been really big when Instagram was about posting, but like it becomes about stories and like, unless you keep playing…”

“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 the next level of their job looks like, see what they're…”

“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.”

“And if you're gonna do content, Just understand it's like a three-month game. You're fucked. Like, use it while it's hot. Get over it.”

“the problem is for consumer product, the second you start introducing too many people too quickly, you are going to fail, right? You cannot build social products or social software with too many people in the room from the start.”

“Like, Harvard is not a dramatically better school than most other schools, but, like, candidly, they selected for, and the whole, historically, saying we want to train the world's next generation of leaders and get them to all know each other as eighteen-year-olds for four years. That was unbelievably effective. That…”

“So I think the mistake is this idea that, you know, if you think about figuring out what's real or not real online, it's like a hot potato. No, it's an unsolvable problem. It's a war of attrition.”

“VCs do this, and I just think it's in every founder's right to do the same thing and say, look, you know, when competing offers come in, Who do I want to work for? Um, and am I, am I okay with if I make this person a billion dollars or a lot of money, what I think they're going to go do with that money?”

“Can we just advise the companies to stop building for, to be a product for the next venture capital round instead of just Build good businesses and treat capital as an option on the future. It's not just about surviving. You want to thrive with or without.”

“which makes sense if you're an investor, because you want companies that require more and more capital. So you get to keep buying more and more of the startup along the way, like capital. Ironically, venture capitalists love things that can be very large, but take lots of money, right?”

“Yeah, if you're thinking about laying people off, it's already too late.”

“We just sell commodity money.”

“The downside to it is that because there's no KPIs in venture capital, really, that are short term, and you're wandering around and you have tenure and you can't be fired, there are two big problems. One is, it's really easy to waste a shitload of your own time without realizing it because no one's really holding you…”

“total time flexibility and control of your schedule and tenure, super fucking hard to go back to working a million hours a week in an operating company, right? It's like very dissonant, right? Because the lifestyle is, and the control is like so good, like tenure is a great lifestyle, right? And so I was saying that's…”

“All this stuff on the margin is just getting cut. Right. And so it's like, it either has to be really working or is dead. There's no more like, eh, it's sort of working. It's a reasonable thesis. They're good people. Let's push it along. Right. No one has tolerance for that.”

“from a first principles perspective, I think people miss how important crypto is, right? And, you know, we'll continue to is like, it is the saving potential grace to a truly open internet, um, is crypto directionally, you know, solid identities, distributed systems. You can't centralize power in these platforms…”

“We're in the command line phase of this and like the operating systems and the word processors and the spreadsheets for this stuff have like not even remotely been created yet.”

“So it's just, I think it's really hard to be a distributor, right? In an era when everyone can get their default as they can go direct.”