SWL Week in Review - Antisemitism and AI

From:

Sam Lessin <sam@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

5/4/2025, 9:22 PM

More or Less - The Ruck Rock & Why OpenAI should buy Snap I had fun pitching the gang on buying founders edition of my Ruck Rock (by Chiseled) … and before OpenAI tries to build a social network for proprietary data (which all these bots need to matter long-term / if they do) … they really should just buy Snap (which s basically free at this point) — oh and here is more or ruck rock…

WTF Venture Capital 2025 I am going to keep headline marketing this for a while… it has gotten a lot of good pickup and sparked some good debates… agree but there are ‘provocative overstatements’… lol who me? Thx Gil

Hot Takes:

Coding is more and more like writing and less and less like engineering — some writing you do can be evergreen / valuable for a long time, other writing is shorter term / only valuable in the moment… but writing is not ‘building a platform’ (unless maybe the Bible?) — and coding-writers need to start thinking about what this means for their business plan (are we back to ‘software publishing’ being the right metaphor?

Cameo skiing in Casey Neistat’s most recent video — I have graced the background of Casey videos before … but this was my first speaking role as ‘Skiier number 1’ :)

Harvard antisemitism report: what comes next (Harvard Hillel and the 1636 Forum colab)— the antisemitism report came out… and I think Alan is doing a great job threading the needle on pushing back on the ‘form’ of trump requests while at the same time actually basically doing what needs to be done (and the administration properly articulated) — For a public summary watch this very very well attended zoom overview at 2x… also this tweet is 100% about harvard tho I won’t explain how in public.

On Trade — Fedex wants to know where the steel I am importing is coming from — forget the price… having to fill out forms for Fedex documenting where the steel inside the treadmill I ordered came from… that is how you slow things down.

On AI — Fracking Humans for Knowledge — — this is the real hope of AI interfaces… will you tell them more than they can uniquely tell you… and can you frack a bunch of humans that know almost nothing, but in a way that in aggregate produces deliciously valuable unique data….

On AI - why there is no lock-in on your profile data— part of the reason any differentiation really has to be about the fracking — so long as there is GDPR / and laws saying you ‘own your data’ — these services can’t lock you in by knowing you better (and their ability to untangle crazy export formats designed to defeat portability melt away)

Gollum 2.0 — On AI — the mental health problem is unseen but huge — I am already seeing this show up… like most problems we always fixate on what we can observe (social feeds not private messaging is the problem! (Wrong) ec… but the forever encourager whispering in the ear of mentally unwell people scares the crap out of me.

Willingness to buy vs. Willingness to Use - from a conversation trying to advise the exceptional (exception to my rule that is) AI company I seeded.. lots of companies are ‘willing to buy’ AI products right now, but willingness to use? That is a different story / the bar to get people to USE them is way higher than the bar to buy.

We already have UBI it just isn’t evenly distributed — this is the problem with getting to efficient with these ‘desk’ jobs & gutting clearly inefficient student loan system… as much as anything else.

Have a great weekend (NYC was beautiful this week)
Sam

P.S. hat tip to yoni for boldly poking the bear (me) on option comp… and then doubling down in his newsletter. This is great new for me because he must be mighty confident he has made some fund returning investments given this schtick and the overall employment market for venture capitalists these days :) (also, more importantly, he is completely wrong)

P.P.S. Lion at (8) utterly utterly crushed his 5K I mentioned last week — plan was to run around a 26 min pace (which I thought he could do) —instead he clocked it at 23:49 — all the kids then decided to do a home triathlon swim, bike, run race… I really am going to have to stay fit to keep up.

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