Sam Lessin

GP Slow Ventures. Intern The Information
Intern
.
Slow Ventures
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.
Skills
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
The Key Value of ‘Open Source’ is To Protect Software Too Powerful to Centrally Manage
Posted bySam Lessin
Slow Ventures
As software in crypto, ai, etc gets more and more impactful— open sourcing software for political and technical defense above all else is only becoming more and more critical. There are really only two reasons to ever open source software. The first one is easy to understand … if you need to do something very very large and can’t afford to build it all yourself, open sour...
#modest proposals
2Comments
Someone Needs to Build Tinder for AIs
Posted bySam Lessin
Slow Ventures
Everyone is out there trying to build AI girlfriends / companions / friends… but how am I supposed to date an AI if I don’t find them first? Obviously someone needs to build Tinder for AIs / Bots so people can find their digital soul-mates. How it works: same as Tinder…. - Open the app, get fed a series of AIs / bots / photos and bios - Swipe right / swipe left on th...
#modest proposals
0Comments
Founders play poker, VCs watch the table and sneak a few chips into the pot on the side
Posted bySam Lessin
Slow Ventures
I came up with an analogy for VC trying to explain how it really works to some founders recently. Imagine that you as a founder are playing poker… You / the founder are at the table. You have your stack of chips (your time, your effort, etc.) and are playing hands. You choose when to put chips in, etc. You choose when you go ‘all in’. VCs are not at the table, they are...
#modest proposals
0Comments
AI’s ‘Napster’ Era
Posted bySam Lessin
Slow Ventures
The best analogy I can come up with for where we are today in the AI era, is that with LLMs we are currently in the ‘Napster’ Era. 1. You can feel the future 2. Compelling if early user experiences 3. Built on spectrum of stolen data 4. Free for users / no business model for copyright holders so unsustainable METALLICA / COPYRIGHT Like the Napster era, I expect that mos...
#modest proposals
1Comment
What LLMs teach us about ‘fairness’ in human societies and the value of social correlation vs. causation
Posted bySam Lessin
Slow Ventures
Start from these two points: (a) the way LLMs work isn’t any real intelligence. They just take a ton of existing content, and play an enormous expensive multi-dimensional ‘guess the most probable next word’ game, based on all words it has ever read and what has been said so far. (b) there are a lot of real humans who see this ‘guess the next word’ game as threatening to ...
3Comments