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 15 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
Ralston: Y Combinator Weighs Founding Teams Far Above Ideas
“Well, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because my weighting is far more on the team at the stage in which I choose companies for angel investments, in which YC chooses companies to fund. I will always Pick a great team. Assume they'll figure it out, or…”
Ralston: Investors Lose When Relying on Founder Stereotypes Instead of Intuition
“I think you lose as an investor if you fall back on stereotypes, which is different, I think, from falling back on intuitions.”
Ralston: Big corporate deals usually kill early-stage startups
“And more often than not, that big deal that you're going to do kills you. And you almost never want to do it. You should almost always walk away.”
Geoff Ralston: Global financial leaders still do not know what they are doing
“The folks that really are running things and should know what they're doing, don't. And I have no reason to believe that that's not still true”
Geoff Ralston: Loosened regulations allowed banks to accumulate $1T in bad debt
“When I read about very, very, very bad debt that many banks are taking on now and then repackaging because regulations have been loosed. Another trillion dollars of this is out in the economy.”
Ralston: Product-market fit is defined by effortless organic growth
“For me, actually, there is a strikingly simple test for whether you have product market fit, and that is, are you growing? Are you growing with no effort at all? Does it just grow because the product solves such an obvious key need that it happens with no effo…”
Ralston: Startup founders should raise capital whenever they are able to
“So there's a generic answer that I give as to when you should raise, and that answer is when you can.”
Ralston: Paul Graham's Viaweb was the first web SaaS business
“They had created really the first SAS business On the web at the time, which was an online shopping cart.”
Ralston: Y Combinator Has Never Accepted a Startup Without In-Person Interviews
“I don't know that we have ever accepted anyone to Y Combinator without an in-person interview.”
Ralston: Tesla was $445M in debt during SpaceX's early launch failures
“I remember hearing Elon Musk talk about what it was like for him when Tesla was something like four hundred and forty five million dollars in debt. And the first three launches of SpaceX had blown up”
Ralston: Startup advisors almost always know less about the business than founders
“In almost every case, you will know far less about whatever business you're talking about than the founders who's in it every day and fighting the fight every day.”
Ralston: Startups should raise when able to pitch a billion-dollar outcome
“Well, the earliest round you should raise when you can make a persuasive case that you're going to be a billion dollar company.”
Ralston: Debt notes were poorly suited for early-stage angel investing
“Debt was not a great model for this. It was sort of an accidental thing that were, that was used for bridge rounds, and it wasn't really meant for angel, for equity investing, and that's why we moved from convertible notes to safes.”