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
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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
Three Ages of Modern Ads, and why the Kardashians are a Fluke as a ‘mass market’ creator brand.
Posted bySam Lessin
To oversimplify the history of modern advertising, we have lived through three ages: - STEP-1: ‘broad-demographics’ — Pre-digital, and folks like ‘don draper’ won with basic data and demographics selling to broad demographics (suburban young moms) … - STEP-2: ‘early-internet-micro-targeting’ - the approach of selling to the broad demographics was largely eviscerated by...Slow Ventures
On the relative quality of ‘alternative assets’….
Posted bySam Lessin
It is pretty clear that the combination of the internet / frictionless free communication + crypto (‘frictionless’ free records of ownership and trade) should super-empower the long-tail of historically illiquid (and therefore under-valued) assets / it has been the trend since the era of eBay ’stores’. But there is a big spectrum of ‘alternative assets’ out there… which lea...Slow Ventures
You can’t do performance marketing for big-ticket ‘lumpy’ purchases vs. high-frequency churn-and-burn products > this fact drives a lot of what capitalism provides to the market now
Posted bySam Lessin
In order to do real performance based digital marketing you need to be operating with enough scale / at enough volume to rapidly test and learn … that means you need: - (a) a big population you can reach and might be interested in your offering / that you can run multiple tests on different segments without exhausting the targets. - (b) to be doing enough volume of actua...Slow Ventures
Proof of Human Identity … Blade Runner is coming true across a broad number of internet problems (search, social, crypto, etc.)
Posted bySam Lessin
One of the major themes of Blade Runner is that synthetic ‘replicant’ intelligence gets so good that it is truly indistinguishable from human intelligence without tools like the Voight-Kampff test … people who have no idea who are ‘people’ and who are ‘bots’ Blade Runner didn’t really have a sense of the internet, but it is shocking how right it got that this is a major co...Slow Ventures
When to invest in "marketplaces" - Look for newly standardized data and new vectors of trust and transparency.
Posted bySam Lessin
Every investor loves a good marketplace play because owning the ‘apple tree’ under which everyone decides to trade has two majorly awesome properties (a) very high margin (since you do nothing other than host the venue for trading, not do any of the work) (b) very sticky, because markets generally have massive return on scale. The problem, of course, is that while they ar...Slow Ventures