Sam Lessin
Founding partner at Slow Ventures, a venture firm investing across early- and growth-stage companies, and a columnist at The Information.
“The problem with even OpenAI and Anthropic is if you sue them, it's not clear you'll ever get any money out from them… Whereas Meta is a highly legible, profitable, suable company with everything to lose and therefore can be trusted a lot more. Same with Google.”
More or Less · Startups & Venture · October 2026
The hosts are comparing how much personal data they hand to AI agents. Lessin says that, ironically, he trusts Meta's Muse the most, and credits an old lesson from his father: a real public company can be sued and has a lot to lose.
Transcript
but I try to go full send. The internet won't let me. But yes,
…lot of people are having this conversation right now. I'm in a lot of WhatsApp groups and everyone's like, how much information are you guys giving all your agents? And some people, a lot of people are going like full send mode. At the same time, it's very binary. A lot of people are like, no way.
Muse is the one I'm most willing to give complete information, like information to, ironically. Like I actually trust Muse the most, but I don't give any of them local access. Why? It's an old Bob lesson, my dad line, which is when I was a kid, I was scared at Disney World on a roller coaster and he said, don't worry, Sam Lessin a public company, right? And the basic point is like, it's a real company. They can be sued. It's meaningful to them. They care about the security angles. Right. So I think like the problem with even Open AI and Anthropic is if you sue them, it's not clear you'll ever get any money out from them. Again, this goes back to the whole internalizing the profits or the value and externalizing the risks, right? They might cause a national crisis, but you're never going to sue them, right? Whereas Meta is like a highly legible, profitable, suable company with everything to lose and therefore can be trusted a lot more. Same with Google. I would trust Google the same way.
I know. I would trust Google first. And I'm waiting for Google to roll theirs out. I think the Gemini stuff was a step in the right direction, but they haven't fully connected the dots yet.
It's the trust. And then it's just, it's also the whole on the other side. It's like, who can just do the BD deals to keep stuff open? Because that's the other thing we're seeing is there's nothing surprising about anything going on. Turns out that once you see a ton of agentic traffic, which is…
I just know to everyone at Meta who's going to be mad for me saying this. I'm sorry. I speak the truth. But, and this isn't a fault of theirs, but like a solid 70% of my Muse use cases that I was so excited about do not work. I cannot complete things. Like the internet is just standing in my way…
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