The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: DigitalOcean and Zapier Built Their Growth Entirely on SEO
“DigitalOcean was built entirely on SEO farm. So was Zapier and others.”
Uretsky: Most great companies start off as seemingly bad ideas
“Most great companies start off with bad ideas. Otherwise, everybody would be doing it, and there wouldn't be any space for you.”
Uretsky: Crowded markets represent massive opportunity if existing products fail users
“A crowded market space means lots of customers, so I think there's always an opportunity to look at those spaces, especially if you firmly believe that The product that they'built is not one that you personally want to use.”
Uretsky: VC firm prestige is table stakes; individual partner alignment matters most
“First of all, I mean, those are both top tier VC firms. They have tremendous portfolio companies and a great reputation. So all of that was kind of table stakes. So it really was about the personal relationship with that individual, how well they understood th…”
Stebbings: DigitalOcean is the second largest cloud platform with 700k developers
“Moisey is the co-founder and chief product officer at DigitalOcean, the second largest and fastest-growing cloud computing platform, with more than 700,000 developers, having deployed more than twenty million cloud servers.”
Uretsky: Early cloud infrastructure providers were clunky and unpleasant to use
“Every single cloud provider was, you know, a bit clunky. It wasn't really elegant. It wasn't something that you enjoyed using”
Uretsky: Co-founding with friends or family amplifies pre-existing relationship dynamics
“Any relationship that you have prior to founding a company, whether it's brother or husband and wife, best friends, whatever that relationship looks like before the company, it will look like that during the company, except it's like pouring fuel on the fire. …”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean's Series A technical due diligence focused on culture over code
“We remember, you know, having one of our Series A, You know, potential investors come by and had like our technical due diligence and this person had this huge technical background and we're sitting there shitting our pants thinking, oh my God, he's going to l…”
Uretsky: DigitalOcean grew revenue 66% in three weeks around its seed round
“We finally sent an update after we hit product market fit, said, hey, we hit 500 K in annual revenue, and then basically, at that At that point, it took him three weeks to get back to me, which was unusual. And by the time we came into the office, we said, yea…”
Uretsky: 'The Innovator's Dilemma' is essential reading for startups to defeat incumbents
“I mean, because that's the one that as a startup you have to read because that's going to give you the secret to big, to beat out those big incumbent companies. Everything else is Kind of structures into that. That's the one that you need to really understand …”
Uretsky: A founder's hardest challenge is adapting their evolving company role
“I think the biggest unexpected challenge is one that continues is how your personal relationship to the company and your role continues to evolve and change and how it's really difficult to guess what it's going to look like in the future. And then when you fi…”