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
Winning AI applications are growing three times faster than predecessor SaaS startups
“For most of these companies that we've backed, these winning apps, they're growing faster, three X faster, you know, than predecessor SaaS and cloud companies.”
Evernote's 2023 price hike caused its largest subscription churn event
“The thing we did on Evernote that produced the biggest churn was when we raised prices in 23, which is something that we thoroughly analyzed, and we ultimately made the decision to do it nonetheless.”
Evernote's headcount dropped from hundreds to under 100 after Bending Spoons acquisition
“Evernote was a few hundred people and now it's less than a hundred.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI Is in Code Red Mode, Delaying Expansion
“That's the OpenAI story from a day ago, and the OpenAI story today is almost the exact opposite. It's the code red, focus on the core, and almost like a statement that says, all the other things we've been doing, we ain't doing them now. We're just going to be…”
Lemkin: Combining Legacy SaaS With AI Startups Fails to Yield 15x Valuations
“We see a lot of talk of this, but right now we're not seeing a lot of these mashed together legacy company at hundreds of millions in B to B and hot AI startups and magically flipping it into a 20 X, 15 X era company.”
Siddharth: Chinese open-source AI models like DeepSeek and Qwen are state-of-the-art
“I think it's very impressive, like the progress that they've made in open source with DeepSeek Kimi Ketu, Kuen. These models are state of the art.”
Rory O'Driscoll: ChatGPT will succeed without destroying Google Search
“The likely outcome for me is ChatGP continues to build this compelling consumer product, can command differentiated market, while at the same time Google search does not quote unquote go to zero.”
Shlomo: AI model market will not be winner-take-all
“It's like, either it's not going to be one winner takes it all. And there's going to be like more and more companies getting into this market. It's going to be like the Chinese players that are now like changing the entire market dynamics.”
Andrew Ng: China is leading the US in releasing open-weight AI models
“China especially has been really taking the lead or, well, Taking a lead or getting up there in terms of releasing tons of really good open way models. So I would say if not, it is kind of not whatever predicted, you know, a decade ago that China AI would end …”
Andrew Ng: The AI application layer is already delivering clear ROI
“So what I'm seeing is for the application layer, there is very clear ROI. I think it's fantastic. So someone else trained these models who can build applications for, you know, a 100,000 dollars or a million dollars and start generating ROI.”
Shopify CDO Carl Rivera bans slideshows and pre-reads in design reviews
“And so what I enforce with Teams is that I never want to see a presentation, a slideshow in any of the meetings. I never want to receive a pre-read. I don't want any of the storytelling at the start. I'm basically of the view that every abstraction, every inse…”
Stebbings: Sam Altman Says OpenAI Will Hit $20B ARR This Year
“Altman says OpenAI is going to hit twenty billion ARR this year.”
Stebbings: Anthropic Projects Reaching $70B in ARR by 2028
“Anthropic projects seventy billion in ARR by 2028.”
Lemkin: Bolt Outsourced Its AI Agent to Claude and Fell to Third
“So even Bolt, which was the early leader, they're now just at number three, They don't even have an AI agent anymore. They've outsourced it to Claude.”
Randle: OpenAI has the fastest growth trajectory in tech history
“What ended up mattering is that it, you know, it's had the strongest and highest growth trajectory Of any technology company in history.”
Randle: Jasper AI reached $100M quickly then shrank due to low value
“Jasper, you know, I think it went zero to a hundred very, very quickly, but then actually started shrinking. And it was because it was sort of easy come, easy go with the revenue and they hadn't built enough scaffolding and they hadn't built enough like actual…”
Randle: Benchmark's top fund investments outperform all post-ChatGPT OpenAI rounds
“Out of our last fund, our five best investments in that last fund today held at LRP last round price are about a 60 X. We have two 30 X's and we have two 20 X's. Since ChatGPT was released, there isn't an open AI round that touches That return multiple and tha…”
Chris Degnan Is the Only CRO to Scale From $0 to $3B
“Chris is the only guy that's ever gone from zero to three billion.”
Stebbings: Harvey hit $150M ARR with 170% net dollar retention
“A little insider at Harvey one of that not so quiet investors shared with me that they're at a hundred and fifty million in ARR. Their DAU to MAU ratio is 40%, which I thought was astounding. Like, usage-wise, phenomenal. GRR, 98%. NDR, a 170%.”
O'Driscoll: Bret Taylor Forced Elon Musk to Complete $44B Twitter Acquisition
“For the second time in the last five years, he totally wanted as board chairman of Twitter, where he jammed that down Elon's throat for forty four billion dollars despite his opposition, and he won here today because he unraveled the mess and set it all up for…”
David Cahn: AI industry is at the start of data center construction delays
“One of the predictions I made last year, in addition to saying it was going to be the year of the data center in 20, 25, I said, Hey, we're going to have these construction delays. We're going to have issues now in building out these data centers. And the info…”
Cahn: Top AI researchers command $50M to $1B compensation packages
“If you're a 25 year old recent grad from an elite university who is perceived to be an AI expert, you can get a fifty hundred million dollar pay package right now. And if you are a brand name that everyone recognizes your name, you can get a billion dollar pay…”
Cahn: Microsoft walked away from two data centers in early 2025
“Microsoft walked away from two data centers and it sent a message to the market like, hey, we're not stepping up.”
Cahn: AI infrastructure build-out is mostly equity and cash funded
“I actually think that what's interesting about this AI build out is that for the most part, and let's put Oracle aside, which maybe has some debt, but for the most part, the AI build out today has been equity funded and cash funded.”
Diao: Static Meta ads convert software downloads better than video ads
“Like one example I'll share with you actually is a lot of people really want to use video content for ads these days, but it turns out that for paid social platforms like Meta, static ads still actually do a better job of converting people into downloads or pe…”
Bouaziz claims Sequoia Capital invested in every competitor of Deel
“Sadly, they invested in every competitor you can think of.”
Lloyd: OpenAI and Anthropic models beat Google's Gemini in coding benchmarks
“The two leaders are GPT-V and the Claude models, and so we measure them. Like, first of all, it's like, it's not so much gut. It's like we literally We have a whole bunch of benchmarks. We run sweet bench. We run terminal bench. Claude and GPT-V are the two be…”
Lloyd: Warp has 700,000 users, outpacing Claude Code and OpenAI Codex
“We have way, way more users than Cloud Code, for instance, or Codex. We have 700,000 users because we've been doing this for Five years.”
O'Driscoll: Target ARR for Tech IPOs Has Doubled to $400M
“We've moved from a world where an exit is two hundred million in ARR to a world where an exit is four hundred million in ARR at an IPO, right? So you're just doing your thing here, but way over there. At the finish line has receded another two or three years, …”
Databricks has double Snowflake's headcount but generates less revenue
“Look at Databricks. Their sales team is, they're less revenue than Snowflake. Their sales team is twice the size of Snowflake. Their engineering team is twice the size of the engineering team.”
Feldman: Claims of a two-year AI chip depreciation cycle are wrong
“I think people are clearly still getting value from H-one hundreds, and that's more than two years, right? So you know If you say it's a two-year depreciation, you're empirically wrong, right? I mean, they are and I think people are still getting value from A-…”
Nvidia Charges Gross Margins Between 78% and 85% on High-End Chips
“Well, because they want to get rid of the 78% gross margin that NVIDIA is charging. That's why it makes sense. Just like that. It might be, on the high-end chips, 85%.”
DeepMind's AlphaFold Has Not Yet Produced a Single Drug
“AlphaFold solved one of the hardest problems in in chemistry. A problem that had been open for years. Name a drug that's resulted from it. Not one.”
O'Driscoll: Ten of 15 year-to-date IPOs had almost no AI story
“Of the 15 IPOs year to date, 10 of them have almost no AI story, right?”
Lemkin: Lovable and Replit both reach nine-figure revenues
“And that's why lovable and Replit are in a death match. And it's very powerful. They're both at nine figures in revenue. They won't kill each other.”
Ross: Tesla's Dojo custom AI chip project was recently canceled
“And when you look around the industry, you've got a bunch of people building chips, some of them are getting canceled, like Dojo recently got canceled.”
Ross: NVIDIA will keep selling chips despite AI labs building custom silicon
“NVIDIA still keeps selling chips.”
Ross: NVIDIA Will Sell Every Single GPU It Builds
“NVIDIA's gonna sell every single GPU that they build.”
Taneja: Total venture capital value creation is noise compared to Big Tech
“When you look at the overall value created in venture compared to the Mag seven, it's noise.”
Taneja: Anthropic raised at ~20x ARR versus 50-100x for AI peers
“Anthropic this round probably was the cheapest round that got done this year on a multiple spaces. Which company was raising capital at, you know, at 20 times ARR? They're all raising capital at 50 to a hundred times ARR.”
Taneja: Anthropic could be worth $500B by next year
“So that's half a trillion dollar company, like by the end of next year. I'm not saying that's what it's going to be, but if they hit their numbers, I don't see why that won't happen. Just from, I'm just saying public market comps, like that's what those things…”
Zhang: Valuation gap between OpenAI and Anthropic will shrink over time
“I don't think that long-term necessarily we'll always see a five X difference between open and anthropic. So I guess, yeah, maybe, maybe if the question is more like, what is spread trade? I think like that, that multiple will shrink. Over time.”
Nejatian: Opendoor will not remain a solely asset-heavy company
“We will not choose to stay in a solely asset heavy world.”
Rory O'Driscoll: SoFi is Chamath Palihapitiya's only successful SPAC
“SoFi was an interesting company, very differentiated, has gone on to be Tremat's only successful SPAC and you know, a perfectly great, successful public company.”
Mercor hit a nine-figure run rate and quadrupled post-Scale deal
“We were already at a nine-figure revenue run rate, and the company quadrupled since the scale acquisition.”
Mercor pays $95 per hour compared to $30 at Scale and Surge
“Our average marketplace pay rate is 95 dollars an hour to put that in frame of reference, scale and search generally pay about 30 dollars an hour.”
O'Driscoll: 80% of venture capital dollars now go to late-stage deals
“Most of the money in quote unquote venture capital is with venture cap. It venture capital is 20% old school venture capital and 80% plus or minus late stage. What would have been fidelity growth, public investing. Right. This is where most of the dollars are …”
Lemkin: Anthropic Sourced AI Book Training Datasets Directly from Pirate Sites
“They downloaded this from pirate websites. Okay. This wasn't cutting a little bit of a corner. Okay. This wasn't claiming something that wasn't quite open source was, This is literally, guys, we got to get this rocket ship going. I need a trillion books. I'm g…”