Wednesday, May 11, 2022

Sam Lessin Of Slow

Musk’s grand vision for Twitter faces reality check in Asia His biggest headaches lie abroad. The question to be answered over the coming years is how far Musk will stick with his promises of freeing up Twitter — not just in the US, but in the rest of the world. ...... For all the furore about which way Elon Musk might tilt US political discourse after getting the keys to Twitter Inc, his biggest challenges may emerge across the Pacific. ........... If the Tesla Inc and SpaceX billionaire makes good on promises to scrap censorship, he’ll encounter a plethora of perplexing regulations, wielded by sometimes authoritarian governments, pushed to the limits by a horde of first-time Internet users. ....... Twitter’s monetisable daily active users numbered 179 million internationally — dwarfing the 38 million in the US in 2021 ........ “Asia has the potential to make or break the new Twitter” ........ Twitter is officially banned in China, but the country will still demand a lot of Musk’s attention. Amazon.com Inc founder Jeff Bezos alluded to the potential conflicts in a tweet shortly after Musk’s deal, asking “Did the Chinese government just gain a bit of leverage over the town square?” ....... An obvious point is that China is tremendously important for Tesla, the key source of Musk’s wealth. The billionaire will certainly face pressures — implicit or explicit — to fine-tune Twitter’s policies to please Beijing. ...... As the world’s biggest electric-vehicle market as well as a supplier of Tesla batteries, China is essential to the healthy growth of the centrepiece of Musk’s business empire. Tesla has also benefited from significant tax breaks in setting up his Shanghai Gigafactory — its first overseas plant — and been allowed to wholly own its local operations, a rarity for a US firm. .......... A pressing issue is how Twitter handles China’s efforts to spread propaganda globally on the platform. The company in 2020 instituted labels for government officials and “state-affiliated media” for publications like Xinhua and Global Times, and readers are reminded of this government-backing any time they like or retweet stories. Chinese media have called the practice “intimidation” and already begun to lobby the billionaire to roll it back. ........ Bots are another matter. China has also used automated and anonymous accounts to distribute the government’s messages, which prompted Twitter to remove more than 170,000 accounts in 2020 for “spreading geopolitical narratives favourable to the Communist Party.” Musk has pledged to “defeat the spam bots or die trying!” and sounds determined to keep taking on the fake accounts. ......... Beijing has shown a willingness to punish billionaires who don’t comply with its wishes. Regulators have hammered the country’s tech giants and effectively banished Alibaba Group Holding Ltd co-founder Jack Ma from public view. ........ Musk’s SpaceX could certainly seek Chinese customers, while his Boring Co may profit from lucrative infrastructure contracts in the country.



Job interest in Twitter skyrocketed more than 250% since Elon Musk moved to take over. But current employees are nervous.
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Saturday, May 07, 2022

Sam Lessin



A DAO To Topple Putin By Christmas

Sam Lessin General Partner, Slow Ventures Lessin was a personal investor in crypto before his firm made numerous bets including blockchain privacy startup Aleo (valued at $1.5B), blockchain platform Chia Network (valued at $500), and Solana. ........ Other than crypto, Lessin backed cloud software startup Airtable, valued at $11.7 billion, and rocket launch company Astra, which went public at a $2.1 billion valuation in 2021. ........ Lessin founded Slow Ventures in 2015 alongside Kevin Colleran and Dave Morin (who has since left). The firm has raised $750 million over the last seven years. ......... Once Facebook's vice president of product management, Lessin now works with pal Mark Zuckerberg's sister, Arielle

Slow’s Newest Seed and Opportunity Funds… More of The Same! We wanted to share with the Slow community the launch of our fifth seed fund (Slow Ventures V), and Slow’s second Opportunity fund (Slow Opportunity II), representing together $325M in new capital commitments for us to invest in the coming years. In total, Slow now manages $770M of investor capital and has invested in more than 550 companies over the past decade. ........ Our point of entry remains at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage and then we continue to support and invest in the later stages as these companies continue to grow. ......... we will seek out and support companies from the earliest days — long before a new thesis is proven or before it is simply about scaling. We love entrepreneurs who ask ‘what if’ and take calculated risks on new markets, business models, and technical innovations. ...... Our goal is to be intelligently non-consensus. So much of what is called ‘venture capital’ has simply become a matter of piling capital into things which everyone sees and knows is ‘working’. Our job is to push the envelope ahead of the herd of large funds. ........ and are always looking for the next frontiers ........ Currently we have several new ideas we are exploring, from

launching and managing DAOs

to investing in individual humans in exchange for a piece of their future value creation, all in an effort to find the next great and unrealized truly ‘venture’ opportunities. ......... We care about impact, not facetime. Time is always money, but even more so at the seed stage. ....... We don’t take board seats and we don’t demand in-depth investor meetings. ........ We want to help founders understand how the venture game is being played. Lots of guidance and advice founders rely on is quickly out of date in this rapidly changing market so we help founders better understand the dynamics at play ........ We’ve honed our network and processes to give founders the best opportunity to raise the capital they need from the most appropriate top tier investors focused on their sector and stage. ........ To us, it really isn’t that complicated. We remain as we have always been, generalists who believe in backing great people with great hypotheses, trying to prove they are correct. We take pride in funding founders from the earliest days, before everyone else comes knocking, we believe the best things take time, and we take pride in delivering capital to founders when it really matters.

Sam Lessin’s Lessons From Backing Solana, $350M For Jump Capital And A Red-Hot Recruiting Software Raise In Santa Monica

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