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 19 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
Ariba acts as a toll gate, extracting 80% of revenue from suppliers
“One of our competitors, you know, Ariba, they've for a long time gone out to these huge companies and said, hey, we will help you Digitize your supply chain, and you just got to buy our platform, and then they go and they invite all of the suppliers in the sup…”
Lanng: Tradeshift fired 50% of VPs with no productivity loss
“At one point we fired 50% of the VPs in TradeShift. And there was no drop of productivity.”
Lanng refused to sign Tradeshift round without protecting employee stock options
“In the latest financing round for trade shift, I refused to sign the papers until the employee stock option pool got moved from common to prep two, because I did not want All of our employees to be underwater in any potential transaction in the future.”
Lanng: Higher prices accelerated Tradeshift's enterprise sales cycle
“We found out in trade shift very early on that there was an inverse relationship between price and speed of sales cycle. The more we charged, the faster we closed.”
Lanng: TradeShift Had a Skype Group Celebrating Work at 2 AM
“We used to have a Skype group, and Skype was a thing of a few people in the company that was called, Late night motherfucking XYZ. And that was because at two AM we were all sitting, solving some problem, getting something done, getting somewhere, and we were …”
Lanng almost died of anemia due to extreme Tradeshift workload
“I almost died of anemia, actually, because I just didn't have time to go to the doctor.”
Free renewable energy is crucial to cushion technological job displacement
“The thing you really need to invest in is actually free renewable energy, because if you have free renewable energy, we have less of a social impact as jobs go, because we can actually produce food, we can produce almost anything we want, and it gets a little …”
Down-cycle fundraising offers less competition and higher investor visibility
“If you're doing it in a down cycle, You actually, you know, you, you're lucky to start with less competition. You need to fight harder, of course, for the money, but you can also stand out more. You know, the investors are not seeing a hundred pitches a day fo…”
Pitching on stage at VC conferences is an ineffective fundraising strategy
“I never really liked this idea of going, like, you know, to some conference and standing on a stage and pitching myself in front of 50 VCs. I don't think that's a very good way to get attention. I think there's a lot of connectors in the ecosystem. Getting to …”
Lanng: Prioritizing personal happiness would have ruined Tradeshift
“I mean, I made some decisions where I could have gone a different path, I could have gone a very different path, and probably You know, had a very different outcome and been happier, but it would not, I mean, it would have been a disaster for the company and f…”
Lanng: Being critical improves ideas, while cynicism gives up prematurely
“Critical is to try to improve an idea and to pressure test it to make it as good as possible, and cynical just means you've given up before you even try”
Lanng: Tradeshift investors supported him after public post about struggles
“A bunch of our investors also wrote me after my post. I mean some were happy with the results of the round, which they just did, some were unhappy, but they still wrote me”
Lanng fired a high school friend after working together for 10 years
“I fired a person that I've known since high school. I worked with for 10 years who moved to California as part of the journey.”
Christian Lanng: Pandemic burnout made me hate seeing Tradeshift's logo
“Suddenly I was just sitting, you know, for 14:16 hours in front of a screen every day, no breaks. I remember having to sort of, like, schedule bio breaks just to be able to run to the restroom, and the rest was just one continuous stream, and I remember, this …”
Network-connected software is the next major evolution in B2B enterprise
“The thing we saw very early on was in the consumer world, we were all moving to networks. This idea that cloud was going to be about the same applications as we had on our desktop, but delivered through the browser was breaking down and we saw a whole new gene…”
Tradeshift serves 1M businesses, dwarfing competitor Ariba's footprint
“They have almost a million discrete companies in a 140 countries worldwide from tiny companies in China up to a huge chunk of the fortune 100 addicted to their stuff. And they dwarf the footprint of Ariba and any other, you know, would be competitor.”
Lanng: Startup revenue multiples dropped from 40-60x down to 7x
“We moved from a world where there was 40, 60 X revenue multiples to a world where there's seven X, right?”
Tradeshift pitched investors over 1,000 times to raise its capital
“I mean, I probably talked to a thousand, I probably pitched a thousand plus times, and that's probably even an underestimate to raise the capital we raised.”
Lund: Enterprise fintech growth depends on closing massive initial clients
“The ability to close huge clients, because the whole equation wouldn't work unless you had some really, really large companies who would, you know, buy into this vision, even though it was a very unstable young company. And that, I think, was the founder's, yo…”