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 20 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
Destin: Benchmark Gets Discounted Deal Pricing Due to Brand Prestige
“In fact, I bet you benchmark gets discounted pricing on most of what it does because they're benchmarked.”
Destin: Smart Workflow Automation Will Eliminate 60% to 80% of White-Collar Jobs
“We can take out 60 to 80% of white-collar jobs through smart workflow automation before we're even touching decisioning engines like AI.”
Destin: I worked at Goldman Sachs hiding the Greek deficit
“One day I was actually working at Goldman Sachs on hiding the Greek deficit through long dated swaps, and I decided I had enough of it, and I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship”
Destin: Deliveroo has almost no customer overlap with Just Eat or Delivery Hero
“We have almost no overlap with Just Eat or Delivery Hero.”
Destin: 70-80% of seed funds had 6-12 month portfolio runway
“Samir Khadji from First Republic Bank in the US is an active observer of the early stage market, and he said that 70 or 80% of the seed funds that he spoke to had six to 12 months of life for most of their portfolio companies.”
Destin: Tier-one VC funds experienced LP defaults in 2008 crisis
“LP defaults have historically occurred, even to some tier one funds. They definitely occurred in oh nine”
Destin: Stride VC Will Keep Fund Size Constrained by Design
“I'd much rather be on smaller funds that we keep constrained by design so that we can really hopefully deliver to our investors a return that are more attractive than I think what the larger funds are trying to do.”
Destin: PillPack Built Its Pharmacy Software With Just 50 Engineers
“I mean, PillPack is a company that got acquired by Amazon for a billion dollars. Guess how many engineers they have? 45. This is a tiny engineering team that built a pharmacy operating system, which, you know, the incumbents have supposedly spent half a billio…”
Destin: Naval Ravikant Created AngelList to Decouple VC Capital From Advice
“AngelList, the original vision of AngelList, because Naval hates VCs, was why don't I separate the skill set here between people who are good at investing and people who would be good advisors, and I'll break it open through a network.”
Destin: Y Combinator Can Function Without Traditional Investment Partners
“YC goes almost a step further, which is, YC can operate without investing partners, because they plug you into a network of alumni, and the network is the value.”
Destin: Data will not rapidly disrupt early-stage venture capital
“And so I think that the notion that data is going to disrupt early-stage venture fast to me is somewhat exaggerated because I mean, we did some of that work at Accel. It is insanely hard to derive signal from the very Fuzzy nature of the early stage data we ge…”
Destin: HubSpot Refused to Use Internal Job Titles for Years
“So HubSpot in Boston was famous for not having any titles for the longest time. They're titles externally, because clients care or your executive vice president or whatever, but internally, actually, they refuse to have a structure of titles.”
Destin: Andreessen Horowitz Industrialized Venture With Corporate and Recruitment Networks
“And then number two, of course, is Andreessen Horowitz. You're the badass operators who come into venture and say, nobody in venture is a true operator. So we are going to build an operating company to help build startups. And so half or more of the organizati…”
Deliveroo Is the Fastest-Growing Startup Fred Destin Has Ever Backed
“Deliveroo is the fastest growing startup I've been involved with.”
Destin: Bit9 almost ran out of money three times before succeeding
“Because some of our best companies, if I look at BitNine, one of the Atlas companies in the That is a phenomenal success story. They almost ran out of money three times”
Destin: Regretful VC investments correlate with rushed founder diligence
“The investments that I regret making Are systematically the ones where I didn't spend enough time getting to know the founders. So there's an almost perfect correlation with shit where I wish I hadn't invested, and the fact that I didn't have time to build a r…”
Fred Destin Invested $100M at Atlas, Expecting 3.5x to 4x Returns
“If you look at Atlas, I probably invested about a hundred million. You know, I think I'm going to end up being three and a half times my money, four times maybe, but it took forever for these numbers to come through.”
Destin: JP Morgan reported US small businesses have median 26 days working capital
“JP Morgan, I think, reported that SMBs in the US have a median working capital of 26 days”