SWL Week in Review - Tel Aviv

From:

Sam Lessin <sam@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

5/9/2025, 10:43 PM(5 days ago)

Tel Aviv
I spent a great week in Tel Aviv for the Future Summit & catching up with a bunch of entrepreneurs and friends. I can’t say enough positive things about the city and culture (the weather was also perfect which never hurts). My only complaint? They really need to bring back a direct SF to TLV flight / going through NYC and LA is a pain.

More or Less - More AI (Minus Sam)
I was away again this week… but the conversation was about Apple / Google, some M&A and Windsurf.

Hot Takes:

School of War on Hamas in the USA — finally got around to listening to this episode with Laura Burns explaining Hamas in the US and in particular on college campuses… very much worth a listen from someone who has deeply deeply studied reality here.

Duolingo for Religion — How does this not exist to help people learn new religions / convert? How have people like the mormon church not spent time analyzing COC (cost of conversion) and come to the conclusion that there is leverage in a product like this?

Trust comes from trading, which is a problem in the age of AI — I really worry about this… spending time in the Middle East … the biggest problem with a bunch of communities is that they just have nothing to trade / give & when you have nothing to trade, what you trade is violence. If AI means that fewer people have anything of value to trade with each other, how does this not end in more violence?

Is Meta going to flip Google in Market Cap? — kinda wild how narrow the gap between meta and google stock has become… It seems like we are just a few narratives away from this happening

Fracking People — this is where the value in theory is in AI…. In the ‘data is oil’ narrative — the real story is can AI by ‘giving’ folks feedback / chatting with them extract more real knowledge from the world (given that the people it is talking to know so little / it is an exercise in fracking vs drilling)

Vibecoding on Airplanes for Creators- I had a lot of flights this week with limited but non-zero internet… normally I would write on them, but I ended up mostly vibe coding a pipeline to find creators that are prospects to invest in. Touching this stuff hands on really gives you the ultimate insight (how can you really invest if you aren’t playing) — upshot, AI is AMAZING at parts of the pipeline, the fact you can’t use ChatGPT or Anthropic for realtime web search on the API really sucks (and makes for weird work-arounds), and I can’t see hiring anyone anymore who doesn’t know who to do this stuff / can’t script.

New Pope, But How Many Catholics Are There Really? - I was looking this up… the catholic church claims 1.4B members… but that kinda seems inflated — they basically count anyone they have ever touched, not real members / users… just counting up the rows in the baptism databases vs. weekly or monthly or yearly active users… I wonder how big they really are, and how valuable their adherents really are… They have a lot of great art and hard assets… but maybe the mormons really have such a higher LTV of adherents that they are more powerful in practice?

Understanding the Real Incentives of VCs — This has come up a lot for me this week talking with founders… as discussed in my WTF VC 2025 — round based / milestone based financing is gonzo — what you need to know is for a given investor what is their real goal / what did they sign up for with their LPs (shipping money at scale, etc.) and on a personal level what are they looking to do (usually breaks down to (1) don’t look stupid in a way that will be called out (2) option on infinity) — but different people and different firms have different incentives.

Have a great weekend (and mother's day!)
Sam

P.S. Harvard Should Stand Up For Itself More Often — yep / quite true and good op-ed… That also means standing up for putting veritas first, etc. and not allowing itself to be used for any political agendas (from the right, or what I fear might happen now — for the left)

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