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
Technical skill is the most important factor for startup founders
“Being technical is far and away the most important criterion that sort of drives success. Basically, you can't have too many technical people On a founding team.”
SeatGeek raised nearly $100M before hiring its first finance employee
“We waited forever to hire a full-time finance person. I think we'd raised almost a hundred million dollars before we hired anyone full-time in finance”
SeatGeek can realistically be NYC's top employer brand, unlike in SF
“If we want to build a differentiated brand as we want to be the best place for an engineer to work in New York, that would be sort of a ludicrous, probably overambitious thing for us to say if we were based in San Francisco. There's just so many iconic technol…”
SeatGeek prefers PhDs and quant traders over bootcamp data science grads
“The biggest challenge sort of sorting through the data science pool is filtering the people who are sort of very serious quantitative professionals versus folks who did a boot camp. For three months and are now trying to become a data scientist. And there's ab…”
Every consumer web startup will eventually either rebrand or fail
“I think if you're doing particularly a consumer web startup, you have to look at it. It's just a matter of when, not if, because every company rebrands at some point, unless you fail.”
Board seats are immutable commitments requiring extensive founder diligence
“When you agree to take someone out of your board and raise a bunch of money from someone, just how long-term sort of immutable the commitment is. I think if a lot of founders realized that fully, they would do more work and more diligence and spend more, more …”
Achieving 100% of OKRs indicates sandbagging and conservative goal-setting
“If you're doing it right, then on average, you're averaging about 70% accomplishment as a company. And if you're getting close to a hundred, it means that you're really sandbagging and that you're not setting aggressive enough goals.”
Blogging and open-sourcing code act as force multipliers in recruiting
“I think people tend to be a little bit myopic and not invest in sort of employer brand building stuff that can actually be really impactful. So, you know, a few examples of that are blogging about the things that you're doing, open sourcing software, Both of t…”
SeatGeek acquired TopTix for $56M using an equal-sized funding round
“So we acquired a company called Toptics. For fifty six million dollars last year, and we raised a, around, it was almost exactly that amount to finance the deal.”
Twitter fell from SeatGeek's top acquisition channel to tenth
“For us, for example, the channel that was our very biggest driver back in 2013, Twitter, mobile acquisition has become probably number 10 on the list right now.”
Startups face at most two or three major strategic decisions yearly
“Each company maybe has two to three sort of major strategic moments per year at most, but they're incredibly important to get right and can be company champion.”
Lack of major liquidity events constrains the New York tech ecosystem
“The challenge, of course, the flip side of that is just the total pool of people is smaller. Even more specifically, there haven't been that many really big liquidity events, you know, sort of Google-style companies. Equity events that spin off a bunch of peop…”
SeatGeek delayed fundraising until unit economics proved highly favorable
“We waited a long time to raise money until we were really sort of irrefutable and controvertible evidence that the CAC LTV math was heavily in our favor and would be idiots not to raise more money.”