SWL Week in Review - Socialism Blowback + Hiring & Sourcing in Age of AI...
Lettermeme.com:
Indexing What Smart People Think Now… | Last summer I slapped together hearsay.email — back in the same cabin I was in, I went for a refresh… and it has been really really fun. I would urge you to check out what I have put together here — lots of people have done the AI ‘review of my favorite newsletters’ for themselves or a few friends, but what I am finding really valuable in 2025 (and have implemented and working pretty well) is:
- Thematic overviews — take all the newsletters from smart people on the day.. pull the themes and ideas … cluster them into meta themes that are ‘in play’ right now and then organize the takes / specific points different people are making on theme to scan. I have learned a lot this way — I.e.here is last week by theme overall
- NewsletterGPT / Chat Interface — taking the newsletters, cutting them up by theme (and proper noun) and continuously updating my own vectorDB not of the ‘world’s’ takes… but of takes I think are good — so I can answer questions / ask questions and get screened perspective… works really well. You can try it here
- vertical specific views — want to know just the media / creator world view of things thematically at the moment — great.. it is like 30 lines of code and here is the creator download / what matters to them…
More or Less / Tech Hiring in Age of AI and Bezos Wedding?
Fun episode with the gang… big topic of substance was around how AI is reshaping hiring (both in the adversarial sense … infinite AI sent job-resumes in, screening tools - and the startup I helped get going last year / Merit First (going well!) — also in the sense of what we ourselves want to hire / (i.e. I won’t hire associates anymore who don’t have enough of a coding background to leverage the crap out of AI OR a serious passion / willingness to learn… because working with people who can’t deeply leverage AI in 2025 is like hiring people who can’t use computers in the 1990s) — also, kinda fun - weirdly getting positive comments on YouTube for the last few episodes?! I didn’t realize you could use a comment section that way…crazy.
Hot Takes:
- Bezos Just Didn't Spend Enough on the Wedding — congrats to the couple... the blowback is a tad silly... but I do think they made a tactical error not really fully embrasing the spirit of 'bread and circus'... they should have spent MORE (not less) and thrown a rager for the people... like they used to do...
- NY Upper Middle Class Disillusionment From Compounding Inequality + Instagram — This situation with Mamdani is bonkers — but what is most interesting is trying to understand WHY the upper middle class is voting for him / what broke there (where poor people and rich people clearly didn’t) … also this from Sunil is super interesting — about the flip from language in public hearings from “I” to “We” — When the Microphones Started Saying ‘We’: The Quiet Data Signal Behind Zohran Mamdani’s NYC Upset
- Early Stage VC is about MARKETING not HUNTING — this is on my mind a lot practically recently.. and it has gone from something I have intuitively believed / tried to do … to something I think is explicitly just correct and the future. You cannot cannot as an early stage VC go outbound.. you never really could, but now no way because (a) World moves too fast / too hard to ‘hook one’ exactly with the right timing and setup vs. being top of mind and wallet for builders (b) AI makes it too hard to find signal generically — everything looks ‘fine’, YC destroyed any network based intel / signaling by teaching a generic book to everyone etc… what you need to do is put out into the world who you are and what you can sell (money, and exactly on what terms and how) and then create a culture and community where people want to come to YOU and send great ideas to YOU. There is no outbound motion that works.
- SALES is done in general vs. CREATING AND OWNING CULTURE — the dogma - especially in B-to-B is ‘listen to customers’… etc… fine… but that is a very hill-climbing way to build a startup / always has been — and the faster the world gets in others adopting and building what you are doing, I think there is just too much competition to do this well … it is GRINDING work. What should you do? Find a cultural position / idea and OWN IT. Ideally it is the type of thing that many / most people disagree with or don’t like but THE RIGHT people love (and the world will move in your favor) — Startups for me increasingly feel like front running cultural shifts and realities enabled by tech that others don’t yet quite realize VS. some sort of plodding game of customer feedback and execution. Again, this might have always been the case — but it feels like as the world gets faster and more competitive it is MORE important to really understand and be precise about.
- Thank You Israel + Than You USA (Also Great Code Names) —It is amazing that last week writing it was just thank you Israel, this story is moving so fast. I think it is great that the US stepped up to the plate here and contributed for the West. I totally get all the stress and fear people have about foreign entanglement, WWIII narrative, etc. BUT in the end of the day if you aren’t willing to fight ever / if you believe in peace full stop, those that don’t will roll over you — in some ways ‘peace at all costs’ from safety is the ultimate selfish / small view of the world… even if you hate war… also great code names all around.
- Employees are Buried in AI Generated Resumes — per MoL .. yep — worth understanding… and yup, the entire point of Merit First… this is a BIG deal in how talent markets are going to shift / change… and I wonder a lot how things shift in places where it is harder to test (i.e. creative executives? How do you test for that in Hollywood? … especially if not everyone works for CAA on their way up AND no one has heard of these roles / production companies… does it just go back to a full relationship based feudal system … is it already that anyway?
- The Dis-Return on Scale of Having More Children - you aren’t gonna get non-parents to have kids (easily) — might be easier to get parents to stack on children,… the problem is that the economics of kids haven’t shifted just because we got the kids out of the farms/factories/mines… we retooled capitalism over the last many years to service individuals / individual as the UNIT of cost vs. family — and that makes each incremental kid way more expensive than it used to! —is it even possible to shift the unit of capitalism away from individual and back towards family
Some Things I Haven’t Written Yet But Are On My Mind (new section!):
- Finance is Supposed to Be A Miracle of ‘Man’s Trust in Man’ — but the problem is in this era that trust is evolving away from trust in each other to trust in the Government…
- You don’t hire humans to do work, you hire them to shift liability…. Don’t forget that when looking at AIs (and how this will all play out with zero switching cost to fire agents)
- As AI Companies Make Things Profitable Earlier Deal Making Gets Harder…; also
- Unlike The Real World, The Internet Let’s You Walk Away and ‘Block Anyone’ — Which Breeds Single Shot Extremist Interactions (vs. more balanced iterated gameplay)
- What do you do with an 80% reliable employee?? This is the fundamental AI question??
Fondly, Sam
P.S. the Katy Perry drinks / De Soi are pretty good.
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email sl@wless.in
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