How to show up in any room with a low heart rate: Silicon Valley’s missing etiquette playbook
Sam Lessin (Slow Ventures, ex-Facebook VP Product) argues etiquette is a trust-building skill that Silicon Valley systematically neglects, and that seed-stage AI companies will lose investors enormous sums.
- Lessin’s contrarian VC bet: seed investors backing companies branded as ‘AI companies’ will lose ‘an impossibly large amount of money’ — even OpenAI was a middling seed return at 25x given capital intensity.
- His distinction: AI as infrastructure in a real business is smart; building a startup whose thesis is ‘we win because AI’ is not — analogous to calling yourself an ‘internet company’ in 2000.
- Core etiquette principle: show up with an abundance mindset and low heart rate — scarcity thinking (this is my one shot) makes founders transactional and off-putting in rooms with VCs or partners.
- Name-recall hack: when you forget someone’s name, introduce your companion first (‘Jessica, meet…’) and let the other person fill in their own name — plausible deniability with social grace.
- Email ordering signals priority: who is in the To line vs. CC is a language — being fifth on a CC means you are not the real audience; reply-all from a BCC is a serious breach.
- Video call etiquette: camera on, no virtual backgrounds, close your closet, make your bed if it’s in frame — small signals that compound into trust or distrust.
- Lessin built Lettermeme, a personal AI tool that converts newsletters into daily cartoon digests — vibe-coded the MVP himself with Cursor, DigitalOcean, and Cloudflare, then handed off to engineers.
2026-01-15 · Watch on YouTube
