MORE OR LESS

@parkerconrad, founder of Zenefits and now CEO of Rippling, joins @lessin and @Jessicalessin. No Morins this week. A year ago VCs were telling him software engineering was months away from mass unemployment. His update: salaries are higher, the market is tighter, and a great engineer is worth more today than ever. He argues the only moat left in AI is seeing the problem before your customer does. That good gross margins can be a sign nobody's actually using your product. And that Rippling isn't a software company at all. @lessin counters with his own setup: a private notes file he hands to four different agents, so they race each other to finish things he never asked them to do. @Jessicalessin brings the mood from New York, where the money people don't think the $8 trillion CapEx bill pencils out, and financing is about to get much harder. Plus Deel fighting a federal grand jury subpoena, Anthropic's IPO date, and Sam's plan to pay people minimum wage with a 5% shot at a million dollars. New episode out now. Topics: 01:14 Parker Conrad joins, no Morins this week 02:13 Everyone watched the election on prediction markets, not TV 04:09 The blue wave, and why the market went up anyway 07:48 Hyperscalers, data centers, and builds that just got harder 09:27 California's wealth tax fails 10:24 Why paper billionaires can't pay a wealth tax 12:17 The financing trick where one investor sets the headline price 13:06 New York's mood: AI financing is drying up 13:45 Sam: we've run out of money in the world 15:09 Parker: good gross margins can be a bad sign 15:30 Anthropic's IPO date and OpenAI's approach to margins 16:44 Rippling's IPO plans and the public market retirement community 18:26 The SaaS apocalypse that didn't happen 19:00 "Rippling is not a software company" 20:29 AI for boring: government forms, faxes and fraudulent audits 25:36 The only moat left is seeing the problem first 28:01 Sam's notes file and the agents that compete over it 29:32 Instinct keeps asking Jess the same question 30:02 Today's agents are shitty assistants 30:49 Permissions architecture as the real advantage 32:21 Where Rippling makes margin and where it makes zero 33:19 Usage pricing and deleting the bottom half of a job 34:36 What you're really selling is a promotion 36:04 Software written at installation time 37:26 Why you shouldn't vibe code permissions 38:07 AI is excellent at using software, humans are not 39:42 Should an AI negotiate your pay? 41:05 Rippling's $17M seed and two years before the starting line 42:07 Why reversibility decides how fast you can move 44:52 The Deel lawsuit and a federal grand jury subpoena 46:06 Sam: your job doesn't look fun to me 48:40 The engineer layoffs that never came 49:25 Random reward payroll, a very bad idea 51:26 Overrated and underrated in Silicon Valley 54:01 Sam's New York Marathon 55:14 Starting a company: the narrow ray of daylight

@parkerconrad on where the advantage in AI will sit. “The most important moat is going to be which companies can have visibility into the fact that there is work to be done for a business.” Right now there’s “this huge gap between the capabilities of these systems and actual uptake.” Then @lessin on his own setup. A private URL to his notes file, handed to all his agents. “They literally every minute or two check it, try to finish things that I haven’t even told them to do and then just deliver me the results back.” On starting a company: “somewhere between completely impossible and very, very, very hard.” “And between those two extremes, there’s this narrow ray of daylight that passes through companies that succeed.” New episode out soon.

@davemorin puts the big AI debate to @bingfish. If AI promises to remove your effort, what part of life gets worse when an agent wins for you? And what do we leave in for the human to do? Bing starts with oysters. “Friction is what makes pearls. If you don’t get sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster.” Sand doesn’t always make a pearl, he says. But it’s necessary to pearl building. So what’s the friction? Constraints. His AI version: ten other people are running the same prompt as you. You’ve got to do something better than them. “What do you do?”

@brit asks @bingfish whether he gamifies his board meetings. “Absolutely.” The rule: the CEO or chairman needs one actionable idea they commit to, per hour. Then a note out within 24 hours to every participant covering what was valuable, who’s taking it on, and when they report back. His measure of whether it worked isn’t the minutes. It’s energy. “A management team goes back to work. They don’t want to go home yet. And the board kind of wants to hang around.” And the best ones share something specific: a risky decision gets made, and you look back later and realize it was the tipping point. He sits on Take-Two and Duolingo’s boards and spent 15 years on Amazon’s, so this is a lot of rooms.

@brit asks @bingfish if he scores his board meetings. Literally grades them and measures each one against the last. He does. His sense is that a founder who loses the board two meetings in a row gets replaced. "If you're wasting the board's time, you're probably wasting your employees' time." Part of the relationship with investors is a confidence game. When a CEO starts mailing in board meetings, it usually correlates to something else. His comparison is the factory floor. Bad board meetings are to CEOs what messy, junk-strewn floors are to manufacturing. Let people keep messy floors, and you'll let them get away with putting a bolt in wrong.

@bingfish on what a wow moment actually is, drawn from forty years of building them: World of Warcraft: the first time you ride a griffon and realize the world is contiguous, that you can see all of it from the air. He compares it to a first balloon ride. John Madden Football had two. The first was parallax scrolling, watching the field move beneath a kick. Nobody had seen that. Doom and Castle Wolfenstein: the speed you move through the world, which was a tech trick. And early Facebook, where the wow was social rather than visual. “Look at these people paying attention to me.” Being tagged. Then photos. Before any of it, the signal was people changing their profile pictures and getting noticed for it, and the team realizing they had to build toward that.

@brit asks @bingfish about the eight steps to gamification in his book. The first one is getting to wow, and his method for finding it is a stopwatch. He walks into a product as the novice. “When I’m talking to developers, I can channel the everyman. I can be the dumb user.” Then he times it. Every time he feels something, he stops the clock, writes down what was on screen and what the feeling was. The feelings sort themselves into a scale. At the top, wow, I’ve got to tell somebody about this. Below that, good, nice, leaning in, feeling warm. At the bottom, the physical tells. Sighing. Brow knitting. Arms crossing. His benchmark from running this on Hall of Fame games: a wow in the first session, and ten goods for every not-good.

@bingfish’s method for backing an idea he thinks will fail: “I don’t think it’s going to work. I’ll back you. You just have to write your letter of resignation and I can pull it out.” The part that makes it work is what happened next. Every single time somebody took that bet and the idea failed, they got promoted. “You’re more valuable after you take a big risk and try stuff, as long as you pay attention to the details.” @brit asks whether anyone actually got fired. One way only. “The only way you got fired is if you blame someone else for the failure.” He puts it to @davemorin directly, as a former CEO. As a founder the whole world is malleable to you, so it is your fault, the way a quarterback owns the defense.

Asked which products today have the Farmville problem, @bingfish offers a test he's run on himself for years. Look at a hundred things in a feed. Count how many you were glad you saw. When it drops under 30%, unsubscribe. What pushes the number down, in his read, is advertising built to look like it isn't advertising. "Putting in not organic ads, but putting ads that kind of seem native. I think it's a risk." @brit takes that somewhere uncomfortable for two companies at once. The usual answer to ads is paying, except her Prime subscription still doesn't remove sponsored products from Amazon search. She's paying and getting served anyway. Then she points at the newest version of it. ChatGPT ends every answer with another question. Here's your answer, now would you like to do this? Now would you like to do this? Same mechanic. New surface.

@davemorin’s question for @bingfish: games make effort meaningful, and AI promises to remove effort. So what part of life gets worse if an agent wins for you, and what do you deliberately leave in for the human to do? “Friction is what makes pearls. If you don’t get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster.” He adds the qualifier most people skip: sand doesn’t always produce a pearl. It’s just necessary to one. @brit asks what friction means here. Constraints. And AI generates its own. “Ten other people are doing the same prompt as you. You’ve got to do something better than them.” Which raises the bar continuously. “What we now think is great, three years from now we’re going to think of as slop.”

@bingfish on what actually brings people back, after forty years of designing products that do it: “The number one motivation for coming back was other people.” His reference is the Cheers bar. You return to the place where everybody knows your name, where someone calls out when you walk in and there’s a little history between you. Walk into a bar where people look at you like a stranger and you leave.That holds in games, and the ranking is what surprises people. “Productivity, including money, is down the list. Which always shocks and bums out business people who want to turn everything into money.” Same principle he applies to hiring. You want people who’ll stay for more than the money, because the coin-operated ones leave the moment things get hard.

@davemorin asks @bingfish the question every dashboard hides: people who quit Farmville felt relief, while retention and revenue were still climbing. What could have told you the truth at the time? His answer starts with a Bezos line. “When the anecdotes and the data don’t agree, trust the anecdotes.” The signal they had was NPS, and it moved the wrong way. People’s scores for Farmville went down afterthey quit. They stopped recommending a game they’d just spent months playing. He’s careful about where the line sits. Being nudged into things you don’t feel like doing is how training works, and he says you sometimes need to get hacked into the gym. “But at some point you’ve got a totalitarian dance troupe leader or coach who takes all the fun out of it.” Reid Hoffman’s version, which Bing quotes: growth hacking works for a short time, like human growth hormone. Get addicted and you’re a cancer risk.

@bingfish was there at the founding of Electronic Arts in 1982, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, and sat on Amazon's board for 15. He was also on Zynga's board, which is why it lands when he says players felt relief when they quit Farmville while retention and revenue were still climbing. So where's the line between good game design and gaming your users? His answer takes in TikTok doom scrolling, WhatsApp as the rare product nobody complains about overusing, the sponsored products Amazon still shows Prime members, and ChatGPT ending every answer with one more question. Then @davemorin asks what the agent era keeps circling: what gets worse if your AI wins for you? "Friction is what makes pearls. If you don't get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster." And the next frictions, he says, come from edge conditions nobody tested for. Plus the wow/WTF scale he used to judge EA's Hall of Fame games, and the bet-your-job letter he kept in a drawer. @brit hosts. New episode out now. Topics: 01:02 No Lessins this week: Brit and Dave bring in Bing Gordon 02:42 Amazon's board, Prime, and 18 years at Kleiner Perkins 05:03 Disneyland inside the computer 06:51 The classroom question that led to Electronic Arts 09:44 Raising $2M in 1982, then Atari collapsed 10:56 Vision, and why people think you're stupid 11:37 Bathroom OKRs and why goals beat perfection 13:13 Word of mouth, and why coin-operated hires leave 14:44 "Can a computer make you cry?" and hiring on mission 16:53 Why games retain: where everybody knows your name 17:34 Which social network did it best? 18:36 LinkedIn endorsements and getting people to come back 20:19 Farmville: players felt relief when they quit 21:18 Growth hacking is human growth hormone 23:04 Amazon, TikTok, ChatGPT: who's gaming their users today? 24:21 What gets worse if your AI agent wins for you 25:03 Friction is what makes pearls 26:30 Hugging Face, Cruise, and the edge conditions nobody tests 29:04 Writing Everybody Wins with his daughter Chloe 32:19 The visionary and the operator 33:20 The wow/WTF scale, and how to manufacture a wow 36:08 Wow moments in games, Facebook, Instagram and Amazon 38:42 Creating wow moments as a parent 41:28 The bet your job moment 42:23 You only got fired for blaming someone else 43:19 Good risk vs bad risk 43:53 Invest and express: Twitch, chat, and kids' art on the wall 45:59 Dave's favorite Bing-ism: the airplane aisle test 47:30 The best retention hack ever made is a wedding ring 48:01 Session economics, novelty, and leveling up 51:51 How to gamify a board meeting 54:03 Why a founder who loses the board twice gets replaced 55:23 Family board meetings and the vice president of fun 56:17 Lightning round: books, heroes, best investment 58:41 Bing's p(doom): doomers are gonna doom 59:36 The three things that make a good day 1:01:59 Dave's iPhone Duo verdic

“Friction is what makes pearls. If you don’t get a sand in the oyster, you just get an oyster.” Bing Gordon co-founded Electronic Arts in 1982 and has spent the eighteen years since at Kleiner Perkins. @davemorin asks him the question AI keeps raising: what part of life gets worse if an agent wins for you, and what do you deliberately leave in for the human to do? His answer is that constraints are the point, and the new frictions are already forming. “Ten other people are doing the same prompt as you. You’ve got to do something better than them.” On what went wrong with the last platform shift: The Facebook Effect promised that connecting would let you move mountains socially. “But then it turned out the money was clicks. And so Facebook never measured on the server how much friendship you were building.” @brit asks for his p(doom) by 2030. “I’m not a doomer.” New episode out soon.

@Jessicalessin: “My enthusiasm for certain new technology products has fallen back to earth in recent weeks. It’s a little bit sad, because I had wanted to be a more.” @lessin: “So you realize you’re fundamentally a less.” Her evidence: no successful credit card transaction on Muse in nine days. And the Waymos have gone a bit mad. They start on the right path, then take the wrong one and add ten minutes. She still thinks they’re the best option available by a long way. “I don’t think this is true, but it feels like they’ve been hacked.” Sam, unhelpfully: are you sure they haven’t just decided to make you ten minutes slower because you’re a journalist? @brit’s read is that this is why Tesla wins eventually. Every Tesla running directions with self-driving on is generating route data. Waymo only has the cities it operates in.

@brit’s theory, after riding Cybercabs in Austin and driving only self-driving Teslas at home: “I am doing nothing but consuming content on most of my drives. I’m looking at the screen, I’m watching football games, I’m doing Zoom calls. I think Teslas are becoming the new entertainment vehicles. And so I would not be surprised if eventually he buys Netflix.” @davemorin calls it a good take. @Jessicalessin doesn’t buy the Netflix part. Dave on the Cybercab itself: “I want to live wherever I’m on the Cybercab network, because they’re that good.” He thought the missing steering wheel would unsettle him and was doing email in the passenger seat within two days. The detail that sold him is small. It remembers your seat position, and if your Spotify is linked to your Tesla account, the song from your own car picks up where it left off the moment you get in.

@brit on what Netflix should be making: A24-style dramas with real storytelling. What Netflix is actually making: a Willy Wonka game show, live sports, games, podcasts. “Trying a bunch of things instead of getting one thing right and being the best at it.” @davemorin connects it to a take that went viral for him this week, about a new kind of slop at work. Email used to be other people’s to-do list for your life. Now the people emailing you are driven by agents that lack the context to know what matters to them, let alone to you. “Email is now other people’s agents’ to-do list for your life.” His argument is that Netflix hit the same wall. They used so much data to decide what to fund that everything funded became slop, chopped into audience buckets instead of being a good story. “You have your content slop and your priority slop, and you can get lost in either place.”

@lessin’s position on AI liability, which he calls his political hobby horse of the era: “These labs need to be carrying enormous liability insurance policies. Right now they’re centralizing profits and radiating the risks to all of society. Because when shit goes bad and all the regional banks get hacked, you have a Katrina style problem. They’re like, not our problem. Society, clean up the mess, we’ll just take all the profits. That’s ridiculous.” His two options. Carry $100 billion of private insurance if you’re doing work on the edge that might cause a lab leak, which he notes Wall Street would make a fortune on. Or pay a few hundred billion a year into a federal contingency fund, since Washington ends up covering it regardless.“ If you’re creating the risk, you should also be responsible for having the balance sheet to clean it up.”

@davemorin has had stretches this year with access to frontier models that aren’t public. “It’s really crazy, the differential between the feeling of using these things and what everybody is talking about on the internet. There’s a wild gap. And I don’t even have access to the true frontier.” @lessin thinks that gap explains the product problems. Both of them lived it at Facebook, where you lose track of what customers actually experience within days of using internal builds. The rudimentary version is being on the latest iPhone while your users are on the oldest Android. This is that, multiplied. “I do wonder how much of it is just like they’re all using stuff that we’re not using, and then they don’t actually know what’s going on.” @brit asks what the labs should do about it. Dave’s answer: ban your own teams from the frontier. Leave it to research and make everyone else live on what’s public.

Elon tells investors SpaceX and Tesla should merge. @lessin has a theory he says nobody else has floated: there’s an enormous SpaceX lockup cliff coming in the spring, and folding Tesla’s retail shareholders into the denominator makes all that supply much easier to absorb. @davemorin thinks the rocket-powered car demo was timed to justify the deal. Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car. 83% of respondents in @Jessicalessin’s new Polls app say it’s mostly about Musk control. Then the PHP vulnerability, and Sam’s conclusion is blunt. All your regional banks will be hacked. The labs are centralizing profits while externalizing the risk, and they should be carrying hundred billion dollar insurance policies. Plus Google informing Jess she’s liable for everything her agents do, Netflix’s content shakeup, Dave’s theory of priority slop, and @brit’s second week with no back pain. Watch here on X or wherever you get your pods. Topics: 00:00 Intro 01:04 Dave’s back, and the nasal rinse discourse 02:06 A web-wide PHP vulnerability 03:12 Sam: all your regional banks will be hacked 04:16 The zero days the labs are sitting on 04:56 Dave on the gap between frontier models and the public ones 06:29 Why labs should ban their own teams from the frontier 07:17 Pearl, Coinbase, and Bitcoin as a byproduct of compute 08:32 Can you even build a cybersecurity company in 2026? 09:16 Cold storage: your documents in a mine near the North Pole 10:22 Sam: the labs need $100 billion liability policies 11:30 Google says you’re liable for everything your agents do 13:55 How many Teslas have the Morins owned? 15:05 Sam’s Mazda dealership is living in the future 16:32 The two futures of car buying 17:14 SpaceX and Tesla are going to merge 18:01 The rocket car demo was a stunt to justify the deal 19:24 Elon doesn’t control Tesla, and that’s the point 21:09 Why the merger needs a narrative 22:25 The Information launches Polls: 83% say it’s about control 23:09 Sam’s lockup theory that nobody else has said 25:36 Will shareholders approve it, and the SXSI joke 27:29 Brit: Teslas are becoming entertainment vehicles 28:17 Dave on the Cyber Cab experience 30:12 Jess’s enthusiasm falls back to earth, and the Waymo bug 32:33 Netflix: content shakeup and what they should actually make 35:32 Dave’s viral take: content slop vs priority slop 38:05 Sam let his bot write the entire AGM deck 39:28 Dave’s broadsheet newspaper for Offline 40:19 Internships for teenagers, run by bots 41:30 Meta’s new voting stock and the end of capitalism 42:08 The wealth tax debate 44:36 The Elizabeth Holmes movie and the surprise Q&A 49:28 Peptide check-in, and a necessary disclaimer