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 12,890 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
Adam Foroughi: Active Founders Who Angel Invest Lose Focus on Core Business
“The second you care about that KPI and you chase it, you're selling from your own core business to go diversify. You're not focused on your day job.”
Masad: Solo founders no longer need to learn traditional programming languages
“They don't need to learn how to code. They need to learn how to create. They need to learn how to build.”
Lemkin: If Box cannot re-accelerate growth, incumbent SaaS is hopeless
“If he can't get Box to 20 to 30% growth I'm giving up on, on the rest of the world.”
Midha: Human alignment is a bigger challenge than technical AI alignment
“AI alignment, don't get me wrong, is hard, but not the hardest problem. Human alignment is really the problem right now.”
Reyna: Professional services models fail in AI due to two-day copycats
“In the world where, like, Snowflake grew up like, that made sense. In the world we are in today with AI, that doesn't make any sense. Because fundamentally, like, anyone can spin up a competitor of your product in the next two days. Anyone.”
O'Driscoll: VCs only significantly contribute money, CEO hiring, and broad strategy
“And I think that's right because realistically, in the journey of what's going on, the only significant things we've done, I've said this before in the podcast, we put in the money and we put in more money when they need it. We decide to hire or not hire and f…”
Andreessen: VCs should only invest in obvious diamonds, not hidden gems
“Don't ever do diamonds in the rough, only do diamonds.”
Andreessen: VCs do not need to like founders they back
“And so I say no, you don't, because I think, like, if you're trying to fulfill your personal emotional needs at work, like, I think that's a very fundamental problem, and you shouldn't try to do that.”
Andreessen: Professionals should never bring their whole self to work
“We always say, do not bring your whole self to work. Like, whatever you do, do not bring your whole self to work.”
Gili Raanan: Selfishness and greed are good traits for seed investors
“We need to be selfish, and we need to be greedy. Those are good trades for an early stage investor.”
Raanan: The venture capital asset class does not work as a whole
“The venture business as a whole doesn't work. It doesn't work. It shouldn't work. And returns distribution are not divided equally between players.”
Steckman: Defense founders must defer ethical rules to democratically elected governments
“If you work in defense, and if you start a defense company, your moral compass tends to be pretty clear on this question, which is, we have a democratically elected set of governments that represent the US, the Alliance, NATO, all of the countries participatin…”
O'Driscoll: VCs investing to meet deployment quotas should halve fund sizes
“If you find your logic being reduced to, I've got to get rid of this much money this month, and this entrepreneur is amazing, so I'm not sure about the opportunity, and I don't like the price, but have a goal. If that's your logic, let me give you some advice.…”
Verna: Paid marketing in year one is a death trap for founders
“For any founder in the first year, investing in paid as the means of growth is a death trap.”
Verna: Startups under five years old cannot accurately calculate their LTV
“Unless you've been in the business for five years plus, You do not know your LTV. Period.”
Verna: Paid marketing is the most expensive and defenseless growth path
“Paid marketing to me is Is a cheap way out, and it's not competitively defensible. I should say cheap. It's actually the most expensive way out, and it's not competitively defensible at all, and it's not sustainable.”
Clements: VCs that never lose deal fights aren't competing hard enough
“I think if you're not putting yourself out there in losing, sometimes you're not chasing competitive enough things.”
Calacanis: Every autonomous AI agent will leak data if allowed
“Like every agent will leak data if it's allowed to, like every single agent will. That's how goal seeking works.”
Lemkin: AI agent vendors lack defensibility because customers rapidly switch products
“I'd actually don't think any of the agent vendors are safe from disruption because we will, even us, like everyone's promiscuous with agents. We will switch it. Like, this is so much better than what we had two weeks ago. We'll switch to the next one.”
Siemiatkowski: VCs who do not use AI coding tools cannot evaluate startups
“If I meet investors today that haven't actually downloaded and tried to build something themselves, I think they don't have the skill set to make an evaluation of the company they're looking at.”
Stebbings: Broken paternal relationships are the top shared trait among unicorn founders
“And the single most common feature is a broken relationship with their father.”
Lemkin: Investors must abandon traditional TAM calculations for revenue trajectory
“I just think we have to give up on TAM. We just have to let the revenue show us the path to TAM.”
Lemkin: Non-hypergrowth private software startups are now completely unfundable
“I think there are only two types of companies for private companies. They're growing at insane rates or they're unfundable.”
Zeev: GP-level diversification provides no value to LPs
“By the way, from the LP perspective, diversification at the level of the GP makes no sense, because they have multiple GPs, so, so the diversification gives nothing to LPs.”
Zeev: Mid-Tier VCs Inflate Paper Marks to Survive Fundraising
“However, if you if you are a fund that is more middle of the road and you're not sure how Is it gonna be a raise or not? You're gonna find any excuse to keep the prices up, right? To look good on paper.”
Zeev: Partners in large VC firms prioritize personal deals over fund performance
“You know, if the typical, if a partner in a in a partnership, especially large partnership with some, with politics and all that they're much more interested in their investments succeeding than anything else because that's their career.”
Peet: Recruiting competitor reps for domain knowledge yields weak sales teams
“Your competitors likely have a bunch of C players, so you want to go hire C players simply because they know the space? Ok, that's a short-term solve. Basically what you're solving for is you want to reduce ramp time, you want them to be able to get enabled fa…”
Chad Peet: Inside sales teams must be in office five days a week
“Inside sales is, your sales leader is in the office five days a week, and the inside sales reps have to be sitting there. Have to be. So inside sales is an in-office deal. And there could be no exceptions in my opinion.”
Peet: Sales teams should fire the bottom 10% of reps annually
“You should be shooting the bottom 10% of your sales organization every year.”
Lemkin: VCs can identify top 0.1% founders without speaking to them
“You can identify a point, a top, oh.1% founder Without talking to them. I don't think you can do it without any interactions, but without talk, I do, I a hundred percent believe it's possible.”
Lemkin: Workforce reskilling is a total delusion that never succeeds
“Reskill is a delusion. Reskill is something we say to make everybody feel better. Reskilling is like when you get, when you, they do layoffs and they bring you in the room and they give you a packet of jobs potentially. It's just to make people feel better. No…”
Chang: Society can have low-cost, abundant, and low-carbon energy simultaneously
“You can have low cost energy, you can have more energy, and you can have lower carbon energy at the same time.”
Alan Chang: Startup throughput is limited by leadership headcount, not focus
“I actually think there are not enough ambitious founders out there, because ultimately the throughput of the company, like how many parallel work streams you can take at a given time is dictated by number of great leaders you have in the company.”
Chang: Superior work ethic and weekend work are required to defeat energy incumbents
“Yeah, I'd say, like, as I said before, like, this is very hard, like, this only way to do it, like, we're going against, you know, big, big, big energy companies with, like, huge balance sheets. You know, billions in revenue. The only way to win is, you know, …”
CMO Raz Herzberg claims marketing is intuitive and less complex than engineering
“I also think marketing is not that complicated. I mean, it's not like engineering where, you know, our VP of engineering, he has so much deep, deep, deep knowledge in the domain. I just don't believe it's that way for marketing. I think people overly complex i…”
Lemkin: Founders Should Default to Accepting Acquisition Offers
“This is why I tell founders to take their exits and then say no, because they can go bigger, but by default, take it.”
McMahon: Win-loss reports are useless when sales teams lack core skills
“Why would I care, as an example, about somebody's win-loss reports when your sales force sucks? I'm trying to change your sales force. Why would I look at the win-loss reports when people really don't know why they won and certainly don't know why they lost?”
A seed lead only taking pro rata in Series A signals failure
“I fully believe if they're like, hey, Sequoia led our seed, and I'm like, hey, are they doing your A, and they're like, Well, they're doing their pro rata. I'm like, this is not a good company. Like, objectively is not a good company.”
Andrew Ng: AGI is hyped PR, AI will improve continuously for decades
“I feel like because of PR goals, AGI has been hyped up as a finish line, but I don't think it's a finish line. It's just, we'll have continually improving capabilities for, you know, decades to come.”
Andrew Ng: AI companies facing existential risk drive the worst industry hype
“The companies with something to lose whose statements over time have become more moderated. So, you know, I find that as your established company, you just say more sensible things, but there are some companies that I think are at greater existential risk. And…”
Shopify's Carl Rivera: Hybrid work is the worst organizational model
“And ultimately I believe hybrid is the worst. The worst thing is the thing where like you have half of the team in person. They have an enormous information advantage. They figure out their own rituals and ways of communicating and collaborating. The other hal…”
Lemkin: Tech Executives From the Last 15 Years Are Wrong for Today
“The most folks from the last decade or 15 years are not the right people for the next decade.”
Randle: Investors should follow momentum when AI inference demand is unprecedented
“When you have demand like this, like you have for the initial GC, like the initial hyperscaler clouds. And I think we're seeing an even greater cohorted demand curve for AI inference. Sometimes you just got to shut your mind up and invest with the momentum.”
Randle: AI startup moats remain rooted in technology, not distribution
“I definitely disagree with that. I think the moat is still fundamentally in technology, not in, in distribution.”
Randle: Mega funds resemble private equity more than venture capital
“To me, sometimes it just feels like a little bit of like it just feels like a different job than like the craft of venture capital where you're almost playing the lottery where you're like, okay, I have these 30 names that I own. I'm gonna try to do two of the…”
Startups Must Hire a CRO Pre-Product to Build Sales Playbooks
“We bring in a CRO pre-product. You need a salesperson to create the sales playbook.”
Non-Sales Stakeholders Should Never Interview Prospective Sales Reps
“If you're going to be in my interview process, you are either uniquely qualified to qualify, or you are uniquely qualified to sell. If you are not one of those two things, you are not getting into the interview process.”
Cahn: Venture capital firms cannot 'king-make' startups with capital alone
“I don't believe in King making and that's maybe a controversial thing to say. I think one of the lessons, you know, you'd think like, oh, Sequoia should be able to King make companies and like, that's so great. And that would be, by the way, if that was true, …”