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 20 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
Siminoff: VC Overfunding Harmed Entrepreneurs by Pushing Them Toward Wrong Goals
“It over watered the grapes and that was an unfair thing to do to entrepreneurs. It actually hurt the entrepreneurs. It gave too much money to too many people too fast and the wrong goals. And it led people who are great people into the wrong places that it rea…”
Jamie Simenoff: Early founders must project extreme ambition over raw vulnerability
“I think that's part of entrepreneurship, is you just, you gotta make it up, because when you're in your garage building a doorbell, if you really told people what you really felt and where you were at, you probably would never make it, and so you have to say, …”
Ring's $100M Funding Round Was Pulled Days Before Closing Over Lawsuit
“We have a round happening, and I get sued by someone who's very large in the business, They get an injunction against the product on me, which, you know, I will not comment on either way. We're, the investor decides, and you know, fair is fair, like a little t…”
Ring Hit -$70M Cash Shortfall by Withholding Payments to Factory Suppliers
“We probably went -50 to seventy million at one point. But that's just because we just didn't pay the factories.”
Siminoff: Printing My Personal Email on Ring Boxes Actually Scaled
“Putting the email in the box is the one thing that actually did scale at Ring.”
Siminoff Rejected a Prominent VC Firm for Ignoring Ring's Mission
“Very prominent VC. We sell comes to me and says like, when you pitched me, you totally screwed up. We never saw how good the business was. We totally would have invested. And I said, no, I was interviewing you. And you didn't pass the mission test.”
Siminoff Ordered $500M in Ring Inventory on Just $100M in Revenue
“Imagine like we went 3,000,030 1,000,001 70, To almost 500. So when we went from, like, one 70 to 500, I had to order, like, five hundred million dollars of inventory when we were, like, a hundred million dollar business.”
Ring Signed Amazon Acquisition Term Sheet on January 1, 2018
“That was going into the holidays of 2017. We signed the term sheet with Amazon on January first of 2018. So literally like, it was like a, from solving this to selling to Amazon was like 45 days.”
Siminoff: Customer Surveys Are Useless Because They Hide Actionable Product Signals
“I hate surveys by the way, I like, literally, I, in my gut, I hate them. Is like, because they don't tell you anything, they tell like, 95% of people are happy.”
Siminoff: Selling to Amazon or IPO Were Ring's Only Acceptable Exits
“I told my investors, I told Amazon, I was either going to go public or sell to Amazon. Those are my two options. And it was because the only company that I felt would really take the mission Take it and allow us to keep executing on it and stay true to it was …”
Jeff Bezos Emailed Siminoff Post-Acquisition: "Don't Let Us Mess It Up"
“First email I got the day it closed, you know, came from Jeff and said, like, don't let us, you know, mess, mess it up. You know, you, like, you know, like you are in control.”
Siminoff: Amazon Respects Its Acquisitions More Than Any Other Corporate Buyer
“Amazon's had a lot of acquisitions that have been successful, maybe more than anyone. And I think the one thing I would say is that they respect the companies they buy.”
Simenoff: Entrepreneurship requires believing in goals far beyond current reality
“A lot of entrepreneurship is like reality distortion. You have to believe in something that's much bigger and crazier than what can actually be accomplished.”
Siminoff: Richard Branson's Investment Did Not Automatically Bring Ring Customers
“I think mostly people want to put a square peg in a round hole. So they want like Richard Branson invested and they like step back and like wait for the customers to come in. And like, that's not gonna happen. Richard Branson doing a blog post saying, I invest…”
Ring Broke QVC's Single-Day Sales Record With $22.6M in One Day
“We broke the record for QVC for the year for sales in a day 22.6 million dollars in a day.”
Siminoff: VC Safety Nets Disappear When Scaling Past 170 Employees
“One 70 to 500, like, they took away the, you know, you're on the tightrope, and all of a sudden you look down, and they're, like, pulling the mats away, like, the safety net is being pulled away, because, and when we did, like, when we had that issue come up, …”
Siminoff: Founders Should Risk Repeated Betrayal to Find Exceptional Talent
“I'd rather keep getting hurt and find a few great people than never be with great people.”
Simenoff: Trying to solve every problem for everyone prevents progress
“The hardest thing I had to learn was you can't solve every problem for everyone. Because then you do nothing.”