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 13 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
All PLG companies eventually need to layer on enterprise sales motions
“As exciting as bottoms up PLG is, all PLG companies eventually need to layer on enterprise software motions to be sustainable and enduring.”
Saper: Market pull is more important than founder quality in startup investments
“The first one is market pull. Like that is the most important thing, I think, when you're evaluating a potential investment or starting a company. The second is the founder, because it's the founder's job to figure out how do you build something defensible in …”
The New SaaS Benchmark for the AI Era Is 'Quadruple 120'
“If I were to posit a replacement for the triple, triple, double, double phrase, Maybe it's something like quadruple one 20. And what I mean by that is, yes, you should be growing very quickly, perhaps quadrupling year over year, triple quadrupling, et cetera. …”
Saper: Domain-specific LLMs will derive insights frontier models like OpenAI cannot match
“And if you build domain specific large language models using that data, you're going to have insights that even an open AI won't be able to have.”
Enterprise AI Buyers Are Using Tools to Freeze Hiring, Not Fire
“Most buyers of this stuff aren't firing people. What they're doing is not hiring new people. And so they're trying to be more efficient with whatever they currently have.”
Saper: VC partner turnover creates orphaned deals that harm founders
“And it is really, really bad for our founders. Because what happens is these founders become orphaned deals.”
Saper: VCs have no defensible reason to hold public stock without board inside info
“If we didn't have inside information, we'd have no defensible reason to hold the position. But as long as we're on the board, we have that information, you know, we can hold it.”
Saper: Revenue growth without high margins isn't product-market fit
“What that doesn't tell you is have you used AI to provide a high margin service, right? You can sell a lot of something, but if you haven't figured out a way to have a good business model around it, then it's not really product market fit.”
Saper: True market pull requires buyers having tried hacking DIY solutions
“It's not a desperate problem if someone hasn't, if your buyer hasn't tried to hack together something on their own to solve it, or if they haven't bought an inferior product to solve it, or if they're not spending countless hours themselves dealing with it. Ot…”
Saper: Enterprise software buyers purchase problem-solving perspectives, not code
“When you're buying software from a vendor, you're not just buying the code, you're buying an opinion perspective on how to solve a problem.”
Saper: AI-enabled services are the easiest model for outcome pricing
“The easiest form of outcomes based pricing today in AI is AI enabled services.”
Saper: Fragmented customer use cases create mirage product-market fit
“One of the cases in traditional SaaS is you're selling a product to a very diverse audience. Who's all using it for different things. And so you think like, oh, I've got product market fit, but the reality is like someone's using your thing for this over here …”
Jake Saper: Emergence Capital requires a 3-5 hypothesis chart for diligence
“Every diligence exercise results in a chart, and the chart is, what are the three to five what you have to believes? What is the data supporting is what you have to believe? And what is the data negating is what you have to believe?”