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 58 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Andrew Dudum praises US administration for regulating processed foods
“I think the current administration is doing an amazing job on that issue. I really do. Right. Like the push to eat real food, the push to normalize the fact that all of the ingredients on these labels is garbage. It's chemicals. The push to educate people to a…”
Dudum: First-day IPO stock pops signal severe equity mispricing and unnecessary dilution
“The fact that a company is doubling in value the first day It means that the company was taking money as part of the IPO at the wrong price, at a price that was probably 50% what they should have been doing. And so there's a huge amount of dilution that they i…”
Andrew Dudum: Running a public company is more fun than staying private
“I might be the only person that believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.”
Weight loss is not the majority of Hims & Hers' revenue
“So weight loss is actually, you know, nowhere near the majority of this business. And I don't think ever will be just because you're continuing to expand core categories and a lot of new categories.”
GLP-1 drug prices dropped 80% in 18 months
“It's not something that's really happened in pharmaceutical history that the blockbuster drug of the century gets cut by 80% in 18 months.”
Physical infrastructure businesses are most defensible against AI models
“I think some of the most defensible businesses in the age of, you know, anthropic and open AI are businesses that actually do something physical. Like they require actual specialization and they require infrastructure.”
Dudum: Operational preparedness is unnecessary to prove product-market fit
“In retrospect, that preparedness wasn't necessary to prove the product market fit.”
Dudum: The era of building DTC brands on Instagram is over
“The days of, and I hear this a lot, the days of building brands on Instagram, I actually think are far gone.”
Dudum: Hims has pharmaceutical margins, unlike traditional DTC businesses
“You also have a margin structure that is fundamentally different from every direct consumer business, because essentially this is a big pharmaceutical company.”
Hiring non-startup corporate executives to scale is a mistake
“I think often people as they scale, maybe founders as they scale fall into the trap of trying to hire people that have seen bigger scale than them and are more strategic. And they feel like they've gotten to the point of success where now it's time where they …”
Hims & Hers spends $1 billion annually on marketing
“So we deploy about a billion dollars in marketing spend every year across the hims and hers brands.”
Hims & Hers treats over 10,000 patients daily
“So we treat, you know, 10,000 plus patients a day. We're probably the largest healthcare system in the U S. If you actually look at volume of patients treated. And now with recent markets, you know, definitely the largest globally from a digital health standpo…”
Standalone pharmacy fulfillment is not a valuable business model
“What I don't believe is that the pharmacy fulfillment part of our business independently is a particularly valuable business.”
Statins cost Hims & Hers two cents per dose to manufacture
“A statin is, you know, two cents for me to manufacture.”
Feeling close to losing control is what success feels like
“What I've found at least in running this business is, is if you don't feel like you are getting close to that line, you're probably not pushing hard enough. And so I do think That uncomfortable gut feeling where you're constantly questioning, constantly evalua…”
Launching commodity skincare and vitamins was a massive mistake for Hims
“So in the early years you know, I thought just having everything on the platform was how you win. And so we invested in, ah, skin care regiments, and we invested in vitamin supplements, and we invested in, you know, so many things that in retrospect were fairl…”
Hims & Hers is spending hundreds of millions to verticalize labs
“And that requires us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, which we're doing right now to totally verticalize this stuff and actually own the devices, the lab processing and that fulfillment.”
Food industry is a primary cause of US obesity and mental health crises
“I think there's a huge problem with the food industry. I think the government applying pressure and regulation there is a wonderful idea for people because undoubtedly that's a massive part of the obesity epidemic in the country and also probably the mental he…”
Customer acquisition costs do not inevitably rise with scale
“At scale, I think with scale, with assortment, with brand value new channels become unlocked, new efficiency grows leverage accelerates with assortment. I think it often only goes one way, but I don't think always.”
Dudum: Hims & Hers Went Public With Only 100-150 Employees
“With hims and hers, we're going public in the next couple of days. By the time people are listening to this, we might actually already be public, and the company is about a hundred people, 150 people, and that's incredibly small relative to Traditional Silicon…”
Dudum: Startups Should Hire Specialists Immediately After Product-Market Fit
“The moment you have that moment where people are willing to pay for your offering, that's where I believe the specialization is really beneficial because you're talking about experience, brand, engineering, customer service, supply chain, whatever it might be.…”
Dudum: More startup founders will choose SPACs over traditional IPOs
“And so I fully expect in the next five, 10 years, more founders to consider that route because it was not something that I had heard of and not something my board had heard of, but we just looked at it from the ground up and dissected it and ended up feeling r…”
Dudum: DTC brands should create unmonetized marketing inventory instead of bidding
“Create your own inventory. Don't bid on it, right? So go find inventory that doesn't exist. That isn't being monetized where companies are owning very valuable real estate or very valuable time or mind share and work with them.”
Dudum: Startups should scale marketing and distribution, never headcount
“I don't know if I believe there's ever a time to pour fuel on people. I believe there's time to pour fuel on marketing or business development or partnerships or different distribution channels, but I actually think that's very different from people. So I thin…”
Dudum: Silicon Valley is excessively arrogant about just building websites
“The one thing that irks me, and I think a lot of people is, is the arrogance that the Valley has. And somebody once told me, you know, at the end of the day, we're just building websites. And that's true, right? We are just building websites.”
Founders should only go public with a 10-to-20-year commitment
“I think if your business is ready from an from a predictability standpoint, and you had a long-term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those two things have to be true. I think you have to actually be able to predict your business wi…”
Leaders in growing companies must replace themselves every 12 months
“If you want to continue to scale in our organization or any organization that's growing, You have to realize that your job is changing every 12 months, right? To level yourself up to the next, next highest leverage focus area. In order to do that, you have to …”
Hims & Hers will not be first to market in peptides
“You won't see us be first to market in this category. You'll see us when we launch it, feel extremely confident in the clinical protocols, extremely confident in the guardrails, make sure that the supply chain and the quality is done to a level we are, you kno…”
Full-body MRI scan costs could fall to $300 annually
“A 500 K machine capitalized over a decade, you know, that the cost could come down to something like 300 dollars a year to do this test eventually.”
AI search growth has not significantly altered Hims customer acquisition
“You know, it hasn't had particularly dramatic changes since since, you know, some of these new AI companies have grown.”
One-off brand marketing campaigns are a guaranteed way to lose money
“Like that's just like, it's a guaranteed way to just lose money. It's a great way to feel good. And it's super fun. It's like so much fun and we've done ton of it and it's really fun, but like, that's not a business strategy.”
Great brands repeat the same core message every week
“And in fact, what makes great brands great is the fact that everybody knows why they exist, why they fight, who their customer is, what the value is they deliver. And it's because they say the same damn thing in 20 different ways every single week.”
Hims & Hers acquired at-home blood device maker YourBio Health
“So last year we acquired your bio health, which is one of the few at home blood collection devices.”
Hims & Hers offers lab testing essentially at cost
“Right, right now it's the lab testing offering. We offer it essentially at cost. We haven't verticalized any of this infrastructure, so it costs us, you know, pretty much just as much money as we sell it for.”
Most new Hims patients lack legacy EMR system data
“When you look at the patients coming to hims and hers today, the patients starting their healthcare journey, the majority of them do not have legacy data and systems within all DMR platforms.”
Hims & Hers was a year or two too slow adopting AI
“I think I was too slow to force the company to invest in completely disrupting their team processes with AI... I think customer care, provider quality, all patient interactions. I think we were a year or two too slow on, on totally changing the model of how pa…”
Declining customer retention is far more dangerous than rising CAC
“There are always ways to optimize efficiency on acquisition. There are always new channels, new brand campaigns, new, new growth avenues. But if you don't have a sticky customer and for some reason they're becoming less sticky, your product market fit, your pa…”
Dudum: Healthcare is US's last untouched multi-trillion dollar industry
“So, you know, I've been building for a long time, and it was a couple years ago that I really fell in love with the healthcare space, fell in love with the opportunity to help a lot of people, but also to digitize, I think, probably the last multi-trillion dol…”
Dudum: Hims & Hers Achieved Product-Market Fit Within First Month
“We hit product market fit within the first month or so of launch”
Dudum: Specialized executive talent seeks broader scope than past roles offered
“I think one of the things that I've found is people that have incredible careers of specialization and they've built businesses and are really experts at what they do. They always want to push and prove to themselves that they can take on more ownership. And s…”
Dudum: Hims & Hers is approaching $150M in revenue after three years
“With now just three years in, we're approaching hundred and fifty million in revenue roughly, right?”
Dudum: 90% of Hims & Hers revenue is recurring subscriptions
“90% of business is recurring revenue.”
Ron Conway introduced Snoop Dogg to Andrew Dudum before Snoop invested
“Ron Conway introduced me to Snoop. We smoked weed, ate Popeyes, and ate our vitamin gummies, and he loved the vitamin gummies and decided to get signed up.”
Hims advertises in SF Giants bathrooms and thousands of gym locker rooms
“When you look at HIMSS, you know, we're in a lot of basic channels, the Facebook, Instagram, TV, and things that are very common, but you'll also find us in thousands of gym locker rooms. You'll find us all of the bathrooms at the SF Giants.”
Dudum: Digital saturation forces DTC brands into physical world marketing
“The reality is, is it is so easy to create a brand digitally today that your customers need to see you. And this is traditional marketing one-on-one, right? You need X touch points for your brand to be digested and thus purchased to be made, right? I think in …”