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
Bouaziz argues investors should earn pro-rata rights rather than receive them automatically
“No, I think pro rata should be earned.”
Bouaziz believes high-growth tech companies should hire engineers as CMOs
“But in his mind, most chief marketing officers are not good. The truth is I actually agree with him. And for a while I was looking for a CMO with this experience, that experience, and what I've realized is, like, the best CMOs I've encountered over the last fe…”
Lemkin: VCs With Double-Digit Ownership Must Serve on Boards Until Exit
“I think if you're going to own double digits, my view ethically is you got to be there till the end. Otherwise, you're dead weight on the cap table.”
Slonimski: Hire Young Builders for Growth Over Silicon Valley Executives
“I probably would not hire that Silicon Valley. Why? I think what you need to bring to the table is hunger, is lots of dignity, lots of dedication, lots of experimental mindset, and you cannot get there when you basically worked for, like, best-in-class compani…”
Lemkin: Board members legally exploit insider information by holding stock
“Hold is your best time to trade on, to legally trade on inside information, though. If you're on the board or close to it, it's your best time to trade on that illegal by not trading. Yeah, you can hold legally with inside information. It's a privileged positi…”
Lawson: Buyers Want AI Replacing 75% of Staff, Not Co-Pilots
“Oh, we're going to make your human beings 10% more efficient because of the AI co-pilot. When reality is they're gonna want a product that is like, no, no, no, I don't need 75% of these people anymore. Give me that product.”
Frosst: Benchmark scores measure training dataset overlap rather than true model utility
“They're a reflection of how much the model had been trained on those benchmarks.”
Frosst: LLM architecture makes independent scientific breakthroughs fundamentally impossible
“No, no, that's not a matter of time. That's fundamentally the way that sequence models work. Like we are training statistical models of text.”
Jason James: Product managers should be a hire of last resort
“I see PM as, think of it as like a hire of last resort. And so I don't think a company should be allergic to hiring them, but it shouldn't be the default.”
Jason James: Founders do not need a CPO until transitioning to chairman
“I honestly think you don't need a CPO until maybe like as a founder, you're starting to think about transitioning into the chairman role.”
Jason James: Promoting '996' schedules is recruitment marketing to attract young employees
“I think it's incredible marketing. It's a way of differentiating against sort of the market. Everybody's going to be intense, but we're super intense. And so like, we're going to be like Olympians and, you know, in terms of work ethic, it's like a coded way of…”
Jason James: Business growth is the only thing that truly matters for company culture
“The only thing that matters for culture is growth, like, business growth, because for a business that's growing at, like, an amazing clip, it's always gonna have Cultural sort of issues that, you know, make it kind of suck to like work there, but everybody's o…”
Lemkin: Tech Companies Do Not Need Half Their Workforce
“You don't need half your company, and Palantir and Shopify are proving it. You don't need half your company. You literally don't need half the people working at your company. You don't need them today.”
Mignot: Building venture-backed hyper-growth startups requires seven-day workweeks
“If you look at the most incredible companies in the past, you know, you look at Revolut, you look at Deliveroo, all of these companies, the amount of work that these founders and these early teams put in was tremendous. I mean, it was seven days a week, you kn…”
Peter Rahal argues product quality is currently more important than branding
“Ironically, as a brand person, I would say products more important than brand right now. Products all that matters actually brand secondary.”
O'Driscoll: Post-IPO dinners exist to placate founders after bankers underprice IPOs
“My mental model on the dinner is the bankers have just screwed you over for a buck a share, and in return, they buy you a very expensive dinner, and they liquor you up so you forget.”
Active Early-Stage VC Management Drives Bad Decisions
“I work with many, and when they actively manage, they do not get the right decisions. They push managers to do things they shouldn't do. They push them to go enterprise before they should, push them to do more products, push them to scale faster, take more cas…”
Edwin Chen: 100x engineers exist through multiplicative compounding of small advantages
“Some people are simply two to three times better, like two to three times faster than anybody else, right? They just code faster. There are some people who simply have two to three times more better ideas. There are people who simply work two to three times as…”
Tenev: Founders want fast capital, not on-chain equity issuance
“Nobody gives a shit about on chain issuance. Like the only place where people are even thinking about on chain issuance is like in your head. What people want is capital as a service.”
Lemkin: Startups failing to grow through AI have already failed
“My rule is if you haven't grown because of AI, you've failed.”
O'Driscoll: VC board members who leave their firm are practically useless
“Cause I'm realistic enough to say that even if I, you know, if you have a venture board member who is an amazing board member, but can no longer speak to the money. Because there's no longer at the vent, at that venture firm, then to a rounding error, they're …”
Kansu: Traditional product specs and linear PRD processes are dead
“Specs, like, you know, companies write product specs that like go from someone's idea that turns into a product spec, and then that goes into design, that goes into engineering. This process is like dead. Like, why would you write specs if you can go from your…”
Kaufman: University is unnecessary for 90% of modern professions
“In 90 plus cases of modern professions, you can study on your own, and you can do it in a fraction of the time.”
Lemkin: The 'AI slow roll' is the biggest threat to B2B SaaS
“I call it the AI slow roll, and I think it's the number one thing killing B to B companies is the AI slow roll.”
Stebbings: The general London population is 'relatively mediocre'
“The greatest founders that I know are motivated by the internal fire and being in London. I push myself every day to be better. Yeah, everyone around me is relatively mediocre in terms of London, generally speaking, generally group population wise. I didn't ne…”
Jack Zhang says late-stage founders should take $20M-$30M in secondaries
“I recommend founders take enough secondary so that they can live an account for life, right? They don't need to worry about how do they feed the family? How do they support the kids? How do they, you know, buy a house? You know, I think they should, you know, …”
Hacker: European AI founders should 100% move to Silicon Valley
“If a young founder, European founder came to me, it's like, Hey, I have this brilliant idea of how to use AI or like a new model or something like that. What should I do? It's like a hundred percent. Go to Silicon Valley. A hundred percent. You absolutely maxi…”
Yamashita: Early-stage startups should not hire product managers
“Smaller companies shouldn't have PMs because the founder is playing that role.”
Lemkin: Non-Technical CEOs Taking Over Tech Companies Never Understand the Product
“All the non-technical CEOs that I've seen, especially take over my investments as outside CEOs, they never understand the product.”
Akhund: If you get a massive valuation, raise big but don't spend
“I think the mistake is to not raise enough money. Like every now and then someone gets like a, you know, like a million dollar valuation, they raised like fifty million. I think that's a mistake. Like you want to raise enough money at that high valuation. And …”
Crespo: Winning US enterprise software buyers is easier than in Europe
“A lot of people say it's harder than you think, where I think it's actually easier than you think. Because I said it's hard, yes, but it's easier than in Europe. People buy faster.”
Lemkin: VC partners with a hot hand who don't run their firm should leave
“If you have a hot hand in venture and you're not running the place, I would leave the next day.”
O'Driscoll: Spinning out allows VCs to ditch poor past track records
“The other wonderful thing about starting a new firm right now that no one will ever say, not only do you ditch your colleagues track record, you also ditch your own, right? You literally go there and go, I was at mega firm from 2016 to 2024. I did some deals. …”
O'Driscoll: Megafunds with forgiving LPs should pursue late-stage investing over seed
“If you have access to capital that's large and forgiving, which is what these mega funds have, then you should play the big balls game. Cause you're exactly right. You don't do it. You have to do less work. If it works great, you make out the same as Jason who…”
Lazarte: Writing small checks as one of many investors makes zero difference
“But the reality is, like, if you write a small check, and, like, you're one of many, then, like, you don't make any difference. It doesn't matter how smart you are.”
Lazarte: VC fiduciary duty ends at check writing to fully support founders
“And my fiduciary duty comes in at the moment where I write the check. It's like, I'm underwriting that person. It's like, hey, do I think this guy will be a good CEO? And once you're there, it's like, I'm just, I'm here to enable this guy. And like, even when …”
Nayak: AI Product Teams Should Over-Fit to Frontier Customers
“Find the customers who are really good at what they do, and then, you know, chase them, even over a fit to them as long as you have conviction that, you know, everyone else will follow.”
Stan Boland: Supplying venture capital creates company supply, not vice versa
“The causality is that if we put capital in place here, great companies will rise to the occasion and supply of companies will come.”
Garcia: Companies should price their IPOs as high as possible
“I don't buy into that. I think price it as high as you can price it.”
Mukherjee: Unpaid design partners lack the commitment needed to build products
“If the customer is not separating with some sort of cash, there's just not enough skin in the game for them to put in the time to work with you for a few weeks, for a few months, for a few quarters to build a product. So I'm very anti unpaid design partners be…”
Hoggett: $10B to $20B companies risk getting lost in US markets
“Increasingly if you are absolutely, if you are a 10 to twenty billion company, don't go to the U.S. Because you'll get lost.”
Hoggett: Prescriptive ESG reporting perversely favors extractive industries over green startups
“And there have been places where over-regulating these things has actually produced perverse outcomes, where investors are incentivized to invest in big extractive industries, for example, rather than medium-sized, scaling, green economy companies, because one…”
Green: If a company responds to VC cold calls, it sucks
“And you realize if the company calls you back, the company sucks.”
Green: DPI is the most important VC metric; marks are for suckers
“I believe I believe that, like, DPI is the most important thing, and marks are completely for suckers.”
Morin: GPUs are a clever workaround, not natively built for AI
“GPUs are, you know, are a good trick for AI, but they're not built for AI.”
Rejecting the MVP model drove Odoo's ultimate success
“It was very risky, because it took time to monetize and get to something that I could sell and everything, but now that I am looking back, it's probably what Medo do today. It's because I thought about the big picture, everything's smooth together, and it's no…”