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 9,132 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 128 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
Lemkin: Cognition mandated 80-hour weeks and laid off 30% of acquired startup
“Well, I guess today, Cognition laid off 30% of the folks they bought, and they offered to buy out all the other 200 employees. They gave them a nine-month package. They told them they either had to work 80 hours a week, six days a week in the office, or they s…”
Databricks rejected a $10M on-premise deal from JPMorgan to stay cloud-only
“They're like, we'll give you ten million bucks to put this, and at the time, we're less than a million, like our whole first-year target's like ten million, to put it on-prem. And Ali was like, no way, we're not doing anything on-prem.”
Databricks is growing at three times the rate of Snowflake
“And if you look at it too, right, we're three times their growth rate.”
Lemkin: VCs routinely colluded and shared pitch details in earlier eras
“There was no transparency when I started all VCs colluded. In my first startup, I would go to a VC pitch and I'd go to the next one and they'd already talked a hundred percent of the time.”
Chen: Surge AI has more daily working PhDs than Big Tech combined
“Like if you think of all the PhDs, even at Google or Meta or Microsoft, we have way more than all of them combined doing work for us in a single day.”
Cognition added roughly $80M in run-rate revenue in six to eight months
“Yeah, look, I don't want to get into exact numbers, but even with the windsurf deal aside, like not including that at all, we are basically, we've done roughly that as well in the last six to eight months.”
Flanagan: ChatGPT scrapes 1,500 web pages for every single referral visit
“Six months ago, it was 250 pieces of content scraped, and they give you one visit back. Today, it's 1500 pieces of content scraped, and they give you one visit back.”
Galloway: Young Americans transfer $1.3T yearly to seniors via Social Security
“Every year, young people transfer 1.3 trillion dollars in the form of Social Security payments to the wealthiest generation in the history of the planet, seniors.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic's burn dropped from $5B last year to $3B this year
“Seeing the, you know, the strong performance from Antropic in terms of top line growth, and then just looking at the burn, you know, five last year going to three this year.”
Lemkin: Oracle closed a $30 billion annual deal with OpenAI
“Oracle just closed a thirty billion dollar a year deal with open AI, right? An extra thirty billion.”
Lemkin: Public CEOs Privately Expect AI to Cut Half Their Staff
“That's what every CEO talks about behind closed doors of a public company. I, they say, I don't know, I need to reskill 20 to 30% of my people, but they really think I might not even need half.”
Kansu: Current AI coding tools only boost developer productivity by 10-20%
“I think my read right now is more of the latter. And also the magnitude of multiplication is way lower than like 10 X-ing things. I think it's maybe in the realm of like 10 to 20% more productivity, Of an average engineering capacity.”
Lemkin: Gorgias AI replaces 50% of agents, but ACV rises only 50%
“When I look at Gorgias, which is, which dominates Shopify for the contact center, right? They're, they have, their average customers replaced 40 to 50% of their humans with AI, and their ACV is only up 50%.”
Lemkin: OpenAI has a 67% two-year employee retention rate
“67% retention rate employees after two years.”
Lemkin: Tech executives are eager to replace bottom 30% of headcount with AI
“The basic vibe was everyone recognized 20 to 30% of their team's gonna be replaced with AI, and they're happy for it.”
O'Driscoll: Benchmark achieved 10% hit rate versus a16z's 2%
“Benchmark did something like 63 series A's and had a 10% hit rate across 15 years. Andreessen did a 454 series A's and had a two percent hit rate across the same period of time. Now in absolute numbers, they had 10 five billion hits and Benchmark had six.”
Grinda: US lacks manufacturing capacity and would lose a war with China
“Right now, we don't have the manufacturing capacity. We would lose a war with China right now.”
Hinrikus: The vast majority of European VC partners lack operating experience
“I, you know, I've said many times is that if you look at the European landscape, majority, vast majority of the European GPs have not spent a single day working in a real company. They've worked in consulting firms, banks, but they haven't worked in a real ope…”
Wilk: Short-Seller Reports Often Contain Incorrect Facts and Exaggerations
“They're actually writing research on a company to get people to short it. And oftentimes those facts are incorrect. They're assumptions. They're, you know, they can be blown out of proportion for things that, again, are just for purely for profit.”
Socher: Chat ads perform up to 100x worse than search ads
“We actually evaluated that they work about 10 to a hundred X worse than search ads and you have. Twice the cost, about.”
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are out of the venture game
“I mean, the big, I mean, the big momentum, the two biggest momentum players Of the last decade, Tiger and SoftBank are already out of the game.”
Lemkin: Acquirers in nine-figure deals aggressively circumvent VC preferences
“My limited visibility recently in M&A is that every acquirer is looking for ways to get around all the VC preference. It's aggressive. Like it was always true, but now it's like super aggressive. It's like, we just don't Even give a rat's ass in corp dev how t…”
Stan Boland: UK's £30B annual tech funding yields virtually no results
“This, 20, thirty billion a year that we pump in at the front end per annum in tech. So, like, a hundred and fifty billion over a parliament in university funding for science and tech, in SEIS, in EIS, in VCTs, in R&D tax credits, and patent box, and so on. All…”
Boland: Jensen Huang publicly berates NVIDIA staff to force improvements
“So he will tear people apart in public on stuff that they've not got command of, or he thinks they're wrong about, and he will, like, rip them to shreds, and leave them whimpering in the corner to lick their wounds but I think he then sort of forgets it and ho…”
Lemkin: CoreWeave's late investors hold a 70% two-year stock buyback put option
“The last round investors. Obviously they weren't fully aligned on the price, right? And so there's structure and I don't think this is a bad thing. It's okay for late stage investors to be more conservative on price than founders. Like, and so they agreed on a…”
Feldman: Cerebras Is First to Yield Whole Wafers in Computing History
“And that had never been done in a computer before, and that's at the heart of our architecture. That allowed us to yield and deliver whole wafers. Nobody had ever been able to do that in the seventy-year history of our industry.”
Feldman: US export controls led US VCs to fund Chinese EDA startups
“You, ah, sought to limit Chinese access to EDA tools to delay the growth of a Chinese chip market. And so U.S. Venture capitalists backed tons of Chinese companies in Shenzhen to build EDA tools, right?”
Stebbings: Klarna is not replacing all of its SaaS with AI
“And we have companies like Klarna who are saying, oh, we're replacing all of our SaaS with AI. They're not, they're absolutely not. And they won't.”
Östberg: Chinese and US tech companies circumvent or ignore European regulation
“There's a lot of regulation that is circumvented or ignored by Chinese and US companies.”
Osika: Lovable's 85% month-one retention outperforms ChatGPT
“We have month one retention that's better than ChatGPT's month one retention on paying customers, and so it's about 85%.”
Osika: OpenAI has lost all of its best talent to Anthropic
“OpenAI lost all their best talent to Anthropic”
Morin: GPUs cannot deliver latent space AI reasoning at scale
“Fundamentally, GPUs cannot deliver, deliver this, plain and simple at scale.”
Ross: NVIDIA used misleading benchmark curves to claim 30x GPU speedup
“Like, if you look at the last GTC, there was an announcement that the latest GPUs were 30 x faster than the previous generation. And when you look at how it was done, there was this curve that looked kind of like this, and then it Basically ended here, and the…”
Ross: Southeast Asian GPU deployments secretly serve Chinese firms
“One of the concerns right now is about Malaysia or Singapore, that region over there being a place where people are deploying GPUs with the wink, wink, like we're not going to rent it to China, right? But that's a belief that a lot of people are doing that. Ot…”
Odoo bans recurring meetings to avoid traditional managers
“I forbid the recurring meeting at the company. They can do meetings. But on the job, or for specific tasks, or trainings, but not recurring meeting. I mean, recurring meeting is a way to manage people, and we try to avoid managers. We want team leaders that wo…”
Ramaswamy: Databricks Buys Revenue and Has Double Snowflake's Sales Headcount
“It's very clear that they're buying a bunch of business. That they don't have to worry about things like you know free cash flow. They have doubled the number of sales people that we have.”
Ross: DeepSeek's ultra-low training budget claims are false marketing
“This model was supposedly trained on a smaller number of GPUs and a much, much tighter budget I think the way that it's been put is less than the salary of many of the executives at Meta, and that's not true. It's actually, there's an element of marketing invo…”
Ross: OpenAI accidentally subsidized DeepSeek via unprofitable API tokens
“Open AI Was effectively subsidizing accidentally the training of this model because they were using open AI, right? And, you know, rumors are that open AI may not be completely profitable yet in terms of every token in the API, like on the subscriptions maybe,…”
Ross: DeepSeek R1 proves base AI models are commoditized
“This has just made it absolutely nakedly clear that the models are commoditized, right?”
Ross: Chinese tech relies on state-backed IP theft from Western firms
“And then you look at China, China practices R D T research development theft. It's just part of the culture. And it's not just against Western company. It's against each other too. The difference is if you're a Western company, then the government Steals from …”
Stebbings: 99% of tech CEOs publicly back Harris but privately support Trump
“There's 99% of CEOs come on the show, and they either shut up, or they say they vote for Kamala, and then it ends, and they're like, by the way, I'm so Trump, I am so Trump”
Kanji: Deliveroo altered legal docs to strip Hoxton's pro-rata rights
“And then we had a weird scenario in that particular company where our pro rata rights got taken away from us, and in the legal documents, they changed the definition of who would get the pro rata, To basically, I mean, basically singling us out.”
Kanji: Female VC partners are hard to poach due to high retention pay
“There are some great women who are very capable. It is hard for me to poach them because they're very well taken care of in their existing funds for very good reasons, because there's a shortage of them.”
Riparbelli: Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the companies
“Europe has all the AI regulation and none of the AI companies.”
Pishevar: Holder's investigation report found no personal wrongdoing by Kalanick
“And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that, you know, Travis did, or I did, or there was nothing, nothing in there about, you know, him, you know, directly and the recommendation was like to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating of…”
Shulman: Quantum computing startups face fundamental physics challenges, not engineering ones
“The challenges are not they're still physics challenges. They're still like basic research challenges that have to happen here, and so it's not something where you can kind of just turn the crank and make companies out of it, and to my knowledge, all of the co…”