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 31 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
Rauch: AI will lead to the creation of more user interfaces
“Our point of view is that now people will be creating a lot more of those UIs.”
Rauch: AI software requires more UI than traditional deterministic software
“Like, that's what I mean by it's actually giving you more UI, not less, because it's uncertain about what it is that you actually want. So it needs to give you more choices.”
Rauch: Software startups defeat incumbents by offering radically simpler products
“The entry players can win because they do a lot less and because it's so disruptive, then the incumbent has to say, holy crap, we have to delete everything. I feel so invested. I crafted every icon. I crafted every menu. I crafted every piece of documentation …”
Rauch: AI wave will yield major IPOs like Web 2.0
“My prediction is just like what happened with web two by now, where you have, because of the platform shift toward mobile and social, you have countless successful IPOs from that generation. You have the Ubers, you have the Airbnbs, you have the Facebooks. We'…”
Rauch: San Francisco still holds a significant advantage for startups
“But in this specific place, I still think that SF has a significant advantage, but it's not the only place in which you can do things like this.”
Rauch: Only immigrants deeply appreciate host countries' unique qualities
“I truly believe that only immigrants can have a very in-depth appreciation for the unique qualities of the place that they immigrate into.”
Rauch: US system coalesces into fairness better than Argentina's
“And I noticed that even though like things can be in the short term, unjust, I think the system coalesces into fairness and justice much more frequently here than where I come from.”
Rauch: Application user experience matters far more than back-end implementation
“The thing that matters the most is the look and feel and the Capability of the application, the device, and then how you make that happen. I couldn't care less as an end user, right?”
Rauch: Overweighting big-tech resume credentials was a past hiring mistake
“Sometimes I've placed more weight than I should have on this stellar linked list of awesome brands that you worked at. I did X at, let's just name random companies for the sake of it. Apple, Google, Amazon Netflix. And you look at that and you're like, well, f…”
Rauch: Providing UI choices generates feedback data to improve AI models
“Another easy to dismiss thing about the brilliance of some of those products is that because they are giving you choices, they're now feeding data back into the system to make it better in the next iteration.”
Rauch: Single-model software businesses will become less popular over time
“My maybe narrative violation is that businesses that only do one half of the equation Are gonna become less and less popular over time.”
Rauch: Painful problems where trust is the main barrier signal big opportunities
“When you know that the problem is so painful, but your only hesitation is whether you can offload it to somebody, there might be a huge opportunity there.”
Rauch: Individual achievement is bounded by underlying infrastructure
“What you can do in your lifetime will be a function of the underlying infrastructure that you're given. And if you're not given that infrastructure, the best thing that you can do is move to where you can find that.”
Rauch: Vercel evaluates talent and acquisitions by tangible public creations
“How I evaluate folks that want to join the company or companies that we acquire or folks that we reach out to is that what are they putting out into the world that is tangible? What can I use? What hyperlinks have you shared with the world about your creations…”
Rauch: Writing serves as the front end to a candidate's mind
“Your writing could be that front end to your mind.”
Rauch: Conceptual understanding helps leaders separate storytellers from real technical executors
“Like, I think being able to dive into like the absolute depth of the problem is, is something that everyone should be able to do. That doesn't mean that you have the complete texture But you have the ability to, I think really what you need is the conceptual u…”
Rauch: Generation's best products will feature deceptively simple interfaces hiding complexity
“I do think that a lot of those will be This deceptively simple things where the interface of the user is just magical and the company took on the burden, right?”
Rauch: Startups competing with incumbents like AWS must offer simplification
“And certainly if you're trying to compete with them, you're not going to replicate their approach. You're going to try to bring a simplification to the market.”
Rauch: Apple succeeds by ignoring trends and picking battles
“Like this is something that Apple does remarkably well because they don't react to every trend that emerges. They pick their battles.”
Rauch: Minimize experiment blast radius to balance velocity and quality
“You can find the ways of reducing the blast radius of your experimentation such that when it's the time that you bring the product to everybody, you've accumulated enough evidence of success that you have an overwhelming amount of confidence in what you're bri…”
Rauch: CEO role is setting quality standards, not inspecting every project
“I'm not the one that is like going after every single project and applying this rigorous testing. You know what I mean? I'm the one that is saying, this is the bar. These are some of the techniques. These are some of the stories.”
Rauch: Concrete past examples are essential to ship fast with high quality
“I think if you don't have those stories that you can actually give people, like, it almost sounds like, it sounds like, it sounds so contradictory, That you could move fast and ship with high quality, that if you cannot offer people those stories of like, this…”
Rauch: Next-gen apps like Notion and Figma will look completely different
“So if I have to create the next notion, the next superhuman, the next figma, My bet is that it certainly is going to look completely different because before I would reach for what I would call like software one point no solutions.”
Rauch: Great companies are defined by how many ideas they reject
“What makes a company good is how much they reject over time, how many things they say no to, how many attract, seemingly attractive on the surface ideas they rule out before they decide, yes, that's the one that goes to market.”
Rauch: Most successful AI systems are suggestive rather than authoritative
“And notice that a lot of the successful AI systems so far have been in the realm of being suggestive rather than authoritative.”
Rauch: Unsupervised AI agent products have yielded few success stories
“When it gets into the realm of authoritative, like agents, like I'm just going to let an agent go into the world and act on my behalf. Without supervision, we haven't seen a lot of products that are successful in that space.”
Rauch: AI will accelerate hybrid SaaS pricing combining per-seat and consumption
“So I think we're going to see a lot more of these hybrid models where You give me a baseline of utility, but it can also burst to utilize more of what you can automate for me, if that makes sense.”
Rauch: Microsoft Azure has capitulated to become a Linux-first cloud
“Azure is a Linux-first cloud, as opposed to a Windows Server-first cloud, right?”
Rauch: Llama is nowhere near as capable as GPT-4
“Right now, Llama is not as good as GPT-IV. Not even close.”
Rauch: A two-year technology advantage in tech is lethal for competitors
“Even a two year advantage in technology can be lethal. Meaning like two years in tech is very hard to overcome. Five years in tech, It's just exponential. 10 years, like, good luck catching up to that company if they got, for whatever reason, you ignore their …”
Vercel is shifting products toward natural language, text-prompted interfaces
“With some of our products. We're basically going in that direction, right? Like what used to be dragging and dropping and like spending like hours or going into a text editor and like, Going through like all these auto completions and like errors, and now it's…”