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 11 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
Altman: Investor help does not scale proportionally with check size
“I do think that when people invest more, they naturally end up being closer to the companies. So I think if somebody does half of your seed round versus if they are a small angel, you will generally get more time, but it's not proportionate. And to your point,…”
Altman: Replacing an early-stage founder CEO fails 90% of the time
“In the early days of a company, the replacement move is more likely to fail than succeed nine times out of 10 before the company's got a certain amount of, like, stability to it.”
Altman: Long-term employee retention outperforms squeezing extra work hours
“What I've also seen, though, is things like employee retention for long periods of time is extremely valuable. And so a company that retains employees for five years instead of one and a half on average, those employees are going to be so valuable in years thr…”
Seed Investments From Multi-Stage VC Funds Carry Major Signaling Risk
“One thing we did do that has a trade-off is we took on some signaling risk by including large funds like Thrive, And Coastal and our seed round that can cause an issue down the line where if they don't end up supporting you, it makes it challenging for a new i…”
Raising Huge Early-Stage Rounds at Peak Valuations Harms Founders
“At the very early stage of a company, you don't need that much capital and you don't need that high of a valuation. I think it can become very tempting to raise all the money at the highest valuation when all you've got is a pitch jack. And I think in most cas…”
Altman: Early founders shouldn't invest until business can run without them
“I think it does when time constraints are the dominant force. And for that reason, I think early stage founders spending real time investing is it's just too expensive. And so when, like, there are definitely things to be learned from your investing that poure…”
Jack Altman: Working over 50 hours yields diminishing returns at scale
“My experience with it was that once we got to a certain size, I found that incremental hours on Lattice were not that valuable past a certain number of reasonable hours past, let's say, 50 hours at some point. It just doesn't, more hours doesn't do you good th…”
True Product-Market Fit Manifests as Urgent Customer Demand
“What we heard once we launched a product that people really wanted was instead of sounds cool, I'll check it out. We heard people say, Hey, I need that by Monday and I need you guys to ship feature X, Y, and Z. And if you don't ship it, I'm not going to be abl…”
Altman: Polite early customer feedback during PMF search is a disservice
“When you're like trying to find product market fit, a customer who's like nodding and saying like, oh yeah, that looks really interesting. Like keep building. We'll check it out because they don't want to tell you it's not interesting. Like they're, that perso…”
Top VCs on a Cap Table Primarily Serve as Hiring Signals
“So, to start, I will say that I think it is very true that one of the most important things that great investors do for you is Is that they make other people want to join your company. And so for better or for worse, if you have miles from thrive or say benchm…”