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
a16z paid growth prices for early-stage Character.AI to back Noam Shazeer
“My partner, Sarah led around a character AI and, you know, it was extremely early stage and, You know, we invested at a, you know, what you would call a gross stage price. But we knew that the likelihood of some degree of success in backing Nome was extremely …”
Wiz invests heavily in unquantifiable brand efforts over pipeline metrics
“And we spend a lot of our efforts on those types of things, and I have no way of tying it back to a number. And I don't really care because I think that's what really matters.”
Wiz saved millions by building internal AI tools instead of buying SaaS
“I definitely think that we've been able to save ourselves a lot of SaaS requests that asked us for millions of dollars, and I can give you names of specific products after, and just build it internally.”
Mansour: Kalshi lost team members twice before suing the US government
“The next day we came back, and we were like, we're gonna try again for the twenty-twenty-four election. And then we tried another year till the end of twenty-twenty-three. Then the government blocked it again. And then, so that's the second time. And then God …”
Lemkin: Fastest-Growing Portfolio Companies Do Not Care About Profitability
“I think in the fastest growing companies that I've invested in, no one gives a rat's ass about the bottom line.”
Shlomo: Passed on AI agent startups like Manus over commoditization fears
“I had the opportunity to invest in like this agent companies, right? Like the Manus, the, those folks. I don't like, I felt like, I don't know the industry good enough to understand if at some point this would get commoditized by the model companies. And so th…”
Max Altman admits holding Gusto past its $10B valuation was a mistake
“It might not have hurt to sell Gusto. I think Gusto's a great business, but I think, you know, they were valued at ten billion at one point, and I think they're still gonna be a strong business. I don't know if they're gonna have explosive growth from there.”
Randle: Dismissing CoreWeave as a low-margin compute middleman was wrong
“When CoreWeave was first raising in private markets, I was like, oh my god, this is, they're reselling a commodity, you know, they're a middleman, they're a broker of compute, it's gonna be low margin, yada, yada, yada. How wrong was I?”
Randle: Benchmark does not strictly adhere to fixed 20% ownership targets
“I think sometimes people confuse the inputs for the outputs at benchmark where it's like, oh, like they have to have 20% ownership and they only want to invest at a hundred posts. All these things. And I think that's, that couldn't be further from the truth. W…”
Lemkin says his last three VC investments yielded 6-8% ownership
“And the last three investments I've done are in the six to eight percent range, even though that's my rule.”
Ferriss deliberately alienates 10% of his audience to preserve his authenticity
“So I will deliberately kind of routinely get rid of like 10% of my audience by just being unapologetically brazenly myself, showcasing the things that I would not be inclined to showcase otherwise, and I find that, at least for me, that has helped to keep off-…”
Ferriss: Viral video clips with 100M+ views drove zero podcast growth
“I've had clips, shorts, that have exceeded a hundred million views. The branding of the show is there. It's clearly an interview on my podcast. There's a link to the full episode, and the impact on the long-form episode has been imperceptible. You look at the …”
Lemkin: Will not invest in Anduril or defense startups building weapons
“No one, not interested in the company personally, just personally at this point in life. I just want to do things I'm interested in to a fault, not interested in building weapons and stuff like that. Just not my vibe.”
Bouaziz never conducts scheduled one-on-ones or formal performance reviews
“I've never had one-on-ones with them. I've never truly had performance reviews with them.”
Snowflake neglected new customer acquisition for two years while optimizing for IPO
“And so we took our eye off the ball for, I want to say, like two years on new logo acquisition, and that hurt us.”
Databricks outbid Snowflake for startup acquisitions by two to three times
“They buy companies that Snowflake Has had term sheets on for three times or two times the amount of money that Snowflake is offering to buy the companies for, because there's no consequence.”
Snowflake Fired Second-Line Managers Who Couldn't Pitch the Product
“So we have fired managers last year. I went through a certification of second line managers and we fired people because they couldn't sell the product.”
Snowflake eliminated its dedicated Customer Success department entirely
“And so I got rid of customer success. Now, customer success is a responsibility of the entire company.”
Former Snowflake CRO admits making more money made him a worse leader
“Worse. Because I don't want to do the hard things. When I say the hard things for a CRO is when you're five hundred million dollars, billion dollars in revenue, getting on a plane and traveling around the world, going on two week trips away from your family.”
Feldman: Cerebras achieved higher valuation because rival chip startups had negative margins
“I think the reason we were able to raise it a higher valuation and from better investors and more money is because we had them. Right? And others who were out looking for mark, looking for money had negative margins.”
Feldman: Cerebras passed on a major China deal in 2019 before export controls
“We had a huge opportunity in, in 2019 to do a deal in China, and I decided to pass because I didn't think it was the right thing to do. Long before the Department of Commerce limited exports to China, I didn't think it was right.”
UAE Accounted for 75% to 80% of Cerebras' H1 2024 Revenue
“I think in the S-one it says and that was for maybe the first half of 24, we haven't published others, but a lot. I think 75, 80%.”
Lemkin: SaaStr team replaced 11 human employees with AI agents
“I live it that we've replaced 11 people on our team with AI agents.”
General Catalyst reinvests all management fees instead of distributing them
“By the way, we, we're not, just to say, like, in our business, we don't distribute any fees. We invest everything back in the business, and that's a deep belief that we don't want to be in the game where the partners of the funds at General Catalyst Want bigge…”
Taneja: General Catalyst regrets passing on OpenAI over corporate structure concerns
“I look, that structure, many people overthought it, and I overthought it as well, and there's a lot going on on that platform that's changing the world, and I don't have a front row seat. So, yeah, I do regret that a little bit.”
Lemkin: Telling 100% of founders with strong M&A offers to sell in 2025
“Every single founder. That I, this year that has had a strong M&A offer. I've told them to take it a hundred percent of the time.”
Lemkin: Over 51% of tech founders regret selling their companies
“In my experience as a founder, I, most, I would say more than 51% of founders regret it. I regret it.”
Mercor's customer concentration breakdown is similar to Nvidia's
“Our largest customer, I can't share the exact percentage, but the breakdown is relatively similar to Nvidia.”
ElevenLabs is considering acquiring a company worth hundreds of millions
“One that, that is, we are considering is an acquisition of another company now, which is a big company. And that company, you know, is in hundreds of millions of dollars.”
Alex Schultz: Meta is building a data center the size of Manhattan
“What we're doing in Louisiana, where we're building a data center the size of Manhattan”
Alex Schultz: Meta supported Apple against UK government encryption backdoor demands
“That's why we came out in support of Apple. That's why other companies have come out in support of Apple in that situation. Despite the fact, as companies, we've had a lot of disagreements. We supported Apple in that.”
Jason James: Tezi won't hire full-time PMs until reaching 50 employees
“Like for us, my theory was we didn't need PMs until call it 50 people or so. We actually do have some gaps. And so we have PM That's like former senior director at Slack that contributes about 15 hours a week, and it really helps fill the gaps on his enterpris…”
Lemkin: His organization spends $500K on 11 AI agents vs $12K on Salesforce
“So we're paying 10 grand, 12 grand a month, 12 grand a year for Salesforce. Nominally, nominally, nominally, we're paying 500,000 dollars for 11 AI agents.”
Deeter: Bessemer refuses to hire sector-specific investors or protect cooling sectors
“This is very much why we don't hire sector-specific investors, and we don't give you air cover if your sector goes out of favor, meaning our job's to make RLPs money, and if you're in a sector that's cooling off, you better get the hell out and go somewhere el…”
Lemkin: SaaStr replaced five human employees with 10 AI agents
“We have 10 AI agents at our little team that have replaced five humans and it's going to go up.”
Osika: Majority of Lovable's paid usage revenue goes to AI compute
“I don't give you the exact numbers, but if you look at the paid usage, it's majority, it's not everything.”
Lemkin: Success Rate Placing Veteran B2B Executives Dropped to 10%
“Listen, until maybe 18 months ago, if any seasoned B to B executive that I knew needed a job, ok, that I knew reasonably well, I'd get him a job by an email. I could reach out to someone, not even in my portfolio, extended network founders I met that I knew me…”
Databricks waited until $500M ARR to verticalize its sales team
“I didn't go vertical at Databricks until we were probably five hundred million plus, right?”
CMU Endowment Is Willing to Pay 2.5% Fees and 30% Carry
“If you're raising you know, that early stage fund, the core five hundred million dollar Series A fund, charge us your, you know, two and a half and 20, and if you're good enough, two and a half and 30. We're okay with that, right?”
Carnegie Mellon Endowment Does Not Screen VC Managers for Founder Friendliness
“Yeah, I mean, we do not, when we're sourcing and we're doing reference work, that is not something we try to dig out. Like we want the most founder friendly GPs. That's not something we source for.”
Chen: Built Surge AI V1 solo rather than fundraising $10M-$30M
“As opposed to feeling like I needed to go out and hire 10 engineers in order to build a product, instead of feeling like I needed to go out and fundraise, you know, 10, 20, thirty million dollars in order to hire, you know, more people. Again, I just wanted to…”
Stebbings invested $12M in Lovable, citing consumer brand leadership
“Why did I write a twelve million dollar check into Lovable? I think very much in the same way that ChatGPT owns the consumer brand for that front end OS for the modern consumer, I think Lovable's reached escape velocity with the consumer brand in this space”
Stebbings: Lovable scaled from $4M to $19M ARR during funding round
“Jason, when I did the last round of Lovable, it was a two hundred million price, and I did it at a four million in revenue. By the time the deal was closed, it was at nineteen million in revenue.”
O'Driscoll: Scale GP would pass on xAI at a $200B valuation
“So I think they'll achieve a very hard technical problem with very low rewards. So that's why I would pass a two hundred million.”
Galloway reached his $150 million wealth target ten years ago
“My number was one hundred and fifty million because I thought it would be hard for me to spend half a million dollars a month, although I figured out how. And four percent of a hundred fifty million is six million, half a million dollars a month. I got there a…”