More or Less

A year ago VCs were telling Parker Conrad that 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. The Rippling CEO joins Sam and Jess (no Morins this week) to argue that the only moat left in AI is seeing the problem before your customer does, that good gross margins are a sign nobody is actually using your product, and that Rippling isn't a software company at all. Sam 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. Jess brings the mood from New York, where the money people think the $8 trillion CapEx bill doesn't pencil 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.

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
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

We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with our guest:
Parker Conrad, CEO of Rippling: https://x.com/parkerconrad
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Bing Gordon co-founded Electronic Arts, spent 18 years at Kleiner Perkins, sat on Amazon's board for 15 and is credited by John Doerr and Jeff Wilke with the idea for Prime. He also sat 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? Bing's 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 Dave asks what the whole agent era keeps circling: what gets worse if your AI wins for you? Friction is what makes pearls, says Bing, and the next frictions will come from edge conditions nobody tested. 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.

Everybody Wins by Bing Gordon and Chloe Gordon: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/797436/everybody-wins-by-bing-gordon-and-chloe-gordon/

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
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): Boomers Are Gonna Doom
59:36 The Three Things That Make a Good Day
1:01:59 Dave's iPhone Duo Verdict
We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with our guest: Bing Gordon, author of Everybody Wins (with Chloe Gordon), available everywhere including Amazon. Bing narrated the audiobook.
X: https://x.com/bingfish
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit
About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Elon tells investors on an earnings call that SpaceX and Tesla should merge, and Sam 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 far easier to absorb. Dave thinks the rocket powered car demo was timed to justify the deal, Sam thinks two engineers got told to bolt rockets onto a car and it will never ship, and 83% of respondents in the Information's new Polls app say it's mostly about Musk control. Then OpenAI finds a web-wide 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 quietly telling 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.

Try the Polls app out now: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-information-polls/id6814969991

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
01:04 Dave's Back, and the Nasal Rinse Discourse
02:06 OpenAI Finds a Web-Wide PHP Vulnerability
03:12 Sam: All Your Regional Banks Will Be Hacked
04:16 The Zero Days the Labs Are Quietly 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
We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit
About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Jess went full send on Muse and reports that about 70% of the use cases she was excited about have stopped working, because the internet is fighting back: Good Eggs now wants her to check out in the app, her kid's school portal refuses the login, and JP Morgan and Amazon are blocking agents outright. Dave's version is worse. Instinct booked a dinner reservation in LA instead of San Francisco, and he's out. Sam has seen this exact movie, because he and Andrew Kortina ran Fin ten years ago and shut it down once they worked out you become liable for every provider down the chain with no margin to cover your own mistakes. His call now is the death of the web, plus APIs that negotiate access back and forth like Hollywood agents. Meanwhile Anthropic is meeting investors behind closed doors while they tape, the market is getting hammered, and Brit's three years of hip pain vanished in six days on peptides, which Sam insists is placebo.

Interested in peptides? More or Less listeners 50% off their first month at NoHo Labs. Use code: MOREORLESSVIP on https://noholabs.com/

Timestamps:
01:09 Jess Is Back, Dave's Birthday, and the October Cold
03:04 Nasal Rinses and Fall Immunity
04:02 Brit's Peptide Results: Three Years of Pain Gone in Six Days
06:43 Anthropic Is Meeting Investors While We Tape
07:34 The Market Is Getting Hammered: VIX, Private Credit, Apollo
08:16 Infrastructure IPOs Stall and Nvidia Becomes the Last Investor
10:01 Slowing Revenue, CFOs Cracking Down, Tokens Moving to Open Models
10:36 Sam: Would You Rather Be Rich or Right?
11:11 The Models Are a Commodity and There Is No Lock-In
12:15 Brit Won't Give Muse Her Whole Computer
13:41 Why Sam Trusts Meta More Than OpenAI or Anthropic
15:16 Jess: 70% of My Muse Use Cases Don't Work Anymore
16:54 Dave: Instinct Booked the Restaurant in the Wrong City
18:18 Sam on Fin, the Assistant Company He Ran Ten Years Ago
20:30 Why the Economics of Mistakes Break Agent Services
22:31 Sam: What's Inevitable Is the Death of the Web
23:09 APIs as Constant Negotiation, and Agents With Reputations
24:51 Agent Credit Scores: FICO for Bots
25:56 Amazon's Rufus Still Works, and Other Branding Crimes
27:13 The Seesaw: Built Up and Torn Down Intraday
28:41 Gen Z Media, Muse Memes, and Punk Rock by Another Name
32:53 Is the Punk Rock Thing Just Marketing?
34:37 Every Company Now Needs a Gen Z Meme Lord
36:14 The Truth Subculture and Who Actually Pays for It
37:32 Jess Is Interviewing Barry Weiss at WTF
40:20 Bumble Goes Private at $1.3B
43:07 Dave on Seven Years of Hinge and Why Dating Is So Hard
46:41 Apple's Home Hub and Keeping Screens Away From Kids
49:04 Everyone Is Going to See the Elizabeth Holmes Movie
We're also on:
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179
Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.

Meta and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest enterprise customers, have roughly halved their Claude usage, and both are running their own models instead. Dave's diagnosis is the one nobody else is making: Claude was over-tuned for parasocial relationships, people got into something unhealthy with it, and organizations are now quietly backing away. Sam is blunter about the business. He runs Claude as infrastructure, but switching off would be a one line change he'd never think about twice. Then it gets strange: a dinner where only the lab researchers raised their hands when asked if one company will be left standing, a lab that believes the machine god will go back in time and simulate hell for anyone who didn't build it, and Sam's case that Silicon Valley caught zero-and-infinity thinking from crypto and broke its own spreadsheets. Plus Hilton's website trapping Sam's agent in a doom loop, and Dave and Sam inventing the Agent Treaty Framework on air. Jess is at an offsite, so it's three VCs and no journalist.

In this episode:
- Why two of Anthropic's largest customers cut their Claude usage in half, weeks before the IPO
- Dave on parasocial tuning as the thing that actually burned Claude, and how you can spot Claude slop on Twitter
- Zero, infinity, and what crypto taught the Valley about putting infinity in a spreadsheet
- The dinner question about one company being left standing, and who raised their hand
- The personal agent protocol from Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe and Sierra, and why Dave says it's about commerce, not protection
- Hilton, Cloudflare and Amazon blocking agents, and whether holding the line counts as collusion
- Dave on building agents versus building agency, and whose potential we're underwriting
- The Agent Treaty Framework: why pairwise deals replace standards when negotiation is free
- Megalith buying unexercised pro rata from seed funds, and Sam's war story about the fund that quashed his

Chapters:
00:00 Trailer
00:51 Brit Moderates: Three VCs and No Journalist
03:43 Peptide Protocols, the Wolverine Stack, and a Dexa Scan
07:42 Sam on the Nathan Fielder Movie
09:30 Meta and Microsoft Halve Their Claude Usage
10:13 Dave: Claude Was Over-Tuned for Parasocial Relationships
11:19 Sam: Switching Off Claude Is a One Line Change
13:46 Zero, Infinity, and What Crypto Taught the Valley
17:53 The Dinner Where Only the Lab People Raised Their Hands
19:41 The Lab That Believes in the Machine God
20:01 Lab Leaks, Infinite Liability, and What a Real Framework Looks Like
21:56 The Personal Agent Protocol: Meta, Walmart, Shopify, Stripe
23:01 Sam: Nobody Should Care About MCP
24:03 Hilton Traps Sam's Agent in a Doom Loop
26:30 If You Ran Hilton, Would You Let the Bots In?
27:15 Facebook Connect, Open Graph, and the Missing Value Trade
29:41 Dave: Building Agents vs Building Agency
33:53 The Social Media Era Already Ran This Experiment
37:02 The Agent Treaty Framework Is Born
38:16 Why Standards Are Over and Treaties Are Next
41:28 Megalith and the Market for Unexercised Pro Rata
42:32 Sam's Pro Rata War Story
45:53 64% of LPs Now Want Co-Invest Rights
48:03 What Hedge Fund Letters Say That VCs Don't
49:20 Main Street Says It Hates AI, Then Uses It
53:27 Plug of the Week: The Mill

We're also on
X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspod
Instagram: https://instagram.com/moreorless
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2CJdt6HhJ8ioNkbqqVKckC
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/more-or-less-from-the-morins-and-the-lessins/id1692234179

Connect with us here:
1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin
2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin
3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin
4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

About More or Less: For 15 years, the Morins and the Lessins have debated the future of Silicon Valley as the closest of friends. Every Friday, they break down technology, capital, and media. From The Information, Offline Ventures, and Slow Ventures.