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
IQ tests are the second best predictor of job performance
“One thing I noticed is that we also do an IQ test, and it's the second best predictive KPI on the performance of the person.”
Universal software adoption requires low pricing
“If you want to commoditize the market and have every company own your software, you have to have a very small price.”
Hyatt: VC principals care about internal promotions, not startup exits
“A principal is not actually waiting for an exit. They just want a promotion, man.”
Hyatt: Investors shouldn't evaluate AI companies by their underlying models
“I don't think you should evaluate any company by the models that are underneath it. Even model companies.”
Refusing Down Rounds Due to 2020 Valuations Is Irrational
“When I see companies sometimes unwilling to raise a round because it's going to be lower than this, like, fictitious number they have in their own head. I see this with, like, IPOs now, where, like, companies are like, oh, well, I can't go public unless I hit …”
Sivulka: Great founders have messed up childhoods, are gay, or adopted
“You can bucket great founders into three backgrounds. The most common is that you have kind of a messed up childhood. The second most common would be, ah, you're gay, and the third most common would be you were adopted. Look at like a list of all-time greats. …”
Kanji: Venture VCs aim to build scale monopolies despite regulatory resistance
“We as a venture industry have to think about how to create monopolies. Like, the regulator doesn't want monopolies, but we want monopolies. We want companies with increasing returns to scale, with deep defensible moats. You build this thing, it has this huge m…”
Shulman: Empty text box UI is wrong for most AI products
“They did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface, and it is for ChatGPT, and it is incorrect for basically everything else.”
Shulman: Scaling laws will not solve AI music generation
“For music, It's very different from text, and I think people will very sloppily look at the world of OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers and say audio is just a couple years behind, which it is, but that scale is gonna solve all these things. But unlike …”
Maples: VC follow-on returns are so bad LPs would revolt
“If the LPs knew, like if they tracked, what's the return on follow-on checks versus first checks, there'd be pitchforks and like, Revolts in the street. It's so bad.”
Hoffman: Distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of reach in media
“The importance of freedom of speech, there's a really interesting distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach, right? So, if you're standing at the local corner, and standing on a soapbox, and saying, the moon is made out of blue cheese, and the…”
Hoffman: Media platforms should attach expert determinations to false claims
“Look, if I could, through a democratic process, because I believe in democracies, I believe in collective governance, get our society to agree to say, hey, what we should do is identify some topics that panels of experts can yield To a truth determination on. …”
Hoffman: Blocking tech acquisitions entrenches monopolies by deterring startup funding
“If you want competition with those large companies from startups, Investors, say for example, I'm an investor who's gonna put a billion dollars into a company that might compete with one of the large tech companies. I'm only gonna put the billion dollars in if…”
Torsten Reil: Founder ambition matters more than regulatory or tax policy
“I actually think none of this stuff really matters that much. I think what really matters is founder quality and founder ambition. So I think for a country to be successful, they should attract the most aggressive founders. And everything else is a lot less im…”
Torsten Reil: Exceptional teams work best without process, stand-ups, or deadline forecasts
“I used to think that, that you needed to make sure that there was always a degree of process when teams work together on something and including something new. I have now learned that it's possible with exceptional people to let's, let's just let them get on w…”
Benioff: Layoffs Are a Necessary Tool and CEOs Shouldn't Fear Them
“So layoff is an important tool for CEOs to be able to use, to be able to prepare for a company for the future. And nobody wants to hit the button. Nobody wants to take the action. No employee wants to hear the words. It sends chills down everybody's spine, inc…”
Bookman: Denying founder secondary liquidity forces entrepreneurs to play small ball
“I'm not less committed now. I'm honestly able to drop back and scan the field and throw passes in a way that I wasn't before. You, it's actually a decent way to encourage the entrepreneur to play small ball. For somebody who grew up without a lot, you know, mo…”
Bookman: Reversing OpenGov's Remote Policy Because In-Office Productivity Is Far Superior
“And the reality is I was dead wrong. We're getting back into the office. The collaboration, the productivity, like, it's not even close, and it's very painful getting back into the office, and you know what is worse than that? It's not getting back in the offi…”
Bookman: Remote Workers End Up Quitting Due to Isolation and Disconnection
“It's the disaffection. It's the, I don't want to be paternalistic, but my colleague, Tiago, who is our one of our key leaders here, he said, look, people think they're happier sitting at home, and they're not. And they end up quitting like a week later. They s…”
Storonsky: Hiring experienced professional managers to scale is a dead end
“Well, I never believed it, but I was forced to believe that, you know, in order to scale the company to hire experienced professional managers, that's a dead end.”
Storonsky: Founder age 25 to 35 is the sweet spot for success
“If you look at statistics, so 20 to 25 is actually quite negative. Like, too early is a negative then 25 to 30 is, is okay. 30 to 35 is the best age. After 35, I mean, there is a clear negative correlation with the success. So sweet spot is 25 to 35 for founde…”
Storonsky: An imbalanced, hyper-focused life is necessary to achieve your goals
“Majority of people believe that our balanced life allows you to be happy and achieve your goals. I think in the reality, a disbalanced life allows you definitely to achieve your goals, so more kind of imbalanced you are, more focused on your goals, sacrificing…”
Klaus Hommels: Having one or two standout investments makes any portfolio successful
“I'm not so keen of building portfolios. If I find cool companies that make a difference, that is where the beef is. And if you have one or two of them, every portfolio looks great.”
Jason Citron calls alignment a 'four-letter word' and demands opinionated decision-makers
“I now say alignment is a four letter word. Like I don't want alignment. I want highly opinionated people making decisions and then being accountable for them, right?”
De Botton: Most parents subconsciously resist their children having better lives
“You have to be fairly settled in yourself to allow a child to have a better life than you had. I know the cliches that every parent wants that. No. I don't, I mean, I, experience does not bear that out.”
De Botton: Believing in Meritocracy Means Believing Failure is Deserved
“Because if you really believe in a world in which everyone who gets to the top deserves to get to the top, you have to believe in a world in which those who get to the bottom deserve to be at the bottom.”
De Botton: People should not bring their full selves to work
“I don't think you should bring your full self anywhere, because if we really think about what your full self is, it includes, you know, infantile bits of you when you were two, bits of you that are full of rage, bits of you that are full of envy and bitterness…”
Villig: Gross bookings is the only North Star metric that matters
“So my view is that it's the only thing that matters. And if you ask me what's our retention, what's our activation rate, what's our CAC, I couldn't tell you really any of those things because I don't think they're real, like they're completely irrelevant. So t…”
Khachab: Reaching a $1B valuation weakens startup urgency and attracts safe players
“Now the real downside to me is that it's at one billion mark, because once we become unicorn and people think, oh, we've made it. Like we've done, we, we're great now. Kind of people get less hungry. And then you get applications of people who look for a safe …”
Le Nel: Good product managers don't need A/B testing
“If you're a good product manager, you don't need an A-B test. You should be able to know what is the right product.”
Le Nel: Focusing on CAC leads to acquiring the worst customer cohorts
“There's no CAC discussion. We only talk about ROI. Because if you talk about CAC, you'll always acquire the worst cohorts.”
Le Nel: Growth marketing fails when operators rely on channel dogma
“I think it's when you start bringing a little bit of belief. I think the less you believe in, the Better it is, you know. I have no belief in anything, you know. I have no belief in anything. Like, it's true, you know, because... Well, I don't necessarily beli…”
Le Nel: Investing in brand marketing early on is a mistake
“Investing in brand in the early days is the worst decision you can make.”
Frankel: Backing successful second-time founders hasn't worked out due to hubris
“I would say generally founders who've had enormous, enormous success and exits come to the next opportunity with some degree of hubris. I speak about this personally. I sold my first business And I thought I could conquer anything. And they look at any vertica…”
Mahtani: Prior sales experience is overrated when hiring sales reps
“I believe sales experience is overrated. I think When you are a highly tenured rep, I think some people believe that. It should be weighted the most when hiring a sales rep. I don't think that is true. I think there are other characteristics that I would weigh…”
Gurski: Conducting layoffs is emotionally easier for founders than venture fundraising
“Even layoffs are simpler, because layoffs is like computation. Cut, and you're just in two or three weeks, and you continue your work. But fundraising, it's like, just like, it's each day you're getting no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and you're starting to lo…”
Gurski: VC junior screeners favor elite Harvard and Stanford alumni profiles
“Investors, they, especially in big funds you usually start your conversation not with, like, partners or mentioned partners, but with analysts or with principles. And this people usually have profile kind of Graduated in Harvard, MBA in Stanford, or graduated …”
Shah: Team quality is far more important than market in VC
“Like, there's this canonical question, I think, in our industry. Is it the market or is it the team, right? And I think many great firms would argue that it's market. In my view, it's very clearly the team.”
Shah: Pattern recognition and VC benchmarking are exercises in psychological safety
“There's so much long tail risk in a company that I feel like the exercise around pattern recognition benchmarking as just like two examples, risk mitigation as a third are exercises in psychological safety.”
Hudack: Product teams should be 6-8 people and PMs are optional
“I think every product team should be probably between six to eight people. Most of those people should be engineers. If possible, one of those people should be a data scientist. One should be a designer. And then I think a PM is optional.”
Schneider: 'Seagull VCs' distract management without providing real assistance
“My terminology from experience is there are VCs that are seagulls, And here's my definition. They fly into a room, or fly into a meeting, fly into a location, they basically take a shit, and they fly away. They talk a lot, they give work to do for other people…”
Chirls: Common and preferred shares yield identical returns in outlier startup wins
“There's a few in every fund that really matter, at least matter from a financial performance perspective. And when they really matter, the common is, is exactly the same as the preferred, is exactly the same as the preferred two, the series A, they're all wort…”
Chirls: Legal agreements cannot prevent VCs and founders from screwing each other
“My experience over the last 10 years, there's the legal agreements don't matter. There are always ways for an investor to quote unquote screw over a founder or for a founder to screw over an investor. It goes both ways. And the legal, the illegal agreements do…”
Chirls: VCs push founders to raise money for markups and promotions
“VCs are obviously incentivized for founders to think that or to be scared of that. Some ways it's a threat and there's all sorts of weird incentives in the middle, right? It's I'm raising my fund. I need to show some markups or I'm a trying to get a promotion …”
Chirls: Building a startup will ruin your life whether it succeeds or fails
“Building a startup is truly awful. It's like a truly, truly bad experience. And it will ruin your life basically in various different ways. And by the way, that's if it goes well or if it doesn't go well.”
Kolter: AI model architectures and Transformers no longer matter
“I, for a lot of my career, was thinking that model architectures really mattered, and by having clever, complex architectures and sub-modules inside architectures, you would have, that was the route to sort of better AI systems. For the most part, I don't beli…”