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.
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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
How Do You Manage An Economy Where Each Person Needs to be the BEST at what they do to survive? We Are Going to Need an Cambrian Explosion of Interests…
Posted bySam Lessin
Speaking with a some folks recently about startup sports leagues - the message was pretty clear - the only possible way for a new sports league to survive is if the players in the league are the globally best at what they do… and a vanishingly small number of people will ever make a living / be at the head of any given sport… no one cares about second best in anything… >...Slow Ventures
Cute "Face Filters" have been priming the youth for years to be perfectly comfortable talking to bots instead of humans...
Posted bySam Lessin
I have heard some studies that show that old people are very creeped out by / don't want to talk to bots... but the young feel exactly the opposite / in fact they would rather talk to and confide in non-human bots vs humans. Why? > I think a big part of this is that for the last decade or so we have been slowly - accidentally - boiling the frog with face filters / g...Slow Ventures
AI is the anti-social-media - and unlike social media movements, bots will bizarrely make extremist speech safer for everyone
Posted bySam Lessin
Imagine a not to distant future where we all have a 1,000 AI personalities that are constantly responding to the crap we post online, engaging us, making us feel good, loved, not lonely, etc. I don’t personally buy the single ‘AI girlfriend’ model at all, but it seems obvious that any platform interested in engagement is going to spawn for each person thousands of fake pe...Slow Ventures
AI is ironically a tool of deglobalizarion (the opposite of the Industrial Revolution)
Posted bySam Lessin
The mechanical Industrial Revolution(s) was /were a major force that drove globalization - once machines standardized output, and you just needed people to oversee and use the machines in a standardized, teachable, and measurable way - …. the hunt for cheap standardized labor globally to run those standardized machines was on — and the impact was dramatic. Mechanical Labo...Slow Ventures
Why shouldn't it be OK to train one 'AI' off of another 'AI'?... if it is ok to strip-mine without attribution the entire corpus of the human generated public web?
Posted bySam Lessin
The whole world of what data is 'fair game' to train an AI model off of vs. not seems like a complete mess -- and given concerns about AI this issue of 'copyright' who owns and have access to the base data that is being used to build these models seems like a dramatically under-discussed issue.... >> On one hand, there seems to be outrage that Google w...Slow Ventures