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 37,600 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 974 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
Foody: Most businesses will spend more on AI tokens than headcount
“And I think most businesses are going to look like that.”
Foody: Europe should concede foundation AI model race to US tech giants
“I would accept that, yeah. I think that maybe it's worth having some post training capabilities because there is going to be value to distillation and some of the work that happens after foundation models are built, and there's definitely going to be some valu…”
Meta Offered an AI Candidate $20 Million Per Year in Cash
“There was someone I was hiring the other day, and he had an offer for twenty million dollars in cash per year from TBD, and like that's the kind of stuff we run into on a regular basis.”
Laqua: Demanding seven-day workweeks filters for the right hires
“And if you want to win, then actually it's something that I think attracts the right type of person and absolutely repels the wrong type of person.”
Laqua: Google represents the worst of corporate employee pampering culture
“You know, I think I really dislike the culture of like pampering everyone or like taking care of them as if you're their parents. I think Google is like the worst of that.”
Laqua: Startups must hire more non-engineers to compensate for lower intensity
“So naturally there, there's roles, I think that, that creep in, you know, you get the, like a lawyer and accountant are not going to work in the same way that you know, a software engineer might. And that's just a fact of life. So, okay. So if they don't want …”
Laqua receives death threats over Corgi's intense work culture
“The death threats and the DMs you know, people, people think I'm nuts.”
Nico Laqua: Early-stage VCs are disrespectful in pitch meetings
“I've had people like, especially the first round, like the early stage investors are disrespectful.”
Laqua: Crypto VCs encouraged founders to accept criminal liability
“I think on the extreme you have, like, if you go back in time a couple of years, a lot of the crypto investors would encourage company founders to take on quite a lot of personal liability, including criminal liability in many cases. And, you know, basically t…”
Lemkin: High-Flyer AI Valuations Are 'SolarCity on Steroids'
“It's solar city on steroids, and we're all here for it because we love AI, but it makes no sense.”
Lemkin: Blaming Tech Layoffs on COVID Overhiring Is Mathematically False
“I'm saying there is already more natural attrition since Twenty-twenty than these numbers. So blaming it directly on overhiring is clickbait. It's clickbait because it's not mathematically true.”
O'Driscoll: xAI Rented Colossus Cluster to Anthropic for $1.25B Monthly
“They've rented that to Entropic for 1.25 billion a month, right, with a, I think, a ninety-day cancellation clause on either side.”
Lemkin: CoreWeave and Nebius Have No Special Technology
“I mean, Corweave has nothing. What do Nebius and Corweave have? Nothing, no special technology, right?”
Lemkin: In AI Venture, Seed Investing Is for Suckers
“And I just think this going back to seed is for suckers. Like you want to invest the hour it blows up. The minute it blows up, you want to get the DM and just wire the money in AI. That's the play.”
Feldman claims Nvidia funds neoclouds to create competitors for traditional hyperscalers
“I think it has been NVIDIA's strategy to try and create competitors for the traditional hyperscalers. They have funded and backstopped and over allocated to the neoclouds. They have created a dependence, which is probably not healthy.”
Feldman says Elon Musk sold outdated H100 hardware in suboptimal deals
“They got H 100. They didn't get the B 200. They didn't get the most current. They are a generation and a half, maybe two generations behind. So the, this was not a great deal. It was a good deal for Elon. He had them sitting around, but they were forced to tak…”
Feldman asserts 90% to 95% of recent tech layoffs are AI-washed
“I think to date, most of the layoffs were AI washed. They were, because we did boneheaded hiring, During COVID. It is actually because a great deal of productivity gains has been, have occurred over the years that we're just now harvesting. The ability to gath…”
Feldman asserts China will inevitably use advanced US chips for military applications
“If we sell leading edge technology to China, will their military use it? Everybody says yes. There is no debate on that point. Their military will use it. You ask a second question, which is, if you sell our leading edge technology, will they, will their gover…”
Feldman proposes granting TSMC and Samsung 20-year exemptions from local US ordinances
“I would allow TSMC and Samsung both to a 20 year period free from all local and legal, local ordinances, all of them, to build fabs in their desired location in the US.”
Feldman argues Europe's regulate-and-tax culture stifles tech entrepreneurship
“There has emerged in Europe a sort of be afraid of it, then regulate it, tax it, or sort of mentality that works against entrepreneurship.”
Peets: Sales reps from ServiceNow cannot generate pipeline
“Why would you want to hire people from ServiceNow? They don't know how to do any pipeline generation.”
Degnan: Forward deployed engineers are glorified professional services staff
“The forward deployed engineer is a glorified professional services person. If you're a really good engineer, you do not want to be a forward deployed engineer. You want to work on the core product.”
Peets: Chief Revenue Officers are receiving $100M compensation packages
“I know CRO's getting a hundred million dollar packages.”
Peets: Tech companies deploy forward engineers to cover for weak core products
“I mean, I know a lot of people that think forward deployed engineers simply make up for a shitty product. There's, and there's something to that, right? I mean, like, look, you're basically, and I won't mention companies here, but there's big companies out the…”
Degnan: Salespeople at mega-funded AI startups are passive passengers lacking skill development
“These companies all, pretty much everyone's a passenger, because there is no accountability. You're not learning anything from a sales, you know, perspective. Eventually that will come to bite you in the, in your butt, in your career.”
Chad Peets: Doubling ARR from $50M to $100M isn't enough today
“Going from 50 to a 105 years ago, everybody would be super excited. Today you go from 50 to a hundred a year, and you might go out of business.”
Degnan: 99% of VCs fail at board guidance lacking operator experience
“99% of them are not. They're, I mean. Because they've never been operators. So like, they're just regurgitating, you know, something they heard in another board meeting that they think might be.”
Chris Degnan claims startup CROs earn more than public company CROs
“It's better to be a CRO of a startup than it is a CRO of a publicly traded company. You'll get paid more.”
Peets: Sales reps will not learn great sales skills at Anthropic
“If you're talking about learning how to be a great salesperson, I don't think you're going to get that, Ananthropic.”
Peets: Anthropic offered sales reps $1.2M compensation packages
“Like if Anthropic, for example, when they were at their three 80 valuation, they were offering reps, call it a 1,000,002.”
Peets: Current tech sales compensation models are fundamentally unsustainable
“What salespeople are currently being paid today is not sustainable. You cannot pay salespeople this amount of money and have a company that's cashflow positive and so on and so forth. Right now, nobody cares because there's so much funding out there and they'r…”
Peets: Databricks is not worth 2.5x Snowflake's $55B market cap
“Snowflake today is worth what? Fifty five billion. So is somebody going to make the argument to me that Databricks is worth two and a half times snowflake? You are, nobody's making that argument to me.”
Peets: Healthy Sales Orgs Must Attrit Bottom 10% Annually
“Every, every healthy sales organization should be attrating the bottom 10% every year. You should be getting rid of 10% of your sales force every year.”
Degnan: Lacework Had World-Class Sales Team But Crap Product
“I mean, like the Lacework sales team was a world-class sales team, just a crap product.”
O'Driscoll: Politically Savvy Regulators Will Outmaneuver AI Leaders
“We have people who are brilliant scientists who politically are utter morons, and the people who are utter morons at AI but brilliant at politics are gonna have us for lunch.”
Lemkin: Tech Leaders Must Hire Thousands to Avoid Social Unrest
“We're gonna have to reflate and hire thousands and thousands of people per tech leader to avoid social unrest.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic Management Stating November Target for IPO
“They're saying they're going public in November”
O'Driscoll: SaaS will never regain public market focus from AI
“The SaaS businesses are amazing, but the AI businesses are an order of magnitude of maybe two order of magnitudes larger and are at You know, earlier in their growth life cycle. So you're never going to get the attention back on you again.”
Lemkin: Figma lost $500M+ failing to launch design-to-code natively
“What Figma missed is I create this design. It's beautiful. I loop in the product team to approve it. And then I click a button, which it says push into full production prototype. And it just works. It works like, and you can, and the irony is Replit and Lovabl…”
Stebbings: Altman Offered $2M in OpenAI Tokens to Every YC Startup
“Sam Altman just offered two million dollars In open AI tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity.”
O'Driscoll: Politicians will punish Sam Altman and AI industry within 3 years
“And the people who are utter morons at AI but brilliant at politics are going to have us for lunch. That's the movie in the next three years. They're going to have Sam for lunch because he's lied to them as far as they're concerned, and they're going to have t…”
Lemkin: Current tech layoffs will be worse than any in our lifetimes
“I actually think It's worse than that Rory, because I think these are going to be by far the layoffs that Harry just rattled off and the ones for this year, I believe are going to be far worse than any layoffs in our lifetimes. And I'll tell you why. And I kno…”
Browder: Growing tech wealth disparity could trigger a revolution in our lifetime
“I think, actually, there could be a revolution in our lifetime.”
Browder: VCs err by scouting high school math Olympiads over grit
“And I think this is actually a mistake a lot of VCs are making. They are focusing too much on, on these credentials. So there's a race right now to back the math Olympiads. VCs are like going to spelling bees and math competitions in high school.”
Browder: AI infrastructure pitches like agent observability are jargon-filled BS
“Everyone is pitching this AI infrastructure nonsense. Like we're building agent observability, like the jargon levels. I'm British. I think that's all BS. Like they just add on the jargon.”
Browder: Accept Sequoia or Founders Fund Over Double Valuation Term Sheets
“There's like the kingmaker firms that you should accept at any price. One example would be Founders Fund or Sequoia or people like that. And so if you get an offer from them at X and the offer from someone else is at two X, you should take their offer because …”