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 4,077 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
Lovable scaled from zero to $300M ARR within one year
“Where you see a company go from zero to something like three hundred million in a year. I think we intercepted them around, well, we kind of got, tried to get in when they were around 30, 30 of error, but we around, we did was around one 50.”
Stebbings: Hot AI Series A valuations hit $500M on $5M revenue
“Is I'm seeing Series A is priced at three to 500 on two to five million in revenue, but I'm finding the B at a hundred million in revenue priced at one to 1.5. It's a three X price increase for a 50 X revenue increase.”
Jain: AI coding tools have not accelerated enterprise product shipping speed
“The actual shipping speed of products has not increased, even though coding, you know, increased, coding speed increased significantly.”
Lemkin: Meta invested $900M in CRED to hire WhatsApp head Kunal Shah
“Zuck also just paid essentially nine hundred million dollars to hire a head for WhatsApp, right? By investing nine hundred million dollars into cred, right?”
O'Driscoll: Nvidia Recognizes Hardware Revenue Upfront Under ASC 606 With Put-Back Rights
“They're basically, quote, selling you the chips up front, so they are going to recognize that hardware revenue up front, and then they're giving you, as the buyer, the NeoCloud, a backstop that if you can't use that compute, you get kind of put back rights on …”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI reached $12B and Anthropic $4B in GAAP revenue
“The rate at which, you know, OpenAI and Tropic got to four and twelve billion, respectively, other way around, sorry, 12 and four billion, respectively, in GAAP revenue, never before seen, right?”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic Settled Book Copyright Lawsuit Over IP Scraping
“All the foundation models, including Anthropic, were trained on other people's IP. To the point where Antropic recently settled litigation with a whole bunch of copyright holders on books because they had, quote, unquote, unfairly, to use Dario's word, applied…”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic Letter Tells Senate Chinese AI Firms Distill Their Models
“Antropic the company said actually in a letter to the Senate Banking Committee recently that basically the Chinese open source companies are bootstrapping their development of their state-of-the-art models by effectively breaching the terms of service of Antro…”
O'Driscoll: Bending Spoons grows via price hikes and cost cuts, not users
“When you read the S one, you realize they don't get organic growth. They don't get new users. They have raised prices, cut costs, and suddenly that's being valued at You know, eight, nine, 10 times revenue”
O'Driscoll: AlphaFold won a Nobel Prize without producing a commercial drug
“The protein folding advance has collected its Nobel Prize and as yet has not had meaningful commercial success or a drug in production yet.”
O'Driscoll: Most competitive open-source AI foundation models are Chinese-based
“All the competitive models to the foundation models, all the open source models, bar not quite all, but most of are Chinese-based.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic delayed shipping its latest model due to US government concerns
“We're seeing Anthropic unable to ship the most recent model until they satisfy the concerns of the US government.”
O'Driscoll: 90% of Kalshi's prediction market activity is actually sports betting
“90% of what they do is sports betting.”
Perplexity differentiates by orchestrating across competing AI models
“And the way we differentiate ourselves at perplexity Is we don't just orchestrate across tools and files and connectors. We also orchestrate across models. That is the differentiation that Anthropic and OpenAI cannot claim”
O'Driscoll: Databricks fetches a higher private multiple than public Snowflake
“Databricks can get capital at a higher revenue multiple because they're higher growth rate than Snowflake can and on hassle-free terms.”
Foody: Mercor did not lose OpenAI as a customer after hack
“False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever.”
Felicis Offered Mercor $10B Valuation at $400M ARR
“By September of 20, 25 or say October, we were at called four hundred million in revenue run rate. And then Felisa's was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet at a ten billion dollar valuation.”
Stebbings: Anthropic Gross Margins Reached 70% With $559M Projected Q2 Profit
“Gross margin, gross margins expanded from 38% to 70%, and they're going to have a five hundred and fifty nine million operating profit in QT, QT projected.”
Lemkin: X Revenue Has Shrunk 50% Since Musk's Acquisition
“Twitter's, Twitter's just, growth has fallen off, it's shrunk 50% since he bought it.”
Feldman claims Micron achieves software-like 80% to 85% margins on memory
“Micron is producing numbers where they have 80, 85% gross margins. I mean, they're getting software gross margins on making memory.”
Feldman says top Chinese open-source AI models lag closed-source models slightly
“This is made doubly worse by some of the best open source models were made by Chinese companies. And they are exceptionally good models. Kimi Ketu, Deep Seek. When the GLM, these are extraordinarily good models. They're not quite as good as the closed source m…”
Peets: Anthropic sales organization operates on group quotas rather than individual metrics
“They have a group quota.”
Lemkin: ZoomInfo's market growth was stolen by Clay and competing tools
“Zoom Info's growth was stolen from it from Clay and friends, and it's a brutal case study.”
Weitzman: Speechify engineers must respond to messages within 60 seconds
“And we have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you've got to respond to messages within 60 seconds because you want to unblock people.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs inference costs range from $30 to $100 per million characters
“For the like standard model is anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V three fast model, it's like 30 bucks.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's internal AI 'River' performs a ludicrous amount of engineering
“If you're building a large scale AI system like we have one, which they think what river, which lives in Slack and does some Ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering now.”
O'Driscoll: Zero chance VCs return capital from blocked Manus deal
“The investors who've gotten their capital out, the chances of them having to or being willing to return that capital are zero.”
O'Driscoll: Private equity will no longer provide 3x revenue fallback exits
“You can't build a company big enough to go public. Strategics don't care. So you can sell this thing for three X revenues to fill in the PE from. That's not going to be true going forward.”
AppLovin Core Ad Business Generates Over $10M EBITDA Per Employee
“So if I just went to the core business, Our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the companies EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a r…”
AppLovin Operates Without a COO, CMO, CRO, or Chief People Officer
“If you look at our exec team, we have CEO, CTO, CFO, and general counsel. We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. Go down the list of other C levels that people might have. We don't have a CMO. We don't have a chief people officer. We don't have any of these…”
AppLovin Restricts Equity Grants to Only the Top 10-15% of Employees
“And we used to believe that every single person should have equity granted by the company. Instead, we went to a place where we said the top 10 to 15% of the company will get equity, and the rest won't.”
Masad: Replit has been stuck in Apple App Store review for months
“Replit has been on the App Store since twenty-twenty-two doing exactly the same thing, allowing people to generate or write code. And running it in a browser window. Suddenly they're saying that we are you know, we're not complying with their guidelines. And w…”
Stebbings: Anthropic SPVs are charging up to 8% in upfront fees
“Some of the package pricing on these SPVs for Anthropic has just been the most egregious face ripping I've ever seen. I mean it's like, it's just, oh, I mean like eight percent up front.”
Levie: Enterprises cannot shift AI liability to providers like Anthropic
“I promise you, you're not going to be able to blame Anthropic when something goes wrong. And so if you can't blame Anthropic when something goes wrong, then at some point it doesn't really work to tell the company, like to tell your customer, well, That, that …”
O'Driscoll: Meta lost $70B on VR after making $100B+ on Instagram
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, if you look at the big play scoreboard for that, it's like, bet a billion on Instagram, win a hundred billion plus, maybe four hundred billion. Bet seventy billion on Meta and VRAR, lose it all.”
Lemkin: Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram are stronger than ever
“Fast forward today. These are record growth businesses now, right? Google search. We started the show talking about AI overviews and other things. Google search is a better business than it has ever been as is Facebook and Instagram.”
O'Driscoll: AI labs will throttle subscriptions and hike prices for compute
“You're going to see some compute rationally, people are going to start allocating tokens to the highest, effectively the highest bidder. You're going to see a lot of throttling, like, you're going to see these plans, like, that's why they shot Sora. You're goi…”
Midha: Tech Is in a GPU Wastage Bubble, Not an AI Bubble
“We're not in an AI bubble for sure. I'll tell you that, which is the question I keep getting asked. We are definitely in a GPU wastage bubble where there are stranded pockets of compute, like billions of dollars of compute that are sitting unutilized.”
Lemkin: Elon Musk will force underwriters to meet SpaceX target IPO valuation
“I think Elon, what Elon said Publicly on X, it ain't going to be two trillion. Maybe he'll change his mind. He said two trillion was too high. So whatever his number is, I think he's going to get it on IPO day. He's going to will it into existence. The underwr…”
Jason Lemkin: AI Agents Now Create More Databases Than Humans
“Database is a world where already the agents are creating more databases than humans. We've already crossed that line”
GLP-1 drug prices dropped 80% in 18 months
“It's not something that's really happened in pharmaceutical history that the blockbuster drug of the century gets cut by 80% in 18 months.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic reaches $19B ARR while OpenAI hits $25B ARR
“Well, to be fair about Entropic and OpenAI, they have a very clear and sensible way they define ARR. What they say is they take the last, the average of the last four weeks to smooth out times to 13, because there were 1304 week periods in a year, which is mor…”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic reports gross AWS revenue; OpenAI reports net Microsoft revenue
“There was this kind of whole meme of OpenAI reports net on their partner revenue and Entropic reports gross. And what they're saying there is if OpenAI sells through Microsoft and Microsoft takes some money off the top, OpenAI only reports the net amount. If A…”
O'Driscoll: Meta will lay off employees to fund Nvidia hardware purchases
“And that depreciation is going to start hitting, and they're going to be firing people because they need to give it to Jensen.”
O'Driscoll: Growth investors will pay 100x revenue again as capital floods back
“Now the wall of money has come back in, and I'm sure growth will go to the same thing again, which is, Evan will pay A hundred times run rate revenues for late stage stuff they think is growing quickly, just as in 21 people thought they were growing quickly, a…”
Rajaram: Jasper's ARR shot from $1M to $100M before falling to $40M
“I think we saw in the first way of AI, we saw many chat GPT, like there was a company called Jasper, not to pick on them, but they went from one to 40, and then they came back from 40 to 10 or something like, or maybe one to a hundred and a hundred to 40 withi…”