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 5,465 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
Weitzman: Speechify now prioritizes raw intelligence over handcrafted coding ability
“So one thing that we have changed about our hiring in the last even six months Is we really cared that you read a ton of textbooks about software engineering and that your handcrafted code was amazing. I still care that you read a lot of textbooks about softwa…”
Maguire Pushed Sequoia's SpaceX Investment After Partner Voted '1' in IC
“Credits to Sean when he brought in the SpaceX investment, We vote on companies. I think someone voted a one. Yeah. I've seen fours, of course. I've seen threes. Never seen a two. I didn't even know we could do one. I didn't even know it was on the scale. But w…”
Bek: Sequoia will not back legacy services companies pivoting to AI
“I will not invest in one of those companies. For the following reason. I think you can make money in that business. The reality is I've only seen it in my career. The best companies are able to concentrate talent and you just not going to get frontier talent w…”
Mac: Uber refuses API access to third-party price-comparison aggregators
“We've not participated historically in the aggregation apps where some, you know, somebody will come to us and pitch and say, hey, you know, give us APIs that give us real-time info on Every car, every Uber car in the network what the price of that ride is, wh…”
Lemkin's team churned off Canva and Notion due to AI agents
“My, me having churned, and Amelia having churned, we churned just not because, this is a tough one, Canva and Notion, both we churned, not because they're not great apps, we just no longer had any need for them in the agentic area, just no need. Canva and Noti…”
Stebbings: 20VC Lost Hundreds of Millions Passing on Deel Over Ownership Targets
“I look at ours, and our biggest mistake, and I can look at Deal, 11 Labs, I can look at Granola, and Starcloud, Fractile, could have done them all, but would have had one to two percent, and all of them we turned down purely for ownership, and that is hundreds…”
Menlo Ventures' Anthropic position is worth over $10 billion
“No, our position is, is north of that, but that's not that you can do the math on what carry usually is.”
Nitski: Mercor shifts to senior hires as AI obsoletes junior skills
“We've biased towards more senior hires. Who are better at understanding what drives the business forward, finding, kind of, like, really crocking how we operate, how we make more revenue, how we deliver better services to our customers, how we keep our custome…”
Nitski: Mercor's fix for lab concentration is moving down market
“I can answer this from kind of like a, how it affects the product team. We would love to move like our biggest challenge is moving down market so that every single enterprise can efficiently run human data projects for eval and training. And that'll diversify …”
Curative Invested $500M Of COVID Testing Profits Into Health Insurance
“So after all was said and done, the money that we basically put forward into the insurance business, the health insurance company, was about five hundred million that we invested into the health insurance business.”
Curative Administered 2.5M COVID Vaccines At A Loss
“We did two and a half million vaccinations. That was another service we did. We also lost a ton of money on that. That was a terrible business.”
Curative's Anthropic API Spend Grew 6x Monthly Into Millions
“Our anthropic cost over the last six or seven months has six X'd every month from, you know, a base of, you know, a couple of tens of thousands of dollars now up to millions of dollars a month.”
Curative's AI Agent Signs Hundreds Of Contracts Daily Without Human Review
“We had a contract, a standard template contract that was drafted by a law firm, and then we have kind of like guard rails for what Gwen can agree to, but she just red lines it and then signs it. It doesn't go to a law firm for a review. Like, we're signing hun…”
AI Agent Gwen Cuts Curative's Contract Costs From $2,000 To $70
“So it costs, with people, it costs us about 1500 to 2000 dollars on average to do a contract. The average with Gwen has been about 70 dollars.”
Abrahami: Off-the-Shelf AI Customer Support Tools Do Not Work
“We actually tried not to build our own. You know, we tried, we tested many different things. It doesn't work.”
Jain: Glean's triage agent handles 95% of issues at an absurd $1M a month
“I would say it's absurdly expensive. I'll give you an example. We had this, we have a really cool triage agent for engineering. You know, and we have 15 people team on call team that was supposed to, that their work was to actually triage Every single producti…”
Mignano: USV avoids enterprise investing to focus on market obliteration
“At USV, we like to bet on businesses that obliterate, that literally obliterate markets and existing business models. And so, you know, we're, we actually don't do a lot of enterprise investing for this exact reason.”
Sierra deliberately took lower valuations than offered in every funding round
“Every one of our rounds, we actually guided to and took a lower price than we could have.”
FOMO Holds More Cash in Bank Than Total Capital Raised
“Our team is scaling. I mean, we're making money. We have much more money in the bank than we ever raised.”
Petersen: SoftBank led Flexport's $1B round and urged undercutting rivals by 10%
“Yeah, well, they led the round of a billion, yeah. And he was like, whatever the price of freight is, you'd just be 10% cheaper than everybody, and then if someone matches you, you'd just be 10% cheaper than that, which is like a terrible strategy. I did not d…”
Randle: Benchmark partner says any pre-AI SaaS liquidity is top-decile performance
“There's a partner here at Benchmark that says any liquidity for pre-AI SaaS companies is top decile performance. Any liquidity at all.”
Mercor spends more on AI agent tokens than employee headcount
“Right now, we're spending more on tokens for our internal agents than we are on employee headcount.”
Mercor Attacker Used Swarm of AI Coding Agents to Breach Systems
“Because in our incident, it was the attacker that used a swarm of coding agents to help get access to the system as is happening in a lot of these.”
Meta Paused Mercor Relationship After Hack While Other Labs Expanded
“I mean, I think that Meta you know, like, currently the relationship is still paused. Every other one of the Frontier Labs has grown their relationship with us since and the company has been crushing it but they're the only one that is paused, which is public.”
Foody Rejects $30B Sale Despite Receiving Significant Acquisition Interest
“No, I wouldn't. I mean, ultimately we've gotten a lot of acquisition interest and we could walk away with, like I could walk away with billions of dollars in cash.”
Foody discloses Mercor holds over $500M in cash and is highly profitable
“And so we view having over five hundred million in cash and a super profitable business as a significant asset and allowing us to be prepared for when there is a market correction to make sure that we consolidate market share.”
Laqua: Corgi Insurance never accepts the highest valuation offered in fundraising
“So we never take the highest price ever. I think that that's just a good rule of thumb. Like we always go with like the second or third highest price.”
Lemkin: My Team Does With 2.5 People What Used to Require 20
“I mean, we've gone not to be a broken record we're doing with two and a half people. We're doing what we did with 20 and everyone's get paid more on my little team, right?”
Degnan: Avoids hiring sales reps from the cybersecurity sector
“So I actually have an affinity of not hiring. People out of the security space.”
O'Driscoll: Passed on seed GPU capacity deal fearing CapEx boom cycle
“I did, to answer the question, Jason, logically, I chickened out. I didn't want to be that marginal capacity three years into the deal, three years into the CapEx boom, but there's a little part of me thinking, Rory, that might be a dumb decision.”
Browder requires pre-seed founders to live with him until raising seed
“It's in California, so it's like Hotel California, where you can't check out until you've raised your institutional seed, and then I, the company is off life support, and I can, like, relax a bit.”
Browder: Micro1 is his best-performing investment at over 1,000x return
“Ali Ansari is a micro one, is objectively my best performing investment in terms of multiple. The founders get upset when I reveal exact valuation numbers, but let's say over a thousand X, well over a thousand X and based on the kind of the scale of the busine…”
Browder invests all personal earnings into land instead of stocks or cash
“In terms of like my diversification retirement I take all the money I make and I buy land. I don't put it in the stock market. I don't buy, I don't keep it in cash because I think that the dollar is, it doesn't have a good future. I don't buy bonds or anything…”
Browder: FTC blocked acquisitions of several portfolio companies
“Several companies I invested in had the acquisitions blocked by the kind of Lena Kahn style approach.”
An Abridge investor required Shiv Rao to undergo a psychological assessment
“We were talking about psychological assessments, I think, before we started, and how some VCs will do that, and I had one before we took money from one of our investors”
Harry Stebbings exits investments the minute founders step down as CEO
“The minute the founder transitions out of CEO role, I'm out.”
Legora CRO: Every Enterprise Pitch Against Harvey Is a Death Match
“We have one big competitor, and they come up on every, it's a, you know, death match on every deal. It's super competitive. We have a ton of respect for them.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's logistics fulfillment pivot was my most public mistake
“I think my most public mistake was going into Full on logistics and physical warehouse building just before AI got really good and not like, and we didn't have the ability to you know, do both of those things at the same time. So we actually had to like abando…”
Lindquist: Clay's quota-to-OTE ratio is seven and a half
“Our quota to OT ratio is like seven and a half.”
Stebbings: Passed on Granola, predicting no one would fund them
“Granada, Granada, I was the first VC they met, and I turned them down. I sent my partner a note saying someone should set up a JustGiving page for them, because no one will give them money.”
Lemkin: Salesforce bill jumped to $22,000 while seats dropped to three
“Our Salesforce bill went up from 12,000 to 22,000 dollars a year, and our seats went down from 10 to two plus one.”
Lemkin: $100M+ startup reports three different ARR metrics monthly
“And for example, I've got one investment I made that's north of nine figures in revenue. I get three different ARR numbers each month. Three different definitions.”
AppLovin Cut Its HR Department From 70-80 Staff Down to 15
“But HR, for example, like that I touched on earlier, we went and took a pretty large HR organization, one that I think had 70, 80 people on it, and now might have 15.”
AppLovin Shut Down Investor Relations to Buy Back Stock During 92% Crash
“So when we fell in 2022 one of the things we did on the investor relations side, you fall 92%, no one's buying your stock. We said, we're gonna buy our own shares, and we're gonna shut down investor relations, because what's the point? Why do I need to go to a…”
Midha: AMP provides billions in compute infrastructure at cost
“We're actually giving away most of our compute at cost. Now, if you're a shareholder, you'd go, wait on, do you have billions of dollars of compute infrastructure you're giving away at cost? Yes, because we think that's the right thing for humanity.”
Midha: AMP Is Securing 1.3 Gigawatts of Compute Infrastructure
“We have started securing about 1.3 gigawatts of computer infrastructure. That's roughly forty billion dollars of cloud spend over the next four years. And that is financed roughly, you know, between with about 20% of equity. The remaining is debt. So 20%, that…”
Reyna: ElevenLabs is willing to lose money entering the government vertical
“And I don't care if I don't make enough money to justify it or like I lose money. It doesn't really matter to me.”
ElevenLabs forces CVC investors to deliver revenue or face contractual penalties
“So how do you figure out something that works along the way so that, like, you put and end up saying, you know what, you will invest for every million dollars that you want to invest, you need to actually, like, bring X amount of revenues in the next 12 months…”