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 24 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
Sivulka: ChatGPT is a poor product that acts like a calculator
“I don't even think ChatGPT is a really good product. It's like a calculator. It's got the technology in there encapsulated in a very simple form. But it's not a product that, like in Excel, that lets you just build whatever you'd like with it.”
Nejatian: Excel has done more damage than any other software
“I'm pretty sure Excel has done more damage to the world than any other software.”
Wand: Startup boards overweight top VCs' opinions based on brand, not merit
“Usually, if there is a partner from a top fund, there is a tendency to give overweight to his idea and decision point, where it's not substantiated by the merit of his idea, but just rather from the fact that he came from Sequoia, he came from Benchmark, he ca…”
O'Driscoll: AI vendors won't capture labor value due to competition
“If there's three people competing for the same Making the same kind of software. Then the law firm gets the value. Like we don't get paid. Excel doesn't charge 60 grand a year because it replaced an analyst. It charged 60 bucks because that's what you get for …”
Lemkin: Multi-stage seed funds create negative signaling if they skip Series A
“Of course, if Sequoia or Excel or Andreessen or Lightspeed has two years of data and they don't preempt the A, of course it's a problem. Of course it's a bad signal. So that was a problem, and that exists today.”
Kim: Top VCs maximize ownership and squeeze LPs out of Series A
“If there is, at the earliest stages, a company that is High quality with high quality investors coming in. LPs are probably the last in line in terms of getting access to that. So imagine a seed funded company by one of our fund managers, a high quality firm l…”
Reyes: AI startups targeting intermediate Excel and Jira tasks will not survive
“A lot of knowledge work that's related to intermediate tasks, like people operating in Excel and JIRA. That's just not gonna be differentiated. The workflows are very common. And I think that we may not use a lot of tools like that in five to 10 years, so this…”
Kaz Nejatian: Making key business decisions in spreadsheets is a bad approach
“So everyone's decisions, regardless of how big you are as a company, ends up being made in an Excel sheet. And like, we're incredibly opinionated about this. We think this is a bad way to run a company.”
Nejatian: Shopify built continuous internal planning software to replace Excel
“At Shopify, we've built software that imagines a company and runs continuously. Based on our prioritization stack, based on what we're working on, based on the APIs we have built ourselves into our data systems. So we don't have to have people building these l…”
Palan: Horizontal tools like Notion fail to deliver for scaling startups
“I still believe that there needs to be specialized solutions for highly specialized use cases. And just like with Excel, like Microsoft Access, I don't know whether you remember, remember, but you would build your CRM in a spreadsheet or in Microsoft Access, r…”
CRV's early Airtable investment thesis was the unbundling of Microsoft Excel
“The investment thesis that we got excited about was this concept of the unbundling of Excel, and we felt like Airtable could become the all-in-one collaboration platform that could kind of redefine how consumers think about productivity software.”
Small VC funds succeed by avoiding direct competition with Tier-1 firms
“The nice thing I like about some of these small funds is that they don't compete in their sector, in their geography, in their states. They don't compete with Sequoia and Excel, benchmark, and increase. So they are dominant. They will never lose to them becaus…”
Stebbings: Accel made $2.5 billion and Paige Craig 1,000x on Scale
“Excel made 2.5 billion dollars. Well done, Daniel Levine. Amazing seed bet early. Paige Craig led a pre-seed, a thousand extra turn.”
Sivulka: Excel reached 90% finance market penetration in 18-24 months
“If you look at finance and how fast, ah, Excel went to 90% market penetration in finance. 1985 to 1986. Literally 18 months to 24 months, Excel took over all of finance. Everyone switched from using a calculator, the HP 12 C, to using Excel.”
Stebbings: Hopin Raised $174M+ in 13 Months
“In just 13 months, Johnny's raised over a hundred and seventy four million dollars for Hopin, from the likes of Excel, IVP, Slack, North Zone, Co-Two, Salesforce, and of course, TwentyVC fund disclaimer.”
Merci Victoria Grace prefers Excel over Google Sheets for deal evaluation
“Depending on the stage, obviously we'll use Excel. Less likely to use something like Google Sheets just because Excel is so powerful.”
White-Sullivan: Roam Research's Product Role Model Is Microsoft Excel
“Our role model for this is Excel.”
Eggers: Lightspeed's Series A in Riverbed returned hundreds of millions
“The first big early stage outcome we had was Riverbed, where we were in the Series A with our friends at Excel, and that returned, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to our investors.”
Lemkin invested in Algolia at $5K MRR before Accel's $18M round
“I did, I invested in a search as a service company called Algolia about a year ago that Excel just put eighteen million into, and I did it, and I did a session with the CEO at Heavybit a couple weeks ago, and I invested I think at like five KMR, so pretty earl…”
Swisher: Distilling complex companies simply in Excel is an essential skill
“Being able to express a company in a few, a complex company in a few lines in Excel and tell stories with data is like an incredible skill.”
Dasilva: Accel provided Lightspeed a term sheet weeks after meeting at NRF
“Well, it took, actually, the diligence took a few months, but our two, within a few weeks, we had a term sheet.”
UiPath has raised over $977M in venture funding
“To date, UiPath has raised over nine hundred and seventy seven million dollars in funding from some of the very best in the world, including Sequoia, Excel, Meritech, IVP, Capital G, Kleiner, CoTo, and more.”
GM Pension Fund has invested in every Accel fund since Accel I
“GM had been an investor in venture funds since the late seventies. They're invested in Excel, for example, all the way on from Excel number one all the way on through.”
Ilkka Paananen raised over $143M for Supercell prior to Tencent acquisition
“Prior to Tencent acquiring a majority stake in the company at a reported 10.2 billion dollar acquisition price, Ilka raised over one hundred and forty three million dollars for the company from Excel, Index, Atomico, IVP, LVP, Initial and Lifeline to name a fe…”