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 771 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
Sacca: Travis Kalanick was ousted by 13 Uber managers, not VCs
“In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that's really the only force that Silicon Valley leader…”
Harry Stebbings predicts traditional VC round ownership will drop to 7.5%
“The days where they could take 15% are gone. It will be a new generation where they take seven and a half percent. Bluntly, alongside people like me and you taking seven and a half percent.”
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
Amazon and Walmart lose trillions annually in inventory waste
“If you look into the inventory losses and the wastage costs of the likes of Walmart, or even an Amazon, or like normal supermarket chain, it's in the trillions of how much they're losing on a yearly basis of like food and other items that are actually being so…”
Ek: US tech ecosystem outside Silicon Valley and Seattle lags Europe
“If you take Silicon Valley and Seattle out of it, the US actually would be worse than Europe if you took those two out of it.”
UiPath is positioned to become a $100 billion market cap company
“We're in a position right now where we're one of the few companies on the planet who can realistically talk about building a business that becomes a hundred billion dollar market cap company with the product set, And the market and customers that are already s…”
Ward: Carta projects $600M base ARR up to $10B revenue by 2025
“Our base case, if none of our bets work out, we think we'll be around six hundred million in ARR, growing 50 to 70% year over year as a software business. If some of our more financial products that we're working on hit, We have a broad spectrum. These are hig…”
Volpi: The era of large closed-source enterprise software platforms is over
“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”
Hargreaves: US business creation is at its lowest since the Great Depression
“Fewer businesses are getting started today than have been started at any point since the Great Depression.”
Pakman: Jay-Z's Tidal is doomed to ultimate failure
“So, I think Tidal's notion of exclusive content was somewhat doomed from the beginning, and I think the numbers show the product has failed. The social receptivity was really negative. And I think it will it will ultimately completely fail.”
Lemkin: Zenefits will reach $100M revenue in 24 months
“Zenefits will go one to a hundred million in revenue in 24 months.”
Lemkin predicts Talkdesk will reach a $1B valuation within 12 months
“You know, talk desk isn't a unicorn within 12 months, then I'll leave my hat.”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs has secured government buy-in across all major Western democracies
“Now, 11 Labs is an unstoppable machine at this point, to the point where it has government buy-in across All of the large major Western democracies.”
O'Driscoll: Hyperscaler RPO depends entirely on foundation model commitments
“Because, let me be clear, if you know the answer to that question, that one question, you know the answer to the entire direction of the U.S. Stock market for the next two years. Because all the hyperscaler RPO, all of it, is a function of the commitments they…”
Jain: Enterprise fears over AI models training on company data have vanished
“When AI just came, there was a, companies were a lot more afraid of getting their data outside of, you know, their own control and model companies training with, you know, with their data. But that sort of is a fear that it's no longer there. Like, you know, l…”
Jain: Glean was the first enterprise AI company to deploy RAG
“We actually get a lot of credit for being the first enterprise AI company in the world. The first ones to actually bring RAG into the enterprise. The first ones to build conceptual semantic search.”
O'Driscoll: AI developers now require Washington permission before shipping software
“Six months ago, you could ship software like a free man, and now you have to get permission from Washington before you do it. It's a big change, right?”
Lemkin: DeepSeek's AI model is intentionally crippled inside China
“And DeepSeek is intentionally crippled in China. It's not as good as it is here. It can't search the web and it is trained on different data as near as I can tell.”
Arora: Compute costs have increased 2x to 4x over two years
“If I abstract, if I step back today there's not enough compute for what the world is demanding. Unequivocally not enough compute, right? You can't buy compute. Compute is costing two to three X or four X more than it used to cost two years ago. There's not eno…”
Lemkin: SpaceX IPO will be a dud and will not trade up
“I think the IPO nominally will be a dud. I don't think it will trade up dramatically.”
Feldman claims Cerebras is the only pure-play AI public company
“But what we did know was that we had a chance to be the first and only AI peer play in the entire market. There's only one, and that's us.”
Lemkin: Anthropic has secured more compute capacity than OpenAI
“And now Anthropik, I hate the five D eight D chess metaphor, but now it's gonna, it's figured out a way to have more capacity than open AI.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
Weitzman: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
O'Driscoll: Microsoft's revenue growth is flat without its AI initiatives
“Without the AI initiative, Microsoft is flat revenue.”
AppLovin Cut Departmental Staff 40-50% in 2024 Despite Fast Growth
“Mostly in 24, we had a year where we probably grew near double digits. Sorry, near triple digits. But we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40, 50% in most departments.”
Reyna: Outbound cold email response rates have dropped below 0.01%
“And you see, like, the response rates on outbound emails Has dropped to the lowest of any point in time. It's like less than 0.01%.”
Stebbings: Anthropic made $6B in February, exceeding Databricks' lifetime revenue
“28 day month of February, where they did six billion in revenue, which was more than Databricks has done in their entire lifetime.”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank is 1.5x to 2x levered, threatening equity in downturn
“It's around two X levered, right? One and a half to two X levered in terms of equity, right? What that means is a 30, 40% decline, you know, wipes them out.”
Lemkin: Salesforce has more Agentforce AI demand than it can service
“I'm long on Salesforce. The simple reason, and I know this being super deep on agent force and everything, is unlike a lot of folks on this list, they have more demand than they can service.”
Green: Software stocks will remain dead money for a quarter or two
“What you're going to see is they're going to take numbers down at a bunch of companies. Give it a quarter or two. Companies will start to then, you know, beat numbers. Then they'll raise the numbers, and the stocks will start to work. But it's probably dead mo…”
Jerry Murdock: Meta rejected Nvidia GPUs to bet on custom ASIC chips
“I mean, look, you know, a lot of people like to criticize meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen. We don't need you. So why did he do that? Because he's betting on a six chips. No question abo…”
Emberikos: OpenAI is the only firm building OS-level sandboxing for Windows AI agents
“We're basically the only company that cares about OS level sandboxing for coding agents. For instance, there's none that exists on Windows. We're the ones building that and we're doing it in open source, so hopefully other people can use it.”
Klarna's AI customer support performed the work of 600 human agents in 2023
“I announced already in 23 that, you know, our AI customer service had, you know, done the equivalent of 600 agents jobs, and it caught a lot of attention at the point of time.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI Will Capture All Ad-Buying Value Natively Without Ad-Tech
“So I think for the paid ads, all the value that's going to be captured is going to be captured by OpenAI, and there's not going to be a optimization engine.”
Fitzpatrick: AWS report shows 70% of AI agents are traditional automation scripts
“There was actually a report AWS came out with today, it's interesting, that like, 70% of agents are actually not even, ah, AI agents, as you think of it. Like, most of the agent, agentic processes today are actually traditional script writing and just traditio…”
O'Driscoll: Meta and Google control 70% of all global advertising
“Facebook and Google have 70% of not just all digital advertising, but all advertising.”
O'Driscoll: Palantir Is the Only Public Software Company Growing Over 30%
“There is literally only one public company growing more than 30%, and that's Palantir.”
Snowflake Grew Its Sales Organization Faster Than Any Company in History
“Chris and I took a sales organization and grew it faster than any sales organization has ever grown in history. It's snowflake. There might have been others since that have grown faster, but at the time, nobody's done that, right?”
O'Driscoll: ChatGPT ended the 2022 VC market correction within a year
“In the context of anyone playing this business from 2010 on, there has never been a period of longer than a year where there's been a substantive correction or a curtailment of capital. The only year would have been 22, twenty-three-ish, and God bless ChatGPT …”
Ross: Norway could match total US energy output via wind and hydro
“Norway has about an 80% utilization rate of wind. So, like, 80% of the time you can be generating energy. They have enough hydro that if you deployed an five x the wind power of the hydro, Norway itself could provide as much energy as the United States and cou…”
Ross: US nuclear power permitting costs triple actual construction costs
“He said they spend three times as much on the permitting in the United States than on the nuclear power plant.”
Taneja: Microsoft generated the highest multiple return among OpenAI investors
“Taking that bet was hugely, hugely valuable for Microsoft. I think, and if you look at the return, by the way, if they put in twenty billion, they are the ones who have the highest multiple return as well. So it was a great investment on a financial basis and …”
Lemkin: Microsoft shifting default model choice to Anthropic across several products
“Microsoft I think today said they're moving not just parts of office to Anthropic, but that it is the default choice for several other products and that Microsoft today said several months ago, they told their teams to start using cloud code several months ago…”
Lemkin: Sales Reps Quit on Day One When AI Monitoring Is Introduced
“Every single time it's been brought in, someone on the sales team has quit the first day. Quit every single time they quit the first day, including on our little Sastra team, someone quit in the day we brought it in.”