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
Lemkin: Refuses to buy Figma stock at $12B valuation
“No, I don't see any evidence of turning, of these agentic investments working. I would rather miss, miss out on the bounce right off the hard deck than invest in something that may fall below it.”
O'Driscoll: Capping Scale's entry valuations under $400M was the wrong play
“We haven't done deals with a billion dollars, but we kept it in a 100 to three, four hundred million dollar pre-money valuation, and right now that's been the wrong play, just to put it out there, right?”
Stebbings: 20VC's biggest regret was not playing momentum in hot AI rounds
“My biggest regret with our Series A fund is not being more elastic, disregarding the Series A mandate, and just saying I'm going to leverage the brand and the access that I have, arrogantly, forgive me for that, to get into super hot companies like your 11 Lab…”
Anduril Supplies Key Air Defense Systems Countering Shahed Drones
“We're one of the principal systems to defend against that threat in the Middle East.”
Steckman: Anduril is valued at 10 to 14 times forward revenue
“I think we're like, what? 10 or 14 X forward. Something like that.”
Lemkin: Under 30% of startup executives are genuinely AI fluent
“Even of the best startups I've invested in, maybe 30% of the management team meets the standard at best. 30%, maybe less. And of the interviews I do in general, it's single digit percents.”
Rajaram has backed more dropouts recently than in the previous 15 years
“I've actually invested in more dropouts as an angel now over the last few months than I have invested in in, in, in, by the rest of the last 15 years I've been investing.”
Verna: Lovable's primary marketing cost is its freemium product, not ads
“A lot of our costs are within our freemium, not with our paid marketing, not with employees, not with marketing or sales budgets. It's with Freemium, because we view Freemium as actually marketing channel.”
Lemkin: SaaStr Built AI VP of Marketing That Led Staff Meeting
“We built our own VP of marketing literally yesterday. This week was the first time it led our human staff meeting. Our AI VP of marketing led the team meeting. It led the meeting. It summarized every single metric, every single thing the humans on our team had…”
Clements: Accel's initial Cursor investment was priced at 4-5x year-end ARR
“Actually, this company is growing so quickly that on a multiples basis, you know, our first investment was at like four times, five times year-end ARR.”
Clements: Accel lost ServiceTitan over rigid valuation caps before $9B valuation
“We had fallen in love with our envy. We were chasing this round. It was going to happen in the two 50 or three hundred million dollar range. And, you know, we had these rigid rules about like, you definitely can't pay more than six times, six to eight times fo…”
Mitchell Green: Lead Edge Capital is buying public software stocks like Procore, Workday, Appian
“We are buyers. We're buying software stocks right now. You know, a portion of our funds can be invested in public equities, so we're buying companies like Procore, Workday, Appian.”
Stebbings: Three mid-sized tech CEOs plan minimum 20% headcount cuts
“I spoke to three CEOs between 500 and a thousand people. And all three said to me that they were cutting by a minimum of 20%.”
Zinman: Monday.com's early AI features were superficial sugarcoating
“We built some AI features, but like you said, I call it we sprinkled some AI dust on top of our product. So essentially we didn't know what to build. So we built a way for people to be, build formulas using AI. We built AI blocks, AI columns, but essentially i…”
Zinman: Google AI search hit 10% of Monday.com's new ARR acquisition
“It was about 10% of our acquisition in terms of new ARR but again, Google is very transactional, so people usually, when they're searching for something, they're willing to buy at this point because the intent is very high, so we lost some of the more transact…”
Lemkin: Portfolio data from 10,000 restaurants proves AI food ordering adoption
“I have an investment in this space. I already know the answer is yes. It's not my opinion. I have data from over 10,000 restaurants.”
Lemkin: SaaStr team shrank to two while generating eight-figure revenue
“We have gone from 12 people to two people on my little team. Okay. That not only does investment, it generates eight figures a year in revenue, okay?”
Swisher: Coatue raised its public market cap target to $50B-$100B
“We have this test internally, right? Where it used to be, five years ago, we called it the ten billion dollar public company test. Can this be a ten billion dollar plus public company? That bar has changed, right, in this new world because we are tackling much…”
Swisher: Coatue avoids high-valuation pre-revenue startups without products
“I think this is a lesson that at least we've taken about ourselves from 2021 is that is not our business. The pre revenue company at a really high valuation with no product is not our business.”
Stebbings: 20VC lost seed deal to mega fund's $100M valuation offer
“We lost a deal recently to a large mega fund, and we did three on 15, and they did 10 on a hundred with no lick pref pre-anything.”
Emberikos: OpenAI serves its trained models to direct competitors
“Actually, our job is the distribution of intelligence, and this is really unintuitive, but like, we put all this effort into training these models, and then we serve these models to our competitors.”
Emberikos: OpenAI is building Atlas browser for safe enterprise agentic browsing
“And, you know, I think it's quite unusual, like in OpenAI, we're building a browser, Atlas, right? And you might wonder why. And there are many reasons why, but I think one of the key reasons is that by building a browser, we can build sort of S and by control…”
Emberikos: The vast majority of OpenAI code is now written by AI
“I don't have a percentage stat for you, but I would say, like, the vast majority of code is written by AI, and I would say that now, probably, like, most people are not even, like, opening IDEs. Maybe if they are opening IDEs to, like, maybe you want to own th…”
Emberikos: OpenAI has plenty of training data for AI coding models
“I think that from what we've seen, and you know, I would defer to my research team on this, but I feel like we feel like we have plenty enough data to build really good coding models.”
Lemkin: Fund sits at 4.5x, but non-AI startups are struggling
“When I look at my last fund, right, you know, and I see what's happening and it, the funds in good shape, whatever, 4.5 X. But honestly, like two companies are like, Massively benefiting from the current world and B to B massively benefit in accelerating. One …”
Stebbings: $8M-$20M ARR portfolio startups are stepping off the venture track
“I just see a realization in my portfolio now of companies that are in the eight to twenty million ARR range, not benefiting massively, but growing 80 to a hundred percent that are basically like, okay, we've raised our last venture dollars and we're going to h…”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna Started Shutting Down SaaS Subscriptions Two Years Ago
“And what we realized when we looked at SAS and all of these things already two years ago, which is why we started closing down SAS for us was because We need to provide our AI the best context.”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna cannot buy off-the-shelf customer support AI
“Sooner or later, you wanted to read the source code and explain to the customer how it works. You want them to provide as much context as possible to be able to give the right answers. And that's when you start realizing that it's not something you, in our cas…”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna built an Uber-style gig model hiring customers for support
“Is we actually built like our own Uber model, which means that we encourage today, we recruit our own customers, the most passionate customers that live in rural areas and so forth. And we say, Hey, do you want to work extra? Would you want to work part-time i…”
Siemiatkowski: Adyen winning Spotify forced Klarna to pivot from checkout wars
“We have been trying to compete with Stripe and Adyen for five years, and we were like losing it. Like they were just, you know, crushing us. And we were like, this is it. And Adyen had just signed with Daniel X, Spotify, my neighbor. And I was like, this is ov…”
Siemiatkowski: Claude performed a task no single human could do
“This is actually the first time I felt that AI could do something that humans couldn't.”
Acharya: a16z Mandates Seeing and Winning 100% of Target Deals
“I don't think we're allowed to believe in luck at Andreessen. We have to see a hundred percent of the deals in our domain, and that we win a hundred percent of the deals that we go after.”
Cohen: Navan's internal AI routing is shifting significantly toward Google models
“We've seen our agentic platform, Cognition, plays between models based on who will give you the best answer, and actually we saw movement much more to Google recently. A lot of the transactions with Edge, which we didn't release yet, but you know, we have it i…”
Zeev: I take zero income from fund management fees
“By the way, I pay myself zero. I don't see anything, which is very unusual. I don't know any VC in the world that has zero income. From the management fees.”
Zeev: Only one in thousands of AI customer support startups will succeed
“One, you know, one of them is going to be successful, but there's a thousand or two, but there's a thousands that are not. So I'm not, at the very early stages, I don't trust my intuition enough to know which one of the thousand is going to be successful.”
Zeev: Overpaid by 3x to 4x on every 2021 deal
“Well, I think in general in twenty-twenty-one, pretty much every deal that I did, most actually I shouldn't because these are quality companies, but every single deal I probably paid. Three or four X, what I should have, because that was the market.”
Wix CMO Omer Shai says TikTok ads and sports endorsements have failed
“I think TikTok didn't work for me yet. I think that sports endorsement in some kind of way didn't work for me as I expected it to work.”
Lemkin: High-profile tech unicorns are aggressively seeking M&A exits
“And we did an MNA review a little while ago, and I was shocked who's on the block. I mean, everyone's for sale. And I was shocked that folks worth less, I mean, worth more, much more are willing to be acquired by someone with a fraction of their revenue.”
Junestrand: Legora shifted from exclusively OpenAI to majority Anthropic models
“We are pretty diehard Anthropic right now at the company in terms of the models that we deploy in our system. So initially we were only open AI. So so most of only open AI. And now we're a majority using Anthropic.”
Stebbings: Built Early Business by Leveraging Famous People's Ego and Insecurity
“Did not have a big following at all, and I leveraged ego and insecurity of famous people and successful people to make money.”
Rampell: Led Rillet's Series B just 60 days after its Series A
“I'm on the board of Rillet. I did the Series B, and it was 60 days after the Series A, and that's unfortunate.”
Lemkin: Most of my best deals originated from cold emails
“Most of my best deals have been from cold inbounds and I have begun that journey by analyzing the in inbound, analyzing the intelligence and the quality of the founder, analyzing this. It's not an, and I've done multiple billion dollar exits from cold inbound.”
Chang: I stop giving feedback to non-improving employees until they leave
“If I, when I realize a person, if I keep giving negative feedback to a person and they haven't improved, then I just stop bothering. Then, you know, they can leave the company.”
Chang honored a $140M oral agreement over a higher term sheet
“It was roughly where we were at a 145. About one 40 actually. And we had an oral agreement with Bolton, we'll take the term sheet. And then, but we haven't signed the term sheet yet. And then later, there was another investor that came, they came and said, I w…”
a16z gives startups more leeway on gross margins today
“On the gross margin point today, I'll say this. We give a little bit more of a pass than we used to.”
a16z's best fund ever saw Databricks return 7x and Coinbase 5x
“Our best performing fund in the history of the firm is actually a one billion dollar fund. So it's a large fund, right? In that fund, Databricks has returned seven X the fund so far. Coinbase has returned already DPI five X of the fund.”