Sam Lessin
GP Slow Ventures. Intern The Information
Subscriber since 2013
About
Sam is currently an intern at The Information and a General Partner at Slow Ventures. He has co-founded two companies, Fin and drop.io (acquired by Facebook in 2010). Between 2010 and 2014 he was a VP of product management at Facebook, where he managed the People, Places, and Things product group and the Identity product group. Sam started his career at Bain and Company, and attended Harvard ('05). In his spare time Sam enjoys skiing and kite-surfing. He is married to Jessica Lessin, founder of The Information.
Open to
Looking to invest in startups / private companies
I have been an early investor in many notable companies and projects including (solana, venmo, birchbox, makerbot, teamshares, tonkean, blockdaemon, airtable, etc.) At slow we look to back ideally things that are a bit crazy but important.
Looking to hire team members
TI is very much looking for engineers, product, design folks. Slow doesn't really have many opportunities but always open to hearing from folks.
Topics
Markets
StartupsGoogleAmazonAppleNetflixVenture CapitalVcSemiconductorsCryptocurrencyCloudAsiaAndreessen HorowitzAirbnbEntertainmentElon MuskFacebookMark ZuckerbergSequoia CapitalSingapore Economic Development BoardEnterpriseSilicon Valley Bank (SVB)PolicyUber/LyftAmazon Web ServicesAIAutonomous VehiclesCryptoVenture-CapitalOpenAIBainE CommerceModest ProposalsFTXSvbMeta PlatformsMedia/TelecomSBFVenture CapitalStartupsSaasIdentityBitcoinLawCryptocurrencyHuman CapitalMarketsCrazy People
StartupsGoogleAmazonAppleNetflixVenture CapitalVcSemiconductorsCryptocurrencyCloudAsiaAndreessen HorowitzAirbnbEntertainmentElon MuskFacebookMark ZuckerbergSequoia CapitalSingapore Economic Development BoardEnterpriseSilicon Valley Bank (SVB)PolicyUber/LyftAmazon Web ServicesAIAutonomous VehiclesCryptoVenture-CapitalOpenAIBainE CommerceModest ProposalsFTXSvbMeta PlatformsMedia/TelecomSBFVenture CapitalStartupsSaasIdentityBitcoinLawCryptocurrencyHuman CapitalMarketsCrazy PeopleSkills
FinanceFundraisingProduct ManagementData AnalysisSqlMicrosoft WordWritingHiringPrivacy IssuesStartups
Weekend
Favorite Vacation Spot
British ColumbiaHawaiiCape CodJackson Hole
Favorite Sports to Play
TennisSkiingSurfingFoilingKitesurfing
Favorite Sports to Watch
Mma
Favorite Books
The HobbitThe Biggest BluffSnowcrashDuneThe Hero With A Thousand FacesBusiness AdventuresThe Three Body Problem
Favorite TV Shows / Movies
Game Of ThronesCasino RoyaleCurb Your EnthusiasmIt's Always Sunny In PhiladelphiaFor All MankindLetterkennySuccessionCaddyshackBlazing SaddlesZoolander
Forum Posts
From AI to Crypto to Social Networks: digital systems are great at internal self consistency and hitting digitally native objective functions. The real problem is keeping them in sync with the real world so they actually have meaning.
Posted bySam Lessin
Digital systems are great at being internally self consistent and delivering against digitally native objective functions. - Crypto is an amazing platform for markets and trading within crypto, but have failed in most cases so far to sync to the real world and deliver real world impact. - LLMs are really interesting ways to process and deliver information from a digiti...Slow Ventures
The S-curves of LLMs, and AI… the many trillion dollar question is where are we?
Posted bySam Lessin
New technologies always follow s-curves … they start out slow, at a certain point they accelerate, and then over time they decelerate as marginal gains get harder and harder to achieve. In the case of LLMs today, and generally ‘AI’ in the future, the many many trillion dollar question is where we are in the s-curve of LLMs / what you can get from them and then, after that...Slow Ventures
How to do ‘PR’ if you are a startup
Posted bySam Lessin
Probably because my wife is a journalist and for no other reason, a surprising number of startups come to me asking how to do ‘PR’ as a startup / how to talk to the press… here is the basic outline of what I tell them as non-journalist who has observed in my life a fair bit of journalism: 1. No one is going to cover your fundraise… duh. it isn’t 2002. Amateur hour to eve...Slow Ventures
Don’t Let ANYONE EVER insert themselves between You and Your Customer … The Real Lesson of the last 20 years of internet ‘business’ and the lesson for AI generation starting with Stack Overflow.
Posted bySam Lessin
If there is one consistent lesson of the last 20 years of digital business, it is that when someone comes to you offering cheap distribution, but in return they get to be the ‘front end’ sitting between you and your customer - you are doing a deal with a devil - and at some point they will try (and likely succeed) at destroying you. - Google search convinces publishers to...Slow Ventures
This era of LLMs / AI practically feel a lot more like the introduction of AJAX / Javascript to the web than a seismic platform paradigm shift like mobile.
Posted bySam Lessin
I am old enough to remember the era when AJAX and building responsive web interfaces using javascript was super cool and super new... and everyone was trying to figure out how to use the tech practically and well to up-level their websites. Talking with a founder recently who was asking what AI will do to his business / how to pivot it given AI, I kept coming back to this t...Slow Ventures