SWL Week in Review - Understanding Memecoins, and Merit First

From:

Sam Lessin <sam@wlessin.com>

To:

Hidden Recipient <hidden@emailshot.io>

Date:

2/10/2025, 2:22 PM

More or Less: Meme Coin Edition This week we spent 90% of our time discussing what is going on with meme coins… with a particular eye to the Jelly-my-Jelly (JMJ) initial launch (and new relevance with this barstool madness)…. Personally, I think this ecosystem and what it represents is not to be ignored or dismissed… this stuff matters —

Key Considerations on Meme-Coins:

Fartcoin is serious - it is an example of a institutional investor resistant asset

Institutional Resistant Assets matter because the ‘institutions’ have blocked retail out of all the real opportunities to invest and get real returns

So young men play / look to trade to 100x-es on narratives… Silicon Valley has AGI mega-narrative to do the same thing, but this is what retail has access to.

So we exist in a world of pure-narrative trading… which is the ‘safe’ realm that is institutionally resistant (and without regulatory clarity seemingly ok vs. tokens representing cashflows or hard assets)

But how do you think about price when the trading ‘player-vs-player’ game of crypto is layered with actual utility / anything else

In a sense none of this is new / certainly dates back to GME and NFT land… but because the medium is the message and Solana is so much more performant… the behaviors of today’s retail players is different than the way NFTs worked on ETH (which was slow and expensive)

... but when you scope out the real issue with a lot of this crypto stuffis that crypto is a communications platform with many use-cases… so it is very hard to think about it as a single thing to wrap your head around - a lot is going on all at the same time in the wild-west (communications)

…and for serious folks- the thing to realize with coinbase is that they don’t really represent ‘crypto’ — they are the interface between the real world and PART of crypto -- which is a great business...

More on this and how to think about things like the SEC / what ‘claims’ they need to regulate/ be able to validate to create trust between the digital and real world etc. on this week’s more or less :)

Merit First Launch Update

Last Monday we announced merit first… which is an effort to help move the world away from increasingly useless resumes and credentials… and towards open relevant tests for hiring… the call to action was:

If you are an employer / need the best — join us to get access to a really high quality test-lead pipeline of candidates to fast-track (especially in generalist tech and finance)

If you are a candidate / the best — take our alpha assessment and we will fast track you to great opportunities if you slay the test…

The launch went fabulously — tons of support, tons of companies and applicants…. (More updates soon… hundreds of companies reached out to use the platform, almost 1K applicants and counting) - but this seems to be the moment to make this obvious switch (partially because of the cultural moment)… but also because AI really does make this possible for the first time (it is hard to design good role specific tests, hard to keep people from cheating if you open the test wide, and SUPER hard to efficiently review all the answers to non-multiple-choice questions without AI)!

Regards,
Sam

P.S. Hosted a conference this week with a lot of my very favorite people to talk to… learned a lot (in-person wins)… from ‘spheres of influence’, to why tariffs don’t matter, to what the solo poly one-legged woman in a hijab really represents in our cultural moment… the skiing was also fun.

P.P.S. Something special is coming this week… which will make the next weekly update very interesting — stay tuned!

P.P.P.S — for book, movie, and TV recs I am moving over to this new AI-bookmarking platformI have been working on building tasti — if you want to see what is up and add to it here is the link to join the tasti group.

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