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 20 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
Katrina Lake: Disproportionate Capital Gives Male Founders More Chances to Succeed
“Raising hundreds of millions of dollars, like it's such a huge advantage. And like, I think it was really hard to watch a lot of, you know, like mostly male founders, many who are bombastic and, you know, have these big visions. And I felt like my vision was b…”
Duboe: Direct response attribution models offer false precision compared to holdout testing
“Many growth marketers aim for this, like almost a false sense of precision to give credit to a conversion on any one channel or any fractional set of channels. Oftentimes that's just false precision. And so even though we were highly analytical at stitch fix w…”
90% of the top 500 tech companies raised $85M+ in capital
“90% of the entire cohort raised more than 85 to a hundred million dollars. I mean, there are always exceptions like Stitch Fix, Zoopla in UK, and Tableau in Seattle, but really the vast majority of them have raised a lot of capital, especially in more recent t…”
Duboe: Stitch Fix boosted ad performance by replacing TV-quality ads with iPhone videos
“Some of the biggest, most impactful changes we made at Stitch Fix were, Lowering the bar to actually like creative content we just put out there. So rather than having very high produced kind of video ass TV kind of quality video assets, let people shoot stuff…”
Duboe: Pre-IPO Stitch Fix capped single-channel marketing concentration at 50 percent
“We had a constraint that I saw with my team was we would not get more than 50% concentrated in any one channel, even if it were short-term optimal to do so.”
Duboe: Stitch Fix maintained strict pricing discipline by never offering product discounts
“We never discounted any product there, which is rare for you come actually. And it was a core part of the company's discipline.”
Duboe: Stitch Fix paused national TV ads for eight weeks to test incrementality
“We ran an eight week holdout test where we actually paused national TV advertising and we would always buy nationally because it was a lot cheaper from a CPM standpoint to do so. We paused national for eight weeks. We picked five regions and we went and go bou…”
Duboe: Stitch Fix grew organically and profitably after early VC rejections
“They had grown on the heels of organic and strong retention for the first few years and famously had a hard time raising venture money. So decided to just say, Hey, we're going to operate on the constraints of profitability.”
Stitch Fix Turns Inventory Six Times Yearly Versus Retail Average of Four
“Even today, we turn our inventory over six times a year, where, you know, a lot of traditional retail turns at something more like four.”
Katrina Lake: Stitch Fix Has Sold $6B in Clothing Sight Unseen
“Stitch Fix to date, we have sold six billion dollars of clothes sight unseen.”
Katrina Lake: Stitch Fix Reached $1 Billion in Revenue in Five Years
“We went, you know, from zero to a billion in five years or something”
David Wu passed on investing in Stitch Fix, Instacart, and Dollar Shave Club
“But from an investor perspective, I would probably say that, you know, the biggest mistakes have to be, you know, my personal portfolio to date. Or anti-portfolio. And three that come to mind are all for different reasons where companies that I passed on that …”
Duboe: Quantifiable success criteria must be set upfront to avoid revisionist history
“Anyone could submit an experiment idea, even if you're not on the growth team, but we built this very simple kind of one pager framework that included an objective hypothesis you're testing design or resources required to execute the experiment timeline. So ho…”
Stitch Fix Requires All New Full-Time Employees to Learn Styling
“Styling fixes is something that we teach every single full-time employee that starts. And so part of their onboarding, part of their training is actually learning to style fixes, even if you're going to be a software engineer, or even if you're going to be, yo…”
Stitch Fix Reached Cash Flow Positivity in 3 Years on $42M Raised
“Prior to their IPO in 2017, Katrina raised just forty two million dollars in venture funding, from some of the very best in venture, including Bill Gurley at Benchmark and Steve Anderson at Baseline, and in just six years, Katrina took the company from foundin…”
Katrina Lake: Bill Gurley Foresaw Stitch Fix's Future Years in Advance
“Bill's been an incredible, incredible board member. I mean, he's added so much value to our board. There's so many instances where I look back and I'm like, Bill saw the future, you know, years before I saw it.”
Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake Maintains Her Own Active Styling Clients
“I have Clients of my own. And I literally, I mean, I could fire up a fix right now and style it while talking to you.”
Katrina Lake: Stitch Fix Was Built With Only Two Angel Investors
“I really only had two angels, if I'm honest, and so the first to Kinderson Cassidy, I mean, she gets credit for, frankly, like, being the catalyst for everything. I mean, she was the first person who committed money to Stitch Fix, and she actually was a critic…”
Kaden: Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake is exceptional at team building
“An entrepreneur who's fantastic at that, even though she's not in our portfolio is Katrina Lake at Stitch Fix. I've learned a lot from watching her. She just has hired an incredible team to execute there.”
Katrina Lake Would Have Joined Stitch Fix Rather Than Founding It
“Candidly, I would have been perfectly happy working at Stitch Fix, but when I spent a lot of time in the landscape and understanding what are companies doing, and, like, who is at the forefront of what's going to be the future of shopping, I really didn't see …”