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 46 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Babayigit: Requiring domain passion is a dangerous Western startup myth
“I think it's a very Western centric view of the world To think that you have to be, you know, passionate about the domain that you're in. And I think that ends up actually in quite dangerous territory because a lot of people who are passionate for winning, who…”
Babayigit: VCs cannot add operational value to truly exceptional founders
“Because I don't think a VC can truly add operational value to a truly exceptional founder.”
Babayigit: True innovation comes from iteration rather than novel problems
“True innovation happens through iteration, right? You start working on something and you iterate, you do this thing one percent different, this thing one percent different, and then the aggregate impact ends up being something completely innovative.”
Babayigit worked only two hours a day late in his Facebook career
“When I was working two hours a day towards the tail end of my career at Facebook. By all measures, it was supposed to be super comfortable and, you know, whatever. I was cruising, right? I was Barely doing any work at all.”
Babayigit: Tripledot lost months of productivity to silly GDPR regulations
“We've lost months of productivity over something silly called GDPR and et cetera, right?”
Babayigit: Mobile game success comes from live operations, not creative design
“And if you look at the business as a whole, the success of a mobile game has nothing to do with how you make the game. It's all about how you operate the game. And how you operate the game is not, you know, I think a lot of times people think about gaming and …”
Babayigit: AI startups do not require proprietary data to build valuable businesses
“So you know, but I don't subscribe to a lot of the criticism about the business model because it will change. You know, you don't have to have necessarily proprietary data to create a valuable business. You can offer tools. You can offer services that really c…”
Babayigit: Most people who enter management consulting lack career direction
“Just like what most people don't, you know, most people that do consulting don't know what they want to do with their life.”
Babayigit: McKinsey is an intellectually rigid, formulaic environment
“It was a very rigid environment intellectually. There was a way to do things, and if you didn't do things that way, you would fail, right?”
Babayigit: Harvard Business School's value comes from peers, not academics
“HBS is around 900 kids every year, and it was transformative for me, not because of the things I've learned, because I didn't learn much, but I did learn by talking to people what they are, you know, what they do, who they are, what gets them motivated”
Babayigit: 35% of early Facebook mobile revenue came from three Russian developers
“There was a period of time when I think 30 Five percent of Facebook's mobile revenue was coming from like three developers in Russia at the time”
Babayigit: Facebook became overly bureaucratic and designed products by committee
“I left Facebook because I was frustrated how big it was and how bureaucratic everything was Getting, and, you know, there's a saying called, you know, a camel is, is a horse designed by a committee, and Facebook was designing, you know, camels all the time”
Babayigit: The founder of $1.4B gaming company Tripledot is not a gamer
“Triple Dot is a company that's doing quite well. But I'm not a gamer by definition. Now, it depends on what you mean by gamer, but any kind of definition you have. You know, I am not a hardcore gamer.”
Babayigit: Startup Mission Statements Are Mostly Disingenuous
“I mean, money doesn't buy you happiness, but it can eliminate some forms of unhappiness, right? And a lot of people fetishize this kind of, you know, grandiose meanings in life, and, you know, what it means to have a mission statement, and you put it on the wa…”
Babayigit: Startups must slow down at critical strategic curves
“Speed of execution allows you to do more iterations than others. Right. But there are points that this is a road, and the road has curves, and you know what? When you're approaching those curves, sometimes you have to just slow down and actually think and take…”
Babayigit: Successful founders always respond to messages right away
“The people that have, that will succeed, if you kind of look back, they'll have grit, they'll have perseverance. They're the ones That actually respond to you right away.”
Babayigit: True work-life balance means doing work you continuously think about
“Work-life balance is not true in the standard sense of, you know, you work, you finish your home, so you work, you finish your work, you go home, and then you chill. That's not work-life balance, right? If you're, you know, lucky enough to be doing something t…”
Babayigit: Entrepreneurship gets easier over time like raising children
“I think it does get easier, right? Because it's, I think it changed the nature of the problems change. It's like when people ask me about kids, you know, when you have a small kid, you worry about something relatively minuscule every single day, maybe every si…”
Tripledot mirrored its cap table to Luna Labs for existing investors
“So in our case, again, this goes back to, you know, we are always doing the right thing. I always try to do the right thing. What we did was precisely because of that, we said all people who invested in triple dot basically will mirror the cap table to Luna. S…”
Early startups need room to diversify and pivot beyond one product
“So that judgment, it all comes down to basically judgment, right? That judgment of what are you focusing on? Are you focusing on the right thing? Or you need to have some breathing room To allow yourself to pivot. If the thing, you know, you talked about diver…”
Babayigit: Early-stage startups should ignore PR and brand building
“You have to focus on execution because in the early days, you know, nothing else matters. PR doesn't matter. Brand doesn't matter. You know, It just doesn't matter. You have to be focused on execution.”
Babayigit: Technical Skills Can Be Taught in Months, Intrinsic Hunger Cannot
“You can teach marketing to anyone. You can teach pretty much anything you do. Even what we discussed, three, the art, you can teach it to a person. You cannot teach the hunger, and this is very true.”
Babayigit: Hiring senior startup talent based on pedigree often fails
“If I look in the past, it has been those cases where we've hired for etiquette. So you hire someone who's worked at gaming company X and you say, oh, wow, they're, you know, super senior. They've done this. They even, you know, check out in terms when you do d…”
Babayigit: Startup Valuations Reflect Market FOMO Rather Than Cash Flows
“Valuation to me can only be useful if it's a meaningful heuristic For future potential cash flows, right? But valuations now are a measure of what that markets FOMO is for that business.”
Babayigit: Startup Employees Will Regret Foregoing Equity for Higher Cash
“If you apply any type of regret minimization, right, to this, I think, you know, you will regret not getting that equity for your sweat, blood, and tears.”
Babayigit: UK and US Candidates Wanting Cash Over Equity Signal Misalignment
“It's a bit cultural dependent because, you know, there are parts of Europe where that's just not a thing. Like people just, people think you're trying to pull a fast one on them. If you say, I'm going to give you equity. And so it is, you know, case by case. B…”
Babayigit: Rishi Sunak has a pro-business, tech-friendly agenda
“The fact that Rishi is, you know, the prime minister out of all the kind of candidates, I actually think he has a pro-business agenda, which I really like, and he has this kind of ability to articulate a vision that is, you know, tech friendly.”
Babayigit: Japan's Pachinko industry generates more revenue than the Japanese auto industry
“The average revenue per year From pachinko is larger than the Japanese auto industry, which is several hundred billion dollars a year, right?”
Babayigit: AI reduced Tripledot's 3D character modeling time from days to minutes
“Yes. So we have, we use AI driven tools that You know, enable us to, you know, increase our productivity dramatically. So we use tools that, you know, in the old days, it might have taken us X days to build a three D model of character to be used in a game. An…”
Babayigit: Very few venture capitalists are truly long-term oriented
“Very few VCs are really long, long term people in general, right? Like you have a horizon that you want to exit and totally understand that's the business, right?”
Babayigit: I absolutely hated my two years working at McKinsey
“Spent two years at McKinsey. I absolutely hated it.”
Babayigit: Skype Could Have Dominated Far More Than It Did
“And it was dominating the voice over IP market, and it could have dominated so much more.”
Babayigit: Mobile gaming studios can win in evergreen categories like Solitaire
“The thesis was, you know, gaming will always be, I mean, I'm simplifying to make a point, but you know, there will always be a market for solitaire. And I felt that I could, and we could out execute some of the other companies that were making solitaire games.”
Babayigit: What an early-stage startup plans to build will always change
“If you simplify it to its core, what you say you're going to build, Is going to change. I don't care who says what, it will be different.”
Babayigit: Knowing when to pivot vs. persist determines startup success
“There's just no silver bullet about when to know to persist versus when to know when to pivot. That probably is the singular biggest determinant of success is.”
Babayigit: Eastern European Startup Candidates Often Reject Equity for Cash
“What I can tell you that, you know, we have operations in Eastern Europe, and I have had a lot of conversations when, you know, we may want to give someone equity, and they're like, you know, no.”
Babayigit: Lower foreign tax rates will not tempt him to leave the UK
“It's not tempting enough to upset the settled lifestyle that I created for my children, right? My children are very British, which is hilarious thinking about it now, but they are very British, and they have friends here, they have schools here, my wife loves …”
Babayigit: Gaming companies trade at 3-4x revenue versus SaaS at 10-30x
“Gaming companies are valued, you know, three, four times revenues, you know, whatever, future looking, backward looking, however you want to do it, right? Roughly. Whereas Software as a service company can be anywhere between 10, 20, 30.”
Babayigit: Gaming companies are always the first to adopt new tech platforms
“If you look at any platform from Microsoft To Facebook, to mobile platforms, to VR, AR, whatever. Gaming companies are always in the first place to adopt those platforms, right?”
Babayigit: Tripledot hires for bias for action and asking forgiveness over permission
“One of the things that we say is we want to hire people who ask for forgiveness, not permission, and that is something that is probably the single best embodiment of the triple dot recruiting culture is we want people who will do things, who will take initiati…”
Babayigit: The greatest VC value add is support during tough times
“The biggest value add, I think, that I've You know, a VC can have on a company is really just to be there for the bad times and just be a friend in the good times.”
Babayigit: Farmville sold more virtual tractors daily than real-world global sales
“I read a statistic somewhere that there was more tractors being sold in a day on Farmville than anywhere else in the world combined.”
Babayigit Turned Down 2010 Zynga Job Offer Over Bad Corporate Culture Reports
“And that element of understanding the psychology behind that actually made me interview at Zynga, and this was in 2000 10, and back then I was told the culture at Zynga was not very good. I had classmates from HBS who were working there, so I ended up not taki…”
Babayigit: Startup situations are never as bad or good as they seem
“And the biggest thing I learned at Facebook actually is things are never as bad as they seem and never as good as they seem.”