SWL Week in Review - 996 meta etiquette

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

9/19/2025, 10:35 PM

More or Less :: 996 & Etiquette

We hit on TikTok deal (delay, delay, delay til the kid people are focused on chat-GPT and everyone is too bored to care) … Alcatraz (because Alcaraz visited — turns out the extreme left and the extreme right both want it to be ‘low income housing’ … We also question if the new Meta Glasses might help with low birth rates (what is the etiquette of glasses in the bedroom?)… and spend a bunch of time on etiquette for YC founders.

Hot Takes:

996 is a strategy for screening for childless young workers — the Chinese cultural narrative invasion hits Silicon Valley (check your feeds)… are people really working 996 or is this just investment banking associate ‘100 hour week’ hustle porn narrative? … or is it really just a backhand way to hire only young unmarried people and keep people with families out (we all know who you want to hire anyway)

Etiquette School for YC founders. — I can’t tell you the joy I got from everyone forwarding me screenshots of Garry Tan flaming our Etiquette finishing school for YC founders on their internal forums … Thank you Garry ... the best possible marketing (and happy to repay the favor here) — “where we are going we don’t need country clubs” … I am dying. If soft skills isn’t your thing / no worries — but if you are up for a bit of fun & want to learn the key soft skills to get along post demo day here for you. Only YC founders can apply for now, but others are welcome to audit the class (you just don’t get your gold foiled certificate of completion at the end, sorry)

Glasses on or off during sex? — we are clearly all going to be reading the internet in meetings (heck I will even be ok going to more meetings in person if I can stay on the internet in person) — but what is going to be the etiquette in the bedroom? (I am very concerned with etiquette at the moment)

Bill Gurley’s Perfect IPO — StubHub — congrats to stub hub for really sticking it to the bankers with your instantly money losing overpriced IPO — Bill Gurley I can only assume to be slow clapping this nearly perfect IPO. (PS you can’t IPO without an AI story and a cult)

OpenAI - a Terrible Seed Bet? — From The Information’s reporting about approximate states of OpenAI shareholders — what jumps is that the seed investors are likely to own a whopping 1% — holy dilution batman! … the idea that seed in the most spectacular run-up perhaps in history get something like a 25x-ish (even 100x) is insane and shows why AI infra is a terrible seed bet — you can’t invest in things that require infinite capital for infra (and billionaire researchers!) —

The Key to Memetic Warfare and Modern Propaganda Publish-ability / Share-bility NOT Consumability — it isn’t a question of what message drives mass affinity and repetition (as in the mass media days) — true memetic warfare is about building narrative templates which people feel comfortable adapting and shouting into the void as a form of cheap self actualization with maximum return of social feedback and MINIMUM risk of getting no likes and comments (the ultimate fail of sharing in a world where people are lonely, scared, and terrified that they might not get validation)…. Need to read more Edward Bernays’s philosophy…

Money Pits Society Needs :: Ukraine boosts Russia’s Economy…. And We Have AI… — productivity of spend be damned…. Here is the thing — the Ukraine war might be the thing keeping Putin in power… helping the economy rip.. for the west it is AI narrative… a place to dump all the cash with a prayer… we need these narratives / sinks just like China needed all that housing…

…Speaking of Money Pits :: The Power Companies Wield By Incinerating Cash and Tied Fates — which makes me think about tech-AI-fiefdoms a lot…. For all the power of the traditional accounting profit machines that were the tech companies of the last century (the best of the best of traditional capitalism ever) — they always had a political weakness when it came to capital — they were too profitable — just didn’t have enough to offer the big financiers / pools of capital to tie fates with them and generate alignment (the best they could do is small business story / ecosystem depth) — but now with AI there is finally a story that capitalists can get behind and be included in — this is obviously late-capitalism-early-feudalism-2o-might-is-right-stuff — but there is something interesting going on here in the race to ‘too big to fail’

Home Delivery of the NYT — turned it back on… hilariously expensive for a hilariously thin newspaper… but what a great form factor especially for kids. New morning routines…

Best,
Sam

P.S. Note to self... I lost in the finals of a pickelball tournament to some 22 year olds... everything about that statement is shameful - hold me accountable.

P.P.S. oh and this is great evaluation of the newsletter thanks AI!

Similar newsletters

There are other similar shared emails that you might be interested in: