SWL Week in Review - Narrative Selloff, HP, and Harvard
More or Less: The AI ‘money’ fight between public and private companies & more on memes
Central discussion on financing AI as a mega meme - how can a private company possibly win an AI war if (a) it is a matter of money and (b) public markets let the big public companies have as much ‘AI’ as they want for free? And of course more on … memecoins / narratives as the ‘blast’ in crypto during crypto selloff & my digital scavenger hunt… and Grok as as yet another ‘character’ you talk to in a chorus of made up characters….
Narrative / Meme-selloff… that is what I see when I look across public tech companies … all the way through to crypto markets this week
Hot Takes:
WTF-VC 2025 Q1 Letter — I am working on my full ‘deck’ updating my view of VC in 2025… but it is taking time because I have a few other things in the works… meantime here is the high level directional thinking in the form of some of the content we shared with slow LPs last week.
Slow.com/AI — very excited for our 101 northbound airport billboard starting 3/3 :) …. Complete with our very fun AI game
Elon’s ‘What did you get done this week’ is what workplace AI is really for…. The reporting this week was ‘shocker elon wants to feed the what did you get done this week emails in the federal government into an AI. Duh... this is going to be the real leverage for AI in a workplace — AI isn’t cute ‘assistants’ that work for the people… it is the other way around, AI is a tool to manage people better/ more efficiently (people work for AI)
On Harvard, I have been consistent since 2019 (phew) — helping do some fact checking for an fancy article coming out, I went deep in the archive and found the first email I ever sent Claudine Gay after meeting her in SF in 2019… I was more polite, but phew I was consistent questioning how her goals interacted with VERITAS as true north … I prize intellectual consistency above almost all else, so a relief.
Don’t you dare put AI in my printer HP— with this ridiculous AI pin acquisition HP clearly wants in the narrative AI game for a little stock bump… but my god, HP, if you put AI in my printer I am going to go berserk — I get it is hard to sell more printers if they don’t break and they just print… you are in a bad business - but just stop it / don’t try it.
What investors really want? combo downside protection + options on infinity A combination of ‘downside’ protection with ‘real assets’ + infinite upside optionality with AI story… and they can get that in some public companies.
From last week (I was busy) — Elon went on some absurd rant about how ‘based’ GROK3 was because it told him The Information was legacy media and shouldn’t be trusted — of course when he released it, all tests of grok3 have glowing reviews of the information… biggest take away, remember - these things are just mirrors / feed you want you want to hear — and we know what elon want to hear… reminds me of some ancient story about a very pretty person and lake… narsis...something or other.
EEEEaww.com The use of sora to super-charge memes with video, etc. has really been a delight to play with — usually when new tech comes out the first instinct is to make old stuff with it (movies)… but with this image gen stuff / movie-gen AI stuff I think is going to yield far more interesting stuff at the intersection of community/meme/art/belonging than traditional film…. More on this soon.
Enjoy the long weekend,
Sam
P.S. Shorsey is back for season 4… possibly the finest TV show ever made… thrilled.
P.P.S. — less intellectual stuff this week candidly because so much REAL stuff is going on… including some very exciting things with Meritocracy
P.P.P.S - The slow creator fund is also going great…. And if you are interested in a job Megan is hiring (standard aptitude app here)
sam lessin | @lessin | want to talk | podcast | stop | to get added to the mailing list email sl@wlessin.com
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