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 37,600 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 974 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
Stebbings: Series B investors are offering founders $1M payouts to return capital
“You know, it is, but I'm seeing now I've seen four this month where the series B's are saying, Hey, preemptively we fucked up, but give us our cash back and we'll give you a million each.”
Emil Michael gives Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi an 'F' grade for performance
“He was a diplomat. He was able to get the company public, but in terms of hiring talent, innovating, and succeeding from a financial standpoint, you know, it's not, it hasn't happened. It's a, it's an F, you know.”
Emil Michael predicts Benchmark's fixed $435M fund model will fail
“That's why I think Benchmark ultimately is going to, is, has no innovation. Forget the reputation, which most entrepreneurs, if they do their deals, will find out about, but just not innovating stuck at four hundred thirty-five million for the next 10 years is…”
Gerstner: LPs should mark down 2020-2022 late-stage venture portfolios by 50%
“I said, I would take everything in your portfolio that received a valuation over the last two years, over five hundred million dollars, and I'd mark it down by 50%. What do you mean? And I said, well, if I look at the average gross stock in the NASDAQ, it's do…”
Mansour: The overinflated B2B SaaS ecosystem resembles a VC Ponzi scheme
“It's just the ecosystem is very hyper overinflated through a mechanism that is not too dissimilar to Ponzi schemes.”
Rabois: Building a tech company in Silicon Valley is an active disadvantage
“And I now believe Silicon Valley is a disadvantage not even neutral, it's an actual disadvantage.”
Zeev: I banned an LP who complained about rapid fund deployment
“I had a, an LP who joined in the third fund, and four months later, I tell him that you know, I'm raising our fine for, I finished, I'm raising, and he totally freaked out, and he started lecturing me on, he didn't call it what you called it, he called it vint…”
Holland: Fast never burned $10 million a month despite media reports
“The burn that's being reported by the media is not the real burn. Our burn was much lower. It was significantly lower. We've never done ten million dollars a month of burn before, right?”
Holland: Excessive burn rate killed Fast, not investor Stripe
“Having Stripe as an investor isn't what killed our company. Having too high a burn is what killed our company. There's just no other way to put it.”
Whatnot Will Have the Largest IPO in History by 2032
“We're the biggest social commerce marketplace in the western world. We've had the biggest IPO ever.”
Ed Baker: Uber secretly ran India test against CEO orders, doubling conversion
“We decided to run a test In Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”
Harry Stebbings: Most retail investors on Robinhood are incompetent
“I think most of the people who invest in there are incompetent and shouldn't be given dollars. This will definitely be taken out, no doubt. I think this is like, you know, you're empowering people who should not be investing. They do not understand public mark…”
Chris Sacca calls Facebook a "cancer" and claims its leadership knows it
“Yeah, I think Facebook is a cancer, and they know it.”
Carney: Long-Term Interest Rates Will Rise Notably This Decade
“I believe that very central banker-y answer, but I believe long-term interest rates are going to rise, notably this decade. I long felt that we were in a low for long, and I felt that for a long time. I was right about it for a long time. Now I feel that there…”
Sacca argues sunlight reflection research is essential to avoid climate catastrophe
“And so the one thing we absolutely have to do is research sunlight reflection. And so we have no way out of this without reflecting sunlight back into the solar system to buy us some time.”
Amazon and Alibaba will lose top e-commerce positions within 10 years
“I think in 10 years from now, Amazon and Alibaba will not be the biggest e-commerce companies anymore. They will get disrupted by other companies, younger companies, more creative, more agile companies, and I think people will look back at Amazon and Alibaba l…”
Ilishayev: GoPuff will be a multi-hundred billion dollar business by 2026
“And I think this business over the next five years is a multi-hundred billion dollar business.”
Conrad: Zenefits' outcome would differ if A16Z and Sacks hadn't ousted him
“If I had fought at my last company, being forced out by A-sixteen Z and David Sachs, and had stayed in place, like, if we could replay the videotape, what would the outcome for that company have been? I believe that it would have been very different”
Conrad: Zenefits investors forced his resignation by threatening lawsuits despite board control
“At my last company, I had board control and everything, but when investors sat me down and said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to sue the company, we're going to go to war with you know, suddenly you're like, crap, how do I survive that?”
Weinberg: Keith Rabois is a "giant doofus" regarding healthcare
“I think the guy is a giant doofus, and I would continue to hold my belief that he's a giant doofus, and I'll be very specific about why. I think Keith Raboy is probably a phenomenal technical investor, software company investor. It seems to me to be an amazing…”
Cyan Banister: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute crimes
“We have a DA, Chesta, who will not prosecute crimes. I just found out yesterday a friend of mine whose house was burglarized. The perpetrators were let out of San Quentin for COVID. They robbed his house, almost kicked in the door of his neighbor who had a chi…”
Stebbings: Society No Longer Fundamentally Operates as a Democracy
“I don't think we fundamentally live in a democracy anymore, because I know I don't, and I know that pretty much everyone around me is too afraid to say how they truly feel.”
Allred: The Bay Area Is History's Greatest Squandering of Potential Wealth
“I think Patrick Collison has said something about the idea that in 50 years we'll probably look back at the Bay Area as one of the greatest squanderings of potential wealth that the world has ever known, and I tend to agree.”
Peter Thiel Called Tesla a Bankrupt Idea Before Model S Shipped
“So like Tesla, I remember famously Peter Thiel's are saying it's a bankrupt idea. The battery technology will never scale. Batteries will never improve. UVs will never work. And I was like, wow, that was just before the Model S. I mean, literally a week before…”
Steve Blank: Facebook is the most likely entity to destroy democracy
“But of all the things that are probably going to destroy a democracy, it happens to be Facebook.”
Lonsdale: Silicon Valley cancel culture resembles 1970s Maoist struggle sessions
“What's really happened here is there's like five or 10% of people who are on one political extreme who've really hijacked the conversation and who've kind of pushed forward this kind of cancel culture, who have kind of pushed forward stuff that really resemble…”
Avi Meir: Business travel in 2021 will surpass 2019 levels
“I'm willing to bet That business travel will grow in twenty-twenty-one. Not based on twenty-twenty, based on twenty-nineteen.”
DHH: At Least Half of Unicorn Startups Are Morally Deplorable
“Our advocacy has been, don't fucking chase being a unicorn. Being a unicorn is a shitty place to be for most people most of the time, and the kinds of companies that come out of that that are unicorns, half or more of them are totally morally deplorable, and y…”
Abuzeid adopted a privileged white male alter ego to project confidence
“I pretty much adopted an alter ego, and this alter ego actually happens to be a white male who, you know, who is highly privileged as well, because I had observed how members of that demographic operate. Like, I see them walking into a room, and the amount of …”
Khosla: OpenAI's AGI Could Eliminate the Need for Human Work
“OpenAI is going after a big, hairy, audacious goal of building an AGI. That, to me, is worth pursuing as an investment, but also for society. It may eliminate the need to work for society, Lots of issues there, but it could be really, really exciting if it wor…”
Collin Understated Front's MRR to VCs to Guarantee Growth Later
“I always talked about the one that was the best, but also I always said that, so let's, let's say I was at 30 KMR. I would say we're at 20 KMR. So I would always give a number that's below so that, you know, if I raise it in two months and for some reason thin…”
Midha: Top VC investors should be forced to retire to protect decision-making
“Venture capital is a business about outliers, and when somebody succeeds, their opinion, and I think their decision-making gets over-indexed on their successes, which often, as you know, are outliers, and it's hard to generalize from a single outlier, and my b…”
Libin: Silicon Valley Startup Model Engineered to Benefit Top-Tier VCs
“This idea of making a startup, a Silicon Valley-style startup, the concept has been engineered to benefit top-tier VCs.”
Facebook Will Launch a Crypto Coin and Become Bitcoin's Main Competitor
“Now, I will say also that on crypto, I think that there's a high probability that the company that will really succeed in crypto will be Facebook, and the reason is that for them to launch their own coin and for them to distribute that coin and allow developer…”
Sterling calls Bratz "prostitute dolls" while noting their shift to STEM
“We have companies like the creators of Brat, who are the epitome of prostitute dolls for girls, coming out with a line of STEM dolls.”
Lee predicts an imminent, massive crash in the ICO market
“So I fear that there's going to be a huge crash in the whole ICO market sometime soon.”
Calacanis: Y Combinator teaches startup founders to be 'bullshit artists'
“What's happened now is the YC companies have a reputation of kind of being bullshit artists and that the program kind of teaches them to be bullshit artists, right?”
Mir: Early-stage startups should avoid diversity of thought in favor of alignment
“But what we don't want, which I think is not commonly supported by other early stage startups is what we don't really want at this stage is diversity of thoughts, and I know that doesn't make sense. It's a little counterintuitive, but the reason why we don't i…”
Ben Lerer: A Donald Trump Presidency Would Be The Worst US Event
“Him becoming the president would be the worst thing that has happened in the history of the United States since its inception. I think he is a racist pig who makes other Racist, sexist, misogynistic, disgusting people feel like they are allowed to share those …”
Rachleff: 90% of a VC's value creation comes purely from stock selection
“90% of the value added of a venture capitalist is finding and choosing the right investments.”
Banks spend $1B on tech because of incompetent staff
“Every bank, just to simplify it, every bank has a budget of a billion a year in technology spend, yeah? Mostly because they have an immense amount of stupid people running around doing nothing.”
Altucher in 2015: Uber will become a trillion-dollar company
“They're ultimately a logistics company where on one side are people who want to do things for money, and on the other side are people who want to pay for services. So they're going to be an entire slice of kind of the world's, you know, GDP at some point. So, …”
Teare: Economic Independence for Women Is More Important Than Voting Rights
“Well, allowing women to work would seem to be a pretty big step, even more important than allowing women to vote. Because with money comes power, and freeing women of the responsibility for individually raising their children, you know, goes right to the heart…”
Franceschetti: Eight Sleep engineers stopped writing code a year ago
“Well, our engineers stopped coding around a year ago, so since then they didn't code.”