SWL Week in Review - 'experiences' airbnb, farming, brokers
More or Less - Airbnb Experiences, Again
How could we not talk about this fun… I still stand by the fact that if they really wanted to make this work they should obviously do it as a partnership with Onlyfans - whether you call that an experience or a service, it would print cash… I also think there is a big opportunity around using it to hire local actors to spice up your vacation experience…. We know they could use the work! (Btw if you know anyone who can credibly play Fidji for our next episode do LMK
Hot Takes:
- Match Making For Private Stock Transactions, Minus the Brokers — one big thing for me on this week… given my 2025 state of VC I obviously am deep on the importance of private to private institutional transactions… but practically crossing these transactions in a high quality way is a MESS. You are either selling to someone you know on the board (fine but usually ‘special price’ in a bad way) — or you are using someone trying to earn a buck introducing private buyers and sellers - but here is a thing, those guys / that market is a cesspool of fake bids and asks, transactions, etc… I don’t think there is a good business making these transactions happen — but in an era of vibe coding can’t we all just gather around the apple tree and do it ourselves in a high trust way?
- Foundation Farms — or, as some hate me calling it ‘NetJets for farms’ — this is an idea I have been cooking with some serious experts in the food space over the last several months… but the reality is that the food you are eating / no matter how much you pay - is totally f-ed in the US / there is no way to escape bad bad things… the answer is just to vertically integrate and fully opt-out in a club model. Private group, buy a handful of farms — control and test everything end-to-end … it ends up looking a lot like NetJets or Planesense… excited to keep working on this / lots of great initial feedback and building the detailed data room for first families ..
- Methaphone is going mainstream on Tiktok — you love to see it — 7M views in first 24 hours… clearly there is demand for the methadone of phones… another possible solution? Just using tungsten to weight the crap out of your phone / a crossover between methaphone and the ruck rock company… and thanks Elizabeth Holmes for the promotion.
- Until the end of the World — in high school my friend Evan Weiner took me to this ~5 hour art film showing… the scene that stuck with me for decades was when the people become physically addicted to reflections of their own memories on screens…. Sound familiar? Wild movie… and interesting discussion of our moment in time
- ’Donkey’ Real power is not correcting at all the crap that AI cooks up from your voice note replies.. you know what I mean…
- The Walkolution… don’t buy this — it is the most overpriced standing desk treadmill you can buy… and months delayed I finally got mine (am on it right now) — but for once the obnoxious price and terrible shipping and service… is actually not worth it.
- AI is not coming for your jobs engineers… just for fun / in the spirit of playing and setting up some things I want as personal projects I spent some good sessions with chatGPT setting up ngrok, a local flask server, pushing some emails through Cloudflare workers etc… all really basic scripting stuff — I am not a real engineer at all… but TBH I have written more code & know far more about how computers work than 99.9% of people — my verdict, yes it helps to use chatGPT and lazily telling it I don’t even want to read code just re-print a whole script over and over is the height of lazy and sort of works… but so long as I am manually catching errors and it is saying ‘oh good find’ — you aren’t there (also memory functions are all messed up)
- Trust comes from trading with each other which is bad news as we regionalize… and as AI does mean lots of people have nothing but ‘not doing violence’ to trade with you…
Have a great weekend
Sam
P.S. it is hard to hit a tennis ball while swinging a camera on a string… but it is cool that you can re-make the matrix for $500 bucks now.
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email sl@wlessin.com
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