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 95 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Crashlytics Raised $6M and Spent Only $3M Before Twitter Acquisition
“So at Crashlytics, we took an incredibly cash-constrained approach, because we were conscious, honestly, of the challenges of the developer tool space. And so for that company, we only ever raised six million in funding. We only ever spent three million of it.…”
Digits Holds Over 10 Years of Runway After Raising $33M
“And so I think the key differentiator here is yes, we've raised thirty three million. We aren't spending it. The big mistake people make is they scale their burn sort of in proportion to their raise. And we haven't. We've kept our team super small and lean. We…”
Seibert: Radical transparency during M&A talks paralyzed InCrayo for two months
“So for the two, two and a half months that we were going through these acquisition discussions, we built basically nothing.”
Seibert: Founders must dampen startup volatility to keep teams productive
“And I think in retrospect, it's your job as the founder to really dampen this roller coaster for your team so that they can remain productive and give your team a really set direction that they feel comfortable and confident executing on.”
Seibert: Acquisitions are about mission acceleration, not cashing out
“My belief on acquisitions and IPOs for that matter, exits of any kind is that they are not about exiting. The entire point is to become more successful at your mission.”
Jeff Seibert: Acqui-hires are bad from a startup perspective
“Not a fan. In they're pretty good from the larger company's perspective, because you get a team for a relatively low price that you know works well together. And that you can't undervalue. From the startup side, I'm not a fan because I'm, I deeply believe in s…”
Seibert: Designing software features for the average user is a mistake
“So the product managers who were super data-driven started designing and building features for the average user, because that's what the data told them. And they actually believed that there was something such as an average Twitter user. It's such a huge mista…”
Seibert: Startup CEOs face severe feedback isolation from internal employees
“I think there's a ton of challenges, and it's even worse for CEOs, because who in your company is going to give you really crisp, blunt feedback on what you did right and wrong?”
Seibert: Investors are too removed to critique CEO meeting behavior
“And your investors aren't involved enough in the day to day to really know. So they can give strategy advice, but they don't know how you're behaving in meetings.”
Seibert: Crashlytics reaches 5 to 6 billion active monthly devices
“Today Crashlytics is on five or six billion MAU, roughly every active smartphone on earth.”
Fenton: Accounting startups win just by making the product somewhat enjoyable
“When Uber was going against the taxi industry, the NPS scores on taxis was so bad, right? Like even if Uber was mediocre, it would still be way better. And he said accounting gave him the exact same vibes. Like the status quo is just so bad that if you can mak…”
Seibert: Apple Silicon prioritizes energy efficiency over pure compute power
“And look at Apple Silicon, right? They've done an amazing job. Like, yes, they're fast, but instead of pushing the bounds on pure compute, they're pushing the bounds on energy efficiency, which for Apple's use case is critical.”
Seibert: AI R&D will focus on smaller, specialized models
“And so I think there will be a lot of really interesting R and D on how do you make these models maybe smaller and perform it in certain use cases.”
Seibert: Enterprise AI adoption will follow cloud's path as privacy concerns ease
“And so I think this will go in the same direction. And like you'll, you'll have very clear guidelines around how the companies use the data for model training and it's off limits and so on. And sort of that trust will be overcome.”
Seibert: Top AI models are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, not just compute
“It's very clear the top models are memory bound as well as CPU bound. So you can't just make the CPUs, the GPUs faster. You need to increase memory bandwidth in sort of on par with that.”
Seibert: Tech companies are locking down data, reversing 20 years of open APIs
“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”
Seibert: Google Photos is one of the most strategic products ever launched
“So Google Photos, Potentially one of the most strategic products ever launched, because it allowed Google to collect the world's largest library of photos ever assembled. And that's how they were able to train their early vision models and so on.”
Seibert's early IPO investments crashed near zero during six-month lockups
“A couple of my early investments went on to IPO. And so we're extremely successful, but then during the six month lockup window went almost to zero. And I couldn't exit almost anything.”
Seibert: Angel investors should keep check sizes identical across deals
“So my advice would be just like, be very disciplined. It's like do a bunch of deals because you need a portfolio and put the same amount in every time and average it out.”
Seibert: Enterprise software traction is more sustainable than consumer traction
“On the consumer side, I'd say real traction on enterprise software. Potentially more sustainable.”
Seibert's single 200x win paid for all his other angel investments
“Yes. So that is why on paper and like, and in terms of cash returned, I'm actually in pretty good shape, but yeah, it's remarkable how, how the outliers sort of outclass the rest.”
Seibert: Many tech employees are trapped at startups with underwater stock options
“A lot of folks, you're right, are trapped in companies with high valuations where their options are likely underwater.”
Seibert: High late-stage salaries prevent talent migration to early-stage startups
“And that's probably the counterforce is all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 20, 21 have high salaries. And if you switch, you'll get more equity, but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”
Seibert: Startup leaders must answer team questions within 24 hours
“So when your team comes to you with a question, you need a decisive answer within 24 hours. And if you're slower than that, you're not moving fast enough.”
Seibert: Useful AI arrived much faster than previously expected
“12 months ago, I thought useful AI would be years away. No longer think that.”
Digits Averages Five to Seven Minutes for Ad-Hoc Internal Meetings
“We have those three meetings, and then nothing else on the calendar, and everything else is ad hoc, and so I'd say our average meeting length is probably five to seven minutes.”
Digits Requires a Take-Home Work Sample for Every Job Role
“For the skill side, we have used basically a take-home work sample, a take-home challenge that we use for every single role.”
Formulaic Resume Questions Easily Reveal Candidate Career Patterns
“And it's just because it's formulaic, And you're asking the same questions for each job role. You can very easily see patterns over a person's career.”
A VC's Greatest Value-Add Is Keeping Founders Focused on Forward-Looking Strategy
“What I think is most helpful is when your investors are always looking forward because they're not caught up in the day to day. And many founders get so caught up in the day to day, their context switching, their racing between fires, that they sort of lose tr…”
Seibert: Entrepreneurs shouldn't wait for a mind-blowing, perfect idea
“And I think that was the first big lesson I learned is not to sort of hold out for this perfect concept that's going to blow the world away. Very, very few businesses start out as this like mind blowing idea that no one's ever thought of.”
Seibert: The average startup fundraising round takes four to six months
“And if you look on the, at the data, the average round takes six to four to six months to close.”
Seibert: Dual-tracking M&A and funding yields stronger acquisition deal terms
“If we had started in January and had a full six months to sort of side by side pursue funding and partnerships or acquisition, I think we would have been in a much stronger position.”
Seibert: Acquired founders should negotiate 6-to-9-month reporting commitments
“What I would have done in retrospect is sought some commitment to continue to report to that person for X period of time. I don't think it's fair or actually good to say, Hey, I want to indefinitely report to this person. You want to move around as the company…”
Seibert: Crashlytics is installed on substantially every active mobile device on Earth
“So today Crashlytics is installed on well, well over a billion devices. We're on substantially every active mobile device on earth.”
Seibert: Crashlytics team tripled at Twitter with only one employee resignation
“Our team had not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time.”
Seibert: Legacy Twitter required two to three weeks for statistical data
“Particularly at Twitter, we need to get stats, SIG data, which always took two to three weeks.”
Seibert: Crashlytics scaled to 300 million phones in 12 months
“We scaled from zero to three hundred million phones in 12 months.”
Seibert: Twitter, Slack, and YouTube originated as completely different products
“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”
Seibert: Two oversized angel investments I felt certain about went to zero
“So on two of them, actually two of my biggest failures, I was so convinced. I was like, this is a no brainer. This is going to be a huge home run. I'm going to put in way more than I usually do. Usually I try to stay pretty disciplined on check size and both o…”
Digits Has Only Fired One Employee Since Its Founding
“We have let one person go in the life of the company, but it's just one.”
Creative Selection Accurately Depicts Steve Jobs' Apple Product Design Process
“Ken Kosienda's book, Creative Selection, I think it came out a couple years ago or so. My time I spent at Apple actually overlaps with the period he covers in the book, and the book is stunningly accurate in how it portrays how Apple designed and shipped produ…”
A Large Portion of Crashlytics' Original Team Now Works at Digits
“We were very, very thoughtful with how we built the Crashlytics team. And believe it or not, a large portion of that team is now the Digits team, and we're still working together nine years later.”
Seibert: Twitter made Crashlytics free and expanded the team to launch Fabric
“And so they were willing to make Crashlytics free. They were willing to help us grow our team significantly so that we could build adjacent products, which we ultimately did and became a suite known as fabric.”
Seibert: Twitter acquires an average of one to two companies a month
“Twitter on average acquires one to two companies a month. They have for years.”
Seibert: Angel investment liquidity timelines exceed a decade
“The time range on seed investing on the angel side is just, is like a decade plus.”