SWL Week in Review - Finger Size

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

11/14/2025, 11:17 PM(sent yesterday)

More or Less - Wearables and Finger Size
We discuss lots of angles on wearables… rings, earrings, glasses, and more…. Also somehow we have reversed roles and I am the one defending Apple??? Again. Checkins on ettiequte, mini-defense tanks, and more…

Hot Takes

Meta Etiquette — I just love how this keeps picking up steam. Several more events in the works… and a book! Hilarious Instagram Comedian Take, and Ice Cream Etiquette...

My Podcast for Children.. discussing on the pod — tune in for excellent episodes including…
The Cult of the ‘Co-Founder’ — having co-founders is a good signal if you are at-scale seed fund or incubator… it is a crude cheap evaluation for ‘how crazy is this idea’ and ‘can this person recruit’ — but actually if you are going for mega-wins instead of efficient / cheap diligence process… co-founders are a negative signal.

Keith Peiris - Newco — Keith has always impressed me…. And is slightly unhinged (like I like em) Yesterday I walked by a restaurant in Palo Alto and it reminded me of when he was a JR PM on my team & figured out from my PA where my dinner was and waited on the stoop for 2 hours to come out and ambush me to continue an argument… When he launched his mobile slide company (pre AI) I refused to invest and gave him a speech… he briefly made me second guess that — but now he just launched v3 of the company doing structureless CRM — and he is either very good at manipulating me to promote him (probable) OR glad to have been helpful on the journey (maybe both?)

Teamshares — interesting interesting — Trow..row…row your boat…. Related to Constellation Opportunity? — I really love constellation… and I hadn’t til this week thought about the fact that Trump’s assault on Canada is creating a possible historic buy opportunity for what is a great great company that is usually pretty richly priced.

A Defense Mini-Tank? — I do actually want a robot that mows the lawn in the day… and patrols the driveway at night.

Easy A — Princeton & Harvard Grades — right after the Gay debacle when I was running for overseers … I liked the line ‘make Harvard hard again’ — MHHA — glad to see this story being picked up & the administration realizing that a lot of the issues are downstream of everyone getting As (from other ways to distinguish yourself being protests, to who even decides to show up at Harvard / the kids who want an … easy-A… if you want something more signal-full - New Grad Merit Series — you might know I believe in this… new grads should check this out… going well..

How did they film Happy Gilmore? — this one really blew my mind… my 8 year old didn’t know if Happy Gilmore required filming at a ‘real golf course’ and ‘if they used a drone for the golf ball tracking shots’ — makes me feel old.

50 Year Mortgages?! — yes please. To me it is completely insane that the US even has 30 year mortgages… as is what it means to literally have 0% 30 year money when inflation touches 3%… but 50? As others have pointed out, this is a terrible actual policy idea and will only make houses more expensive… but on the other hand sign me up!

Slow Internal Chats — make me laugh. I might not agree with my partners on investments, but I do tend to agree with their sense of humor and culture. That is what we do here right?

A bunch of universities are shrinking their PhD cohorts but Harvard is cutting a lot more... especially in the sciences where no one else is. this is a bit like a zero-based budgeting moment for harvard - could be good to reset but sciences seem like the worst place to cut and not just for the obvious reasons - 1636 has more here

Sam

P.S. ‘we are just capital solutions providers for individuals in who have a need’ — scariest line someone said to me this week…

P.P.S. oh an Epstein? You know what I honestly find most shocking… the American public doesn’t have much of an attention span for anything… except apparently this. Which is pretty strange…. Why is this the one thing we care about for more than 20 seconds? How many emails do you think I will get responding to this?

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