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
Lemkin: VCs will increasingly offer bad deal structures to win competitive rounds
“We will see deal structures that are objectively bad for the company done more and more often to win deals, whatever it takes.”
Greze predicts users will trust AI agents to autonomously share personal data
“I think you'll trust your agent to decide what data to share with other people without you intervening in five years.”
Greze: LLMs will replace human security teams in classifying and gating data
“As opposed to having humans in your compliance and security team over time, label data and decide what goes where and what can be accessed. I think we'll just start to trust LLMs to do that.”
Stebbings: OpenAI fumbled voice AI due to poor management and hiring
“Well, I think with all candor, that's because of incredibly poor management. And hiring, and that was theirs to take, and they fumbled the bag across every spectrum.”
Stebbings predicts Meta's stock price would rise if Mark Zuckerberg departed
“If Zuck expired, Meta's stock price would increase.”
Weitzman says GPU analysis helped identify and solve his father's prostate cancer
“It's already solved my dad's prostate cancer, because I figured out with a bunch of help from other people how to use GPUs to identify where in his body the lesion was.”
Cognition Reportedly Raising at $46B Valuation With $1.6B Projected ARR
“Cognition raising round at forty six billion dollars reportedly. They will end the year at 1.6 billion in ARR. Currently doing 800 to 900.”
Most European Point-Solution Startups Will Fail in the US Market
“And that's why your European startups, most of them are going to fail at least in the U S because they can't do much more with more, right? They're going to fail. Their little point solutions are just going to disappear in six months. We don't need those littl…”
Reyes: Model training and self-improvement will not stay exclusive to frontier labs
“And so I think that right now the, there's like a couple of companies that claim that, like, recursive self-improvement and model training will be only their domain. And I think in reality, many businesses will have access to that technology via software servi…”
Reyes: Frontier labs must pursue regulatory capture or multi-model architectures
“Part of what needs to happen in order to make these
companies like Anthropica and OpenAI realize the value is they either A, which they're pursuing, have to go through regulatory capture, in which case they go and they tell, they sort of scare politicians int…”
Reyes: Major AI model providers explicitly plan to compete with customers
“At least, you know, two of the largest companies that provide models today have explicitly said, we are going to go after every single one of these industries and businesses that we provide like intelligence for.”
Reyes: Labeling open-source AI 'Chinese models' is a frontier lab psyop
“I think calling open source models Chinese models is a psyop by the frontier labs to basically trick people into thinking that they're scary and otherize them.”
Reyes: Chinese AI models show no unique security backdoors versus US models
“For me, the Chinese models specifically have demonstrated no examples where they have some sort of security risk or backdoor compared to American models.”
Reyes: OpenAI and Anthropic are currently in the Netscape and Yahoo era
“We are probably in like the Yahoo era where we don't actually have, or at least widely recognize The Googles of the world, or like the sort of the thing that comes after. And so today, when I look at OpenAI and Anthropic, there are, I think, more analogies to …”
Lemkin: A $9B exit is not enough for seed investing in 2026
“Nine billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026.”
Stebbings: Mercor Crosses $2B ARR and Raises at $20B Valuation
“I'm an investor in McCaw. I never thought this would be as big as it has got as quickly as hit, as it has done. It's crossing out two, two and a half billion ARR. They're doing a new round led by General Catalyst at twenty billion.”
Stebbings: Surge AI at $3.5B ARR, Mercor $2.5B, Handshake $1B, Micro1 $500M
“Surge are doing three, three and a half. McCaw are doing two and a half. Handshaker doing one. Micro One are doing half.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI will IPO later and lower than Anthropic
“The rank, the most, the big picture fact is the ranking has changed, and you're now number two. So you will go out later then and a lower price than the other guys, unless you change the trajectory massively.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic's $30 Trillion TAM Target Is 'Delusional'
“I just say on Tropic and the Wall Street Journal, they believe their TAM is 30 trillion. And I, and then I say to myself, oh, I remember everyone when they're doing really well gets slightly delusional. Your time is, you know, the entire US GDP.”
Lemkin: Workers Will Threaten to Quit Without Continuous AI Agents
“Next year, there's going to be backlash. I can see it in my best portfolio companies where we can't go back anymore. We can't live. We can't go back in time. And I need my 10 sub agents running 24 hours a day to do my job or I quit.”
Lemkin: Databricks and OpenAI IPOs will be nail in coffin for SaaS
“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”
O'Driscoll: Defense tech venture returns will suffer from market consolidation
“I think an area where, despite it being amazing for America and important for the world, I think the venture returns of the March might be tough will be defense, not because we don't need all these products, but because I think there's an element of that busin…”
Lemkin: Classic CS and CX software won't exist in 24 months
“Classic CS and CX won't even exist in 24 months. There's really no, there'll be commodity cheap products But we won't even need it. It's already dying and merging into marketing, sales, every, everything's becoming one agent.”
Investing in AI Labs Resembles Backing Quora Before Facebook Emerged
“I think right now, if you're going to invest in the new Neolab, you're basically investing, you know, in the Quora, in the stumble upon when Facebook X came about.”
Bek: Largest venture outcomes will emerge in mature markets over greenfield
“Ultimately what matters to you is how much ownership you have and how big the company can get. And that will be true only when that investment crystallizes in almost guarantee that will happen for the biggest outcomes in markets that are more mature as opposed…”
Legal AI Is Overfunded but Harvey Is Positioned to Win
“Probably legal. I think there's, you know, there's just so many me too's in this category. Whereas I think that the winner is already in existence. I'm obviously biased, but I think Harvey is very well positioned because they have the widest distribution. And …”
Murdock: Fireworks Is 10x Better Business Than Baseten Due to Capital Efficiency
“I bet on fireworks over base 10, 10 times better business, in my opinion, because they're more capital efficient.”
Murdock: Baseten's Deal With Cursor Yielded Scale but Little Profit
“I think cursor was pretty smart in the base 10 contracts from last year with cursor. I don't think there was much profit in it for a base 10. They just got revenue and they got scale from it, but they didn't get a lot of earnings.”
Jerry Murdock: OpenRouter's 5% markup is unsustainable and will not last
“My opinion is open router has massive amounts of transactions because people are basically lazy, right? It was easy. Okay. I need to connect to this model. I'm just going to use open router and open router charges five percent on top of that, which is a crazy …”
Murdock: Continuous learning will replace frontier models rather than bolting onto them
“They're going to replace frontier models. I don't think you can bolt on continuous learning into an existing frontier model. I think they're going to try and the early stages will look like that. But I think ultimately it'll call for a new form of architecture…”
O'Driscoll: GitHub is now a trailing edge product
“And the fact that they've lost that connection with developers, that GitHub is now a trailing edge product, is to me, over the medium term, a pretty significant loss.”
Lemkin: Dev teams not working on 2027 roadmaps by August 2026 cannot survive
“If no, if you're not into your 20, 27 roadmap deep into it by August of 20, 26 in the agentic world, your team is not good enough to survive today.”
Macdonald: In 15-20 Years, Nobody Will Own a Car or License
“Which is why I do think in some future world, maybe not five years, but 15 or 20 years, Everyone's going to be like Harry. Nobody's going to own a car. Nobody's going to have their driver's license because you'll be able to get around. And I think bikes and sc…”
Waymo and Tesla Will Eventually Have to Partner With Uber
“I think ultimately it's in both of their interests to put their vehicles on our network, even if they have their own robo taxi apps or their own one P apps, even if they work with our competitors on the rideshare side or on the delivery side. I think everyone …”
E-commerce performance playbooks are the correct B2B SaaS growth strategy
“My philosophy is that the Ecom playbook
Is the right playbook for SAS?
Because if you look at e-comm, you have every single cent needs to equal a purchase or an ad to cart.
You have hundreds of UGC creators, variety of creative, and you also have a ton of chan…”
Swulinski: Fire marketing team members who are not systems thinkers
“My hot take was probably fire most of your marketing team that is not a systems thinker. Like, stop brute forcing people in. Hire the right people into the roles because the role has changed.”
The era of no-code software is slowly ending due to AI
“The era of no code, of things that we can, humans can do without engineering resources, it's slowly winding down. And if it's in chat, GBT, man, I'm just worried.”
Enterprise software companies only pretend to offer outcome-based pricing
“No one does that outcome. They talk about it, but they just tip, they just pretend that they do it. No one puts a two billion dollar deal on the line for an outcome based resolution.”
Canva is currently worth only $12 billion in public market value
“I'd say it's probably worth twelve billion right now. 20% growth at four billion ARR in the current public markets and not decelerating. There's some sort of rule of 40 number that's better, but I'd say it's worth about twelve billion.”
Anthropic will IPO soon after pulling ahead of OpenAI's ChatGPT
“They will go public because this is peak brass ring moment, and you know, you could argue the trends in 27 are tougher. You've pulled ahead of ChatGPT, so just put a nail in the entropic pit, right? You've pulled ahead of ChatGPT comfortably, OpenAI, to a poin…”
Any startup investment not run by a founder will be a zero
“Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder is a zero. It's going to be a zero in this age. It's going to be a zero. I look across, now you, we have different portfolios, but the ones I have that are not run by founders, whether they're at twenty mil…”
Atallah: The US Remains Very Far Behind in Open-Weight AI Models
“We should. We're behind. America is very, very behind still.”
Atallah: US Enterprises Fear Frontier Models More Than Chinese Open Models
“I think they're more nervous about frontier models, usually. Part because there's just like a much, there's much more confusion around the data policy about what's like actually happening to the props that I'm sending and where they're being stored and how the…”
Stebbings: Chinese Open-Source AI Providers Are Inherently Advantaged Over US
“I think the comparative landscapes they sit in mean that the Chinese open source providers are just inherently advantaged, sadly.”
Stebbings: Scaling From $1.5M to $15M ARR Is No Longer VC-Fundable
“I turned down a company the other day that went from one and a half, and they were gonna go to five, and then they were gonna go from five to 15, and it's just not enough anymore. It's just not interesting. I'm sorry for venture. We have an opportunity cost of…”
Stebbings: The $1 Billion Valuation Has Become the New Series A Standard
“I think a billion dollar valuation is the new series, eh? And you're like, whoa, Harry, whoa, whoa, kiddo, calm down, listen to the facts. We used to do a fifty million post and hope it would become a 1,000,000,020 x, without dilution, blunt. Now, you enter at…”
Frankel: Microsoft Has Done a "Crappy Job" With AI
“So I think Microsoft have done a crappy job of AI generally.”
Angelopoulos: Chinese AI Progress Involves More Than Distilling US Models
“That doesn't mean that they're not distilling. They may still be using distillation as a sub-step in their training procedure, But it does mean that distillation is only part of the story and that there's something that those labs are doing above and beyond di…”