Welcome to Slow Ventures’ Snailmail, where we unpack what’s on our partners’ minds every Sunday.
TL;DR:
Sam Lessin
Context:
I just spent some time with Sora’s new “social app,” and honestly, I’m left with mixed feelings. There’s some very real tech magic under the hood, but as a product and a market signal, it’s more interesting as a chess move than as an actual social network.
Here’s what stood out:
TECH
The tech is genuinely cool. The face/voice superimpose and collaboration features are slick—definitely the kind of thing that makes you go “oh, so that’s why Meta rushed out their generative AI feed last week.” This is next-gen stuff, and you can see the arms race happening in real time.
APP
As an app, Sora is built for consumption (no surprise there), but it’s buggy, and video generation is way too slow for posting to feel good. These are fixable, but right now, it’s a bottleneck. Maybe it’s just the cost of doing business at this scale, or maybe it’s a justification for building out a ton of infra before anyone cares about monetization.
LEGAL
This is a “just send it” moment on legal/copyright. A year ago, dropping this level of copyright violation with high fidelity would’ve started a holy war. Now? Maybe the sheer scale of infra investment, plus cultural exhaustion and distraction, means we’re living in the “age of power” instead of the “age of law.” I’m not saying it’s right, but I wouldn’t bet against it.
CONTENT
Here’s the real problem: the content just isn’t compelling. It’s got Studio Ghibli syndrome—everyone wants to try it, but nobody really wants to stick around. I’m not convinced that taking text and blowing it up into video (even when the quality gets great) is actually that interesting. It feels like a recipe for infinite, ignorable slop. Wild to see all this focus on high production value video, when in reality, standup comedy and memes (low production, high meaning) are what dominate culture today.
ALTMAN as TOM
One weird thing: a crazy high percentage of the videos reference Sam Altman or remix him. It’s giving MySpace Tom, or Twitter-Elon, or Truth Social-Trump vibes. Maybe in the “age of power” every major player needs their own social space. Maybe this is less about acquiring information and more about staking out territory. Worth playing with, for sure, but I don’t buy that OAI is building a social network that actually surfaces novel, important info about the world. The content just isn’t there, structurally. But as a power move? Super interesting.1. TECH
Takeaways:
The tech is impressive and the competitive dynamics are heating up fast.
The app experience is rough, but probably fixable.
Legal risk is being ignored—maybe because power wins now.
The content is not compelling, and I’m skeptical it ever will be.
The “Altman as Tom” effect is a fascinating signal about how social power is being mapped onto tech.
Capital Is Not a Badge, It’s a Drug. Use Only as Directed.
Will Quist
Context:
Venture capital is powerful medicine. But too many founders treat it like a default prescription—have an idea, make a deck, raise a round. That’s backwards. You don’t start with the drug; you start with the diagnosis. What are you actually building? What are you trying to prove? What will it take to unlock the next step?
Market Signal:
Here’s the truth Silicon Valley often ignores: Venture is just one drug on the shelf, and it’s the most aggressive. There’s a whole menu of capital—sweat equity, customer revenue, debt, grants, angels, strategic partners, and, yes, venture. Each has its own costs, side effects, and best use cases. Treating venture as the default is like taking antibiotics for a headache.
Sure, it’s powerful, but misused, it can poison the business before it ever has a chance.
Takeaways:
Capital is a tool, not a badge. The right medicine, in the right dose, at the right time, can save you. The wrong one can kill you. Used well, venture is a hell of a drug—but it should only be used when:
You have a novel, non-consensus thesis.
You can prove it true or false.
You can do so on relatively little money.
Being right is very valuable.
If those don’t hold, venture is a misdiagnosis. You’ll spend years forcing exponential growth onto linear economics—and destroy a perfectly good business in the process.
Takeaway:
Capital doesn’t create clarity. Clarity attracts capital. If you’ve done the diagnosis, raising is easy, the prescription writes itself. If you haven’t, venture is just an overdose waiting to happen.
The ask:
Do the hard thinking first. The medicine only works if you know what you’re treating. And if you need help, let me know here.
In 2035, Your Attention Span Will Be Your Net Worth
Yoni Rechtman
Context:
We’re living through a weird inversion of status. If you rewind to the early 2010s, being busy and “optimized” was the flex—Uber Eats, Peloton, Duolingo streaks, and all the hacks. But as we tiptoe into a world where AI, short-form dopamine hits, waifu companions, and Ozempic make everything frictionless, the new status symbols are quietly shifting. In a landscape where everything can be automated, faked, or shortcut, demonstrating attention and willpower becomes the real flex.
Market Signal:
Cooking your own food is back, not because you have to, but because you choose to. Uber Eats is now “wage-y” coded—convenient, but totally unsexy. The new luxury is unnecessary skill, the kind that says: “I have agency, health, and time to waste on this.”
Running marathons is the next frontier. Being skinny is table stakes (Ozempic, semaglutide, etc.); being fit is marginally harder. But you can’t fake the misery of a 20-mile run. The marathon is proof-of-work for the body.
Language learning? Once babelfish-level translation arrives, speaking another language will be pure performance art—a hobby, a flex, a way to show off patience and curiosity. Dead languages will be the next status dialect.
Reading novels (not non-fiction, not summaries, not AI-generated CliffsNotes) is a new marker of depth. Engaging deeply with fiction is about interest, not output. It’s patience and comprehension in a world optimized for speed.
Takeaways:
The next decade’s status symbols will be about deliberate friction: anything that requires attention, patience, and willpower.
“Gentlemanly” (or gentlewomanly) hobbies are coming back—cooking, reading, running, learning for the sake of it.
In a world where outcomes can be faked, process and tactile experience become the new luxury.
For founders and investors: new markets will open around hobbies and experiences that can’t be faked or automated. The value is in the signal, not the utility.
OpenAI Sora vs. TikTok: Can “AI Entertainment” Fund the Compute Bill?
More or Less Podcast
Hot Takes From The Episode:
"The reason the internet is valuable is because it's an economy... Dead internet theory basically says for a while nothing lasts forever. instead of you replace the economy, which is all the people creating shit and unique things, with just like a bunch of machines doing it. kind of looks the same at first blush... but there's nothing behind it." - @lessin
“There's this sort of an irony to Sam making himself the cult leader of OpenAI and that he owns 0% of OpenAI. And it's just interesting because you have these cults in tech that are fundamentally based in control and ownership. Now you could argue Sam effectively has this.” - @JessicaLessin
“LLMs are the be all end all of AI. And Richard Sutton was basically like, no, actually, these things don't know anything about the real world. Like nothing. They don't know anything about what's going on in your head. And that's a problem because they're not able to predict anything about the future. They can predict what the next token should be.” - @DaveMorin
"Even Sam Altman only has 10,000 followers right now [on Sora], so it feels like it's very not viral from a friending perspective... It is definitely consumption." @brit
From No-Code to $100K ARR, Now $3M Seed: Building Memelord
Sam and Jason Levin (Memelord)
Hot Takes From The Episode:
“Propaganda is one guy to many people. Mimetic warfare is one to many, to many more, to many more—right? Exponential. And if you have the power like we do, to seize the memes of production... then what you're able to do is give people ideas." - @JasonLevin
“No idea is original. It is very arrogant to think so, considering humanity has been alive for 10,000+ years... I think the only thing you could do is remix art so much that eventually it becomes your own style and people see that. But that takes years to do." - @JasonLevin
Quote from Sam