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More or Less · Startups & Venture · October 2026
The panel was discussing reports that Meta and Microsoft had roughly halved their use of Claude in favour of their own models. Lessin, who uses Claude as infrastructure, argued that model makers have a hard time building durable businesses when switching costs are close to zero.
it's interesting. I use a lot of Claude, but I don't actually talk to Claude that way.
You just use it as inference. Yeah,
it's just, it's just infrastructure for me. And it's just excellent at what it does. I mean, I published my diagram of like how all of my infrastructure works. And like, I'm loving it. As I said on the last pod, like my thing is, though, I think that the warning sign in mind is what we've been saying all along, which is this stuff is great. Multiplying big matrices is amazing. You can do great stuff with it. But it's very, very hard to build important businesses for the long term when if it went away tomorrow, there's a perfect replacement and always will be. It's fine. And so like I'm not switching off of Claude. I think Claude's completely fine and does what I need, but it's a one-line change if I want to. And like, it doesn't matter. Silicon Valley, if you'd be silly about it for a second, I just think Silicon Valley is very bad at business. I think Silicon Valley is very good at technology. And the irony is technology has been so dominant in certain areas that like being good at technology has swamped all sense of business and strategy for a long time. So it's like you don't need to be good at business. You just do technology, but this is a little different.
Well, Sam, I think that you've rightly pointed out that Silicon Valley is great at one kind of business, which is create enormous capital bubble to make number go up until the like the one emerges that can outstrip all of the business losses and become infinity. That's like the kind of easy way to…
Although it's a recent phenomenon, right? Because like even as far as 10, 15 years ago, the businesses that Silicon Valley generated were like unbelievably capitalist. You know what I mean? Like it wasn't about like moving heavy dollars. Like that's kind of a recent Bitcoin style. There's a series…
And those were even weirder, by the way, because they had no dilution involved in some cases. Well,