SWL Week in Review - Master of Bots

From:

sam lessin <s@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

3/20/2026, 11:19 PM

Dave and Jess go on and on about GTC … shocker I didn’t go, but if Jensen wants to stop by the poorhouse and sauna for 3 hours he is more than welcome! Dave and I get into a pretty interesting discussion IMHO on ‘is Openclaw an OS’… what does an OS even mean / what is the value of having one when you can port software / any memory from one to another with no switching cost at all… and it is just a few markdown files…. And my favorite topic - how I truly don’t understand how anyone makes money longterm multiplying matrices as a ‘service’ in a brutal globally competitive business with no friction / barriers and an economic race to zero / the marginal cost of power… (unless it is once again apple selling you a matrix-multiplying TI83,000 in your pocket? Because you want to do your OWN math yourself so no one knows what numbers you are multiplying?)

Hot Takes

Bots Bootcamp for Creators — Megan and I have been discussing how the best uses cases / most practical business leverage hands down we are seeing in the creators we invest in. They have the community, they have the trust, the have the cult - and now they have incredible incredible new ways to leverage tech to be more efficient in their businesses, start things faster, and build software. So — we are hosting a two day a bots bootcamp specifically for creators in SF in 2 weeks. We have great technical TAs coming / masters of bots, etc. and the plan is to help people learn a ton, and then practically select projects, execute useful AI/bot projects and SHARE with each other learnings, etc. It is gonna be a blast and if you want to come click the link and apply (but seriously only if you are actually a ‘creator’ with some form of community, or if you are super technical and want to meet the creators and TA actively)

Slow ‘Master of Bots’ — speaking of ‘masters of bots’ — I think there is def a new role in orgs like slow which is basically MOB (or maybe ‘HR for bots?’) — sysadmin 2.0…we aren’t for sure hiring this role… but I do think while bots will take a ton of jobs, there will for sure be one-role-per company of someone who is more technical than the average employee helping people learn to deploy bots, building software as a one-man-person army, etc.

The pattern in it all? Centralize Knowledge & Centralize the Team… Very Few Densely Networked People, Lots of Tokens — this came up a bunch this week in conversations with different founders. The way you get leverage from all of this? You MUST MUST MUST centralize all your knowledge … every conversation at your company, every decision, etc. into one place. It is the ‘data lake’ X.0 concept… but at the most minute level of interactions, meetings, contracts, etc… and finally with HUGE and broad utility for moving faster? And what of team? Well you want to centralize the hell out of that as well… fewer more generalist people, more tightly networked, managing a broader army of machines. The key? It will be in person culture — this reorg is the final death of the head fake of ‘remote’ teams… very good people together are better than the best ever on an underworked disconnected island.

Which might lead to a refinement about how I think about the world… I still think in the AI land there is really very little opportunity for turnover of the ‘leaders’— big boy company / hyperscalers world AI massively massively favors incumbents… but at the other extreme? Little boy small businesses… will clearly massively benefit from small team + lots of tokens… and maybe that is where the turnover happens because 6 people in one living room with a big token budget can definitely out-compete 100 people distributed around the world in most things….?

You must optimize to collect and protect secrets — software becomes like media / content… just as media/content gets overtaken by software — it is all just scribbles on pages… and it is all copyable and disposable… the value you can create? It MUST be compounding secrets. Learn how to do something no one else can do… NEVER SELL DATA… become the person / company others MUST come to if they want the best of X directly… upshot? The only way to be valuable is to be positioned to know something forever better than everyone else… that or regulatory capture or sitting on an ancient trade route like Jerusalem, or I guess strait of hormuz these days?

Which brings me to…The end of open marketplaces — I mentioned this last week — I am still really on this. The internet’s whole move was driving efficiency by aggregating demand / increasing liquidity… but no one can make money on perfect / near perfect markets… which is precisely why BOTS destroy all businesses with public data feeds / the value of participating in any public market… and drives the story back to know things no one else knows in a way that will always be true and compound.

TOSwatch.. for bots — It is funny to see all these terms of service updates rolling through… and funnier still that people continue to not ever read them… but shouldn’t the bots read them… ? I feel like bot monitoring of TOS changes, alerting on when companies now burry the meaningful change, and switching to their competitor on the fly when they do is a thing.

Bots in First Class… it is very noticeable flying out of SF… number one app is terminal. Which leads to the obvious conclusion, we need airplanes that don’t fly…

What is OpenClaw?, What is an OS?.. I am still thinking about this exchange with Dave… OSes were powerful beach heads because people got sooo locked into them… you couldn’t switch easily… software you wrote for one ecosystem was hard to port. But now people are running doom on pregnancy tests, and porting iOS to windows software back and forth no problem… so what? Where is the value in this ‘middleware’? Death of software IMHO kinda makes it feel like Death of OS is around the corner … the middle always drops out…

And just for fun… poke.Jensen would be ‘deeply alarmed’ if his $500K engineer didn’t consume $250K of tokens … and I am sure mark would be deeply alarmed back in the day if his product managers didn’t use Facebook, and the Roy Kroc would probably be mad if his people didn’t eat Big Macs. Funny that it is all denominated in dollars tho… I can imagine that Elon doesn’t necessarily want his engineers spending $250K in imagine tokens on X :)

Have a great weekend… and for those in California enjoy the great great weather you handsomely pay for.

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