SWL Week in Review - Code Red Realities

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

12/5/2025, 10:28 PM

We start non-Ai with an ode to Daniel Lurie’s social media game (excellent…) — and then go deep discussing OpenAI ‘code red’ realities… When the leader says ‘hard left’ but then can only shake free 5 engineers, how hard it is to hard pivot a bunch of expensive designers, PMs, and engineers off of the mandates you sold them to come work on, etc. Also can founder led startups ever really win a things when the founder doesn’t care (and does the founder care about AI-messiah vs. winning in a consumer product, or was that just a capital raising narrative?) — … or is this whole ‘code red just a decoy and they really are just working on monetization and ads?

Kudos to SF Mayor, Daniel Lurie
Doom scrolling on a Garmin watch
Holiday gift guides: AI robots, Duolingo piano, Matic vac mop, etc
The creator-VC playbook
Instagram RTO 5 days per week leadership reality check
Alan Dye leaves Apple for Meta
Jess' 2026 prediction: The Big Tech divergence is coming
Meta’s enterprise gap
AWS outreach to Sam: Bedrock Nova and startup credits
Sam Altman's code red memo -- is it a decoy?
Gemini latency vs GPT why speed matters for Brit (Ad opp?)
Is Aaron Levie for or against AI?
Waymo's safety report and Dave's FSD usage
Recapping the Slow holiday party + Offline's next
Slow's Modern Etiquette Book

Hot Takes

Etiquette Update, Number One New Release — this continues to be fun… the first edition of the cartoon book is a huge hit (… we are now number one new short business book written by a venture capital firm with 3 or fewer general partners) and already helping founders everywhere … but seriously fun — if you haven’t bought v1 yet get it here — also we are going to do a real book / publishing deal — if someone has a self help oriented publisher or book agent they recommend send em on over — there is heat here.

Chase Center Talk Post Vinod — I did a JV second-string talk after a Vinod keynote to a few hundred founders at the Chase center (I don’t take it personally 20% left after his talk) — here is a write up on the points… I was mostly into Vinod’s talk track about ‘don’t do what is expected of you, only what you want and are good at’ — and I love that 40 years in he still ends by giving hundreds of people his email address (the real one… or at least the one I have lol)

Local Town Meeting TV — The Real Judge Judy — hamlet is a startup we invested in that basically ingests all local town meetings (hours and hours of lawn arguments) and AIs the crap out of it to figure which towns you can build in, not, and if Jane needs a coffee break and a black and white cookie before she approves any new building permits. As a fun side quest (and to get the word out) they have launched a TV platform with the greatest highlights from town meetings around the country — and it is pretty funny… (as an aside, this company is really cool — for the ‘lab of democracy’ to work with towns you need the experiments AND the data / insights into what is going on… the later has been hard to scale til now!)

Alan Dye — I guess meta needed help implementing liquid glass from the guy who made it? … someone tweeted (lost it) that in 72 hours of Apple AI chief walked out, head of UI design goes to meta, Policy and GC all out… that must have been one hell of a management offset OR the holiday party went very very wrong.

Daniel Laurie — from ‘if you commit a crime you will be caught’ to ‘no drugs’ this guy is crushing social media with one-liners worthy of a national stage ALMOST to ‘the rats don’t run New York, we do’ from Jessi Tisch

When hunting or investing — clean kill or total miss… you never want to maim / it is nasty hard time consuming and sad business.

“emphatically in the camp that ai doesn't take all the jobs” — Aaron Levie — this was a great quote — what a thing to be EMPHATIC about … not ALL the jobs.

More on Twitter Outrage The Game (TM) — which is kinda a general case of poking fun at YC the game (which I really think I should get some sort of lifetime achievement award for TBH) — I have a follow up to this post / let’s see if I can engineer it again — people love love love yelling about spreadsheets.

’Another 3X investment returner’ - Kevin Colleran — I have to give credit where credit is due— Kevin is funny, especially in person. At slow we got unlocked on a public position we got via a tiny tuck in acquisition ages ago — a whopping 3x ‘investment returner’ — … forget ‘fund returners’ we are in it for the tuck-in-to-random-public-equity ‘investment returner deals’ LOL

Your ability to actually pivot your company when you need to is a major sign of health (or sickness) — when you recruit a lot of people on the promise that they can do really sexy things from research to own their fiefdoms / verticals… it tends to be pretty hard to pivot them for an emergency / focus — if you came to do commerce and were sold on commerce that is what you want to stick with — so when push comes to shove after all is said and done the ‘code red everyone goes left’ turns out to shake free like 2,3,4 engineers per team and life continues — we will see how this will all play out

Thinking AI Pre-Rolls — at some point someone is gonna be showing video ads while their LLM is ‘thinking’ — and then there is going to be a pretty fun monetization dial on just how long that ‘thinking’ should take before it tells you how to read your blood test results… monetization isn’t that complicated

Can founders ever succeed at missions they don’t care about? — I don’t really think so — anyone can pony it up for 24 months… but when the question is bring the messiah or monetize chat… ??

In the gluttonous season of AI and holiday parties remember — most die of indigestion followed by starvation’ (one of the great startup lines)… but probably applies to people as well.

Turns out Harvard cutting their PHD programs really doesn’t do all that much financially, so what? Here is a pretty deep analysis the team did (and is very well received by people who actually know what they are talking about)

Requests for Startups

Commercial Safe Deposit Boxes in Rich Towns — banks have huge wait lists for safe deposit boxes but don’t take the business seriously… and they are super under-priced. Get some nice downtown space, build a big safe, stick some guards on it and some biometrics… this is the easiest way to make a total easy fortune… can someone pls do it I am too lazy.

Archive to microfiche in the desert — second laziest business… API into my google photos, print them, store them in vaults on two different continents on microfiche … come on people. It is like people don’t want money.

Move out all my shit and sell it back to me — also seriously, in the bay charge people $20K to move all their stuff / whole house into an open airport hanger to de-clutter…. Deep clean, and have them walk around and select what comes back in…. Sell the rest of their shit in abandoned JC penny footprint — people would love this stuff and in an era of high-tariff putting it all back in circulation vs. back of closet makes sense.

Gen-Z’s revenge is turning money into feelings. Think about it.

Sam

P.S. at a holiday party this week I was indignant that NONE of the people working the Valet knew how to drive a stick shift… what is next? Valets who don’t know how to drive and can only park self driving cars? (probably)

P.P.S. … want to see a modern brag? Check out my stress score.

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