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 6,239 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
Fadell: iPod's original strategy was driving Mac sales, which failed
“We're going to sell the iPod. It's going to be so awesome that people will buy Macs so they could use their iPod. We're going to sell more Macs because they're going to need to buy one to use an iPod that they're going to have to have. Well, guess what? The fi…”
Gul: Airlift will reach free cash flow in Pakistan within 6-9 months
“For us specifically, Harry, we're looking at free cash flow across all markets across the country. In our first market in, in Pakistan sometime between Q four and Q one within the next six or nine months.”
Rabois will now exclusively invest in in-person startups
“I really want to invest in only companies that are in person. So I think there's a lot of alpha there. I think in-person companies will be the successful startups. I only want to find founders who are working in person and that's my new investment filter.”
Fialkow: Distributors refused to buy 'The Dissident' over Saudi fears
“Couldn't get the film sold. It was one of the best films that we ever made, and no film company would buy it. No film company would distribute it, because they honestly were all scared of the Saudis. And it taught me a lesson. Right after winning an Academy Aw…”
Sacca: Travis Kalanick was ousted by 13 Uber managers, not VCs
“In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that's really the only force that Silicon Valley leader…”
Holland: Queensland government refused to pay Tow $17 million owed
“The government didn't want to pay for about seventeen million dollars worth of tows and impounds that we did for them.”
Whatnot Operates Without Product Managers, Jira, or Ticketing Systems
“Because we're in a world where we basically don't have PMs, there's so many decisions and bits of ownership that engineering is required to take control of. We don't have JIRA. No one writes tickets.”
Harry Stebbings predicts traditional VC round ownership will drop to 7.5%
“The days where they could take 15% are gone. It will be a new generation where they take seven and a half percent. Bluntly, alongside people like me and you taking seven and a half percent.”
Ehrenberg: Tiger Global and Coatue face horrific portfolio markdowns ahead
“You know, their mark to market now, the next couple of years is going to be horrific. They're going to see huge markdowns on a huge swath of their companies, a bunch of stuff that they had counted on to go public isn't going to go public.”
Foroughi: AppLovin will become the third-largest digital ad marketplace
“Like if you just to size it, that's Facebook, Google one, two, or in whichever order I'd have to check, but that's the third biggest digital marketplace for advertising in terms of scale that will exist.”
Harry Stebbings predicts the quick commerce market will become a graveyard
“I don't think it's going to be like a As many winners as you think it is, I think it's going to be a bit of a graveyard.”
Amazon and Walmart lose trillions annually in inventory waste
“If you look into the inventory losses and the wastage costs of the likes of Walmart, or even an Amazon, or like normal supermarket chain, it's in the trillions of how much they're losing on a yearly basis of like food and other items that are actually being so…”
Ek: US tech ecosystem outside Silicon Valley and Seattle lags Europe
“If you take Silicon Valley and Seattle out of it, the US actually would be worse than Europe if you took those two out of it.”
Cyan Banister: High taxes and safety issues drive tech exodus from California
“There's a reason startups aren't staying. There's a reason that people are fleeing. That's because of San Francisco and frankly, all of California, you can only tax people so much. And then eventually they're just like, gosh, every dollar I'm making, I take ho…”
Gumroad reached $10M revenue years after Kleiner Perkins wrote it off
“Gumroad, it took me seven, eight, nine years to get to a place where Gumroad kind of is considered, like, you know, we're at ten million in revenue doubling every year, but that's because of a macroeconomic shift, namely COVID, that just happened out of the bl…”
Venture Funds With Over Seven Partners See Returns Plummet
“I don't think venture firms scale at all at headcount. One of the biggest things I've learned in the last 25 years is that team size is essential between two and five partners max. If you get to seven, you're at your limit. If you had more than seven partners,…”
Cuban refuses to invest in venture-backed companies that buy market share
“The type of investments I won't do or don't do is ones where companies buy sales. So this is going to be a company that has to raise five hundred million to do one hundred million in sales because they want to own market share. And then they can get an exit be…”
Marks: A period of market distress will occur by 2025
“The bull market is 11 years old. If there's not one in the next five years, that means we'll have gone 16, which would be a record by a wide margin. So my guess is that in the next five years, we'll have a period of distress, and my hope is that Oak Tree will …”
UiPath is positioned to become a $100 billion market cap company
“We're in a position right now where we're one of the few companies on the planet who can realistically talk about building a business that becomes a hundred billion dollar market cap company with the product set, And the market and customers that are already s…”
Messerschmidt: Women hold just 9% of equity value in tech companies
“Women make up roughly 33% of the workforce of tech companies, yet they hold just nine percent of the equity value. Men hold the other 91%.”
Romanow: 40% of venture capital goes directly to Google and Facebook ads
“40% of venture capital dollars that are raised today end up going straight to Google and Facebook ads.”
Ward: Carta projects $600M base ARR up to $10B revenue by 2025
“Our base case, if none of our bets work out, we think we'll be around six hundred million in ARR, growing 50 to 70% year over year as a software business. If some of our more financial products that we're working on hit, We have a broad spectrum. These are hig…”
Midha: In five years, most people will spend their time offline
“I believe that most people five years from now will spend the bulk of their time offline, not online.”
Meir in 2019: Tesla will become a $1 trillion company
“I believe that Tesla will be a trillion dollar company.”
Libin: Average Expected Return for Startup Founders Is Sharply Negative
“Because the average expected return for founders of making a startup is sharply negative.”
Silagadze: Companies should measure IQ because it strongly correlates with performance
“Most companies don't measure IQ at all, and that's wrong. I mean, there's a zero-point-six correlation between IQ and job performance, and that is, in fact, if you could base your hiring decision on one factor, you could only base it on one factor. IQ is actua…”
Startup fundraising will shift to crypto tokens within 10 years
“I actually think in 10 years, some of the craziness will level out. And maybe it's not on Bitcoin, but maybe it's on another token or so, that you will see fundraisers done differently in 10 years.”
Inkinen: Type 2 diabetes can actually be cured
“I actually have to admit that after Truly IPO, I thought I'd be just advising and investing in other entrepreneurs, but completely accidentally around 2012, 13, through personal health problems that I had, I discovered that this Quite horrible and irreversible…”
Volpi: The era of large closed-source enterprise software platforms is over
“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”
Retail investors will lose a ton of money in ICOs
“So they scare me. I think there's going to be some really great ones, but I think people are going to lose a ton of money, like, and just everyday people. Whenever there's so much money going around, and people think they can make a quick buck, and there's a l…”
Allbirds Co-Founder: Amazon Profits Off Knockoffs Targeting Allbirds Search Terms
“If you look at how Amazon does, even when you're not selling on their channel, enough people have typed in all birds on amazon.com such that there is a lot of knockoffs and other, perhaps you would call it similar looking products. That are now sold through Am…”
Hargreaves: US business creation is at its lowest since the Great Depression
“Fewer businesses are getting started today than have been started at any point since the Great Depression.”
Esports will draw a larger global audience than the NFL by 2022
“I do. Based on the underlying data today and how accessible it is to people, I do believe it will be larger, certainly, than the NFL.”
Schuler: Up to 50% of tech IPOs will be flat or down
“So you'll see, I think, flat and down IPO rounds. Maybe up to 50% of the companies that are out there.”
Kevin Rose: GV deployed its entire $254M annual fund into Uber
“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”
Pompliano: Historical data shows check size and follow-on decisions don't drive returns
“The only thing that correlates to outsized returns across different economic boom and bust cycles is being early in the best deals, right? So check size doesn't matter. Follow-on decision-making doesn't matter.”
Ariba acts as a toll gate, extracting 80% of revenue from suppliers
“One of our competitors, you know, Ariba, they've for a long time gone out to these huge companies and said, hey, we will help you Digitize your supply chain, and you just got to buy our platform, and then they go and they invite all of the suppliers in the sup…”
Mutual fund private startup valuation marks are based purely on sentiment
“We're more or less at the worst possible scenario right now. We have no information rights, no liquidity. Valuation committees at Fidelity and BlackRock basically get to mark things up and down with no information, so it's basically all sentiment.”
Accel's returns were not top-tier prior to its Facebook investment
“Excel's returns prior to the Facebook fund weren't the best in the industry, and so some analyst types in the LP community were like, well, you know, should I stay in Excel or not?”
Uretsky: Apple will never match iPhone scale with another product category
“So when I read online about, you know, all of these different pundits talking about, you know, what's Apple's next big thing, my answer is there isn't one, because it has nothing to do with Apple. It has to do with the market. If you can't Find another thing t…”
Former Yahoo executive Marvin Liao predicts the company is 'toast'
“If I'm honest, I think they're probably toast. It's a one point O company in a three point O world. I just, I'm very skeptical. And this isn't anything against Marissa, but I just think it's just, it was such a mess when I left and I probably take some credit …”
Pakman: Jay-Z's Tidal is doomed to ultimate failure
“So, I think Tidal's notion of exclusive content was somewhat doomed from the beginning, and I think the numbers show the product has failed. The social receptivity was really negative. And I think it will it will ultimately completely fail.”
Lemkin: Zenefits will reach $100M revenue in 24 months
“Zenefits will go one to a hundred million in revenue in 24 months.”
Lemkin predicts Talkdesk will reach a $1B valuation within 12 months
“You know, talk desk isn't a unicorn within 12 months, then I'll leave my hat.”
Stebbings: Index dropped Town deal after portfolio company Instinct objected
“There was a conflict in venture that has now prevented a deal.
We've spoken about instinct being the AI assistant that's raised from index and benchmark.
Well, there's another AI assistant called town, which we just had on the show and index.
Were going to …”
Stebbings: Instinct raised at a $2.5 billion valuation without monetization
“Instinct raised at two and a half billion dollars with no monetization.”