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 1,605 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 114 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
Lemkin: AI will replace half of knowledge workers in 24 months
“Half of these knowledge workers are going to be gone in 24 months”
Every crypto company offering an Earn program is a fraud
“I believe every crypto company that has an EARN program is a fraud.”
Lemkin: Coinbase's 10% high-yield crypto program is a pyramid scheme
“And even, I know Coinbase is the good one, but where are they getting this 10%? It's a pyramid scheme. It's fraud.”
Lemkin: Every venture capital firm has a fraudulent company in its portfolio
“And every VC has a fraud in their portfolio. Every single VC has a fraud in their portfolio.”
Lemkin: Will only invest in startups working in-office six days weekly
“I want small high paid teams that work in the office over six days a week. That's I'm not interested in investing in anything else. I'm just not interested. And it's not because I don't have empathy. It's because they're gonna fail.”
Lemkin: SpaceX market valuation will triple in 2026 driven by retail investors
“I'm going to take this bet that it's going to trade up three X, In twenty-twenty-six, just based on GameStoppers driving it up.”
Lemkin: Fire employees who brag about team size on LinkedIn
“Anyone on LinkedIn that talks about their team, fire them. My team this. They're all so precious about their team. Lead from the effin' front with AI.”
Lemkin: A $100 billion startup exit will happen within a year
“The big exits will solve it, right? The whizzes and the, I mean, we thought whizz was big. Now we have cursor. Now I'm going to win the bet of a hundred billion dollar exit in the next year.”
Jason Lemkin: SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic combined IPO values will top past 20 years
“The big three, SpaceX plus OpenAI plus Anthropic, their value at IPO will exceed every other IPO for the last 20 years combined.”
Lemkin: Nvidia will reach $10 trillion cumulative bookings in 5-7 years
“I think there's a high degree of confidence that most of the roads lead back to Nvidia reaching 10 trillion of cumulative, cumulative bookings over the next five to seven years.”
Lemkin: Non-engineering software categories face existential seat shrinking
“Every category that I know of outside of engineering and product is at existential risk of shrinking seats.”
Lemkin: Governments should guarantee 0% financing for AI data centers
“We have to guarantee zero percent financing for all data centers. We'll get all our money back.”
Lemkin: 900 late-stage unicorn startups generating nine-figure revenues will never go public
“And then we've got 900 unicorns that are never going to IPO. Poor guys. We have nine, we all have one or two in our portfolio that are at nine figures in revenue that are still growing and will never IPO. And there is no PE buyer for them.”
Lemkin: Fire half your team if AI hasn't reaccelerated growth
“If you haven't gotten a boost this year from AI, fire half your team right before the holidays, give them a turkey and three months of severance, but they failed. You have a, your team is not good enough. They had 18 months to ship a product that mattered in t…”
Lemkin: A Top VC Firm Will Give Sam Bankman-Fried $100M
“I don't think Rory or I would, I'll defer to Rory, but I think someone will fund him. He's smart as Rory, Rory said, like he showed the upside as well as the downside. I don't know if there's a lot of morality in the business. I think someone will give them ju…”
Lemkin Advises CEOs to Mandate RTO and Fire Non-S-Tier Engineers
“The only advice I gave to this particular CEO is immediate, like he was hybrid. So I said to force a hundred percent of people returned to office in 30 days and let everyone go, except your S tier engineers, letting them all go. Because you don't need them.”
Lemkin: AI will replace half of sales and customer success teams
“Half of these sales teams will be gone in two years. Half of these sales and customer success teams will be gone in two years because they're mediocre. They'll be gone. They're all going to be laid off.”
Lemkin: B2B SaaS CEOs should be embarrassed to conduct layoffs
“If you're a great SAS CEO, you should never have a RIF. It's called recurring revenue. You should have the ability to, I get it in B to C or D to C or X and Y and Z to C. I don't think good SAS CEO should, I think it's an utter failing to ever have a RIF unles…”
Lemkin: Startups should not hire tech workers who lack pre-boom experience
“I almost think We shouldn't hire any of these people in startups today. You have to have had some adversity or have worked before the boom or have, or you just need to flush through this and have a fresh perspective.”
Lemkin: Employees joining a $1B unicorn in 2023 will make nothing
“If as an employee, if you join a company with, in, in 2023 with a valuation over a billion as an employee, you're gonna make nothing. It doesn't matter what it sells for, you're gonna make nothing.”
Lemkin: VCs will increasingly offer bad deal structures to win competitive rounds
“We will see deal structures that are objectively bad for the company done more and more often to win deals, whatever it takes.”
Most European Point-Solution Startups Will Fail in the US Market
“And that's why your European startups, most of them are going to fail at least in the U S because they can't do much more with more, right? They're going to fail. Their little point solutions are just going to disappear in six months. We don't need those littl…”
Lemkin: A $9B exit is not enough for seed investing in 2026
“Nine billion doesn't clear the bar for seed investing in 2026.”
Lemkin: Workers Will Threaten to Quit Without Continuous AI Agents
“Next year, there's going to be backlash. I can see it in my best portfolio companies where we can't go back anymore. We can't live. We can't go back in time. And I need my 10 sub agents running 24 hours a day to do my job or I quit.”
Lemkin: Databricks and OpenAI IPOs will be nail in coffin for SaaS
“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”
Lemkin: Classic CS and CX software won't exist in 24 months
“Classic CS and CX won't even exist in 24 months. There's really no, there'll be commodity cheap products But we won't even need it. It's already dying and merging into marketing, sales, every, everything's becoming one agent.”
Lemkin: Dev teams not working on 2027 roadmaps by August 2026 cannot survive
“If no, if you're not into your 20, 27 roadmap deep into it by August of 20, 26 in the agentic world, your team is not good enough to survive today.”
The era of no-code software is slowly ending due to AI
“The era of no code, of things that we can, humans can do without engineering resources, it's slowly winding down. And if it's in chat, GBT, man, I'm just worried.”
Enterprise software companies only pretend to offer outcome-based pricing
“No one does that outcome. They talk about it, but they just tip, they just pretend that they do it. No one puts a two billion dollar deal on the line for an outcome based resolution.”
Canva is currently worth only $12 billion in public market value
“I'd say it's probably worth twelve billion right now. 20% growth at four billion ARR in the current public markets and not decelerating. There's some sort of rule of 40 number that's better, but I'd say it's worth about twelve billion.”
Any startup investment not run by a founder will be a zero
“Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder is a zero. It's going to be a zero in this age. It's going to be a zero. I look across, now you, we have different portfolios, but the ones I have that are not run by founders, whether they're at twenty mil…”
Lemkin: Open-source AI models will bypass Nvidia's CUDA platform
“He's got to go frontier and open and open is dangerous. Open doesn't need CUDA. Open is cheaper and it's lower margins. Open will bypass him, but he's got it.”
Lemkin: AI agent unpredictability will strengthen US bans on foreign open weights
“I think these models are very risky. I use them every day. I love it. And I think it's an argument to keep the open weight out of the US. It's gonna favor the ban because we can't, we have no idea what these models are gonna do.”
Lemkin: First signatories of Jensen Huang's open-weights letter are AI losers
“And if you look at who signed first, it's the folks losing. The winners didn't sign. The losers signed.”
Lemkin: Every company will suffer an LLM agent breach within 24 months
“I believe that every company in the next 24 months will have a security breach due to an LLM agent. Every single company.”
Lemkin: Almost every AI go-to-market startup buys illegitimate data sources
“Almost every GT AI agent GTM provider is buying data sources that they probably shouldn't be buying. Almost every startup that is doing GTM, they are buying, whether it's a cleanse Chinese data center, they are taking your, like, you can't be that good with da…”
Lemkin: Legacy pre-AI SaaS companies will die when their contracts renew
“I think when the renewals come, they all just die like Marketo. They're just all gonna die.”
Lemkin: Adobe's Marketo is in terminal decay and heading to zero revenue
“It is going to zero. It is, but it is one of the slowest decays you can get, right? Because moving off a marketing automation system in the enterprise is very slow, but it is without question going to zero. There are no net new logos and everyone hates it.”
Lemkin: Benchmark's flat partnership model is optimized for profit, not discipline
“This is one of these things we manufacture, like how wonderful it is. Benchmark has a flat partnership. I mean, who cares, right? It's not disciplined. It's optimized to make the most money.”
Lemkin: when a late $100M check can 10x, why did I bother getting in early
“And when everything can exit north of twenty billion, you know, it's I, even me, like I have an investment with a hundred million dollar position that took me years and years and years to get to right now. And then just watching a growth round where someone co…”
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic Lied About Books and YouTube Training Data
“Open AI, an anthropic, Kind of lied about the books, and they definitely lied about training on YouTube”
Lemkin: Microsoft's enterprise AI deployment strategy will fail
“I think this is going to fail because I don't think there is enough talent To do what we want to do in the enterprise. The idea makes sense to on a spreadsheet. It makes sense. Sad is smarter than me, but I, my today, my experience is it's going to fail with a…”
Lemkin: round-trip revenue is suddenly cool again, so everyone will do it everywhere
“I love it. Now that round trip revenue is like totally cool and not something you go to jail for, like, let's, let's do it every single place we can find it, right? Let's just do it. And I'm not saying there's anything literally wrong with it, but go for it, r…”
Lemkin: Asana product feels terminal and fits roll-up target criteria
“This is easy for me to, I don't want to be too much of an armchair quarterback from a product that feels terminal, but it's probably a good one. I think it's a good candidate, right?”
Lemkin refuses to invest in Chamath's 8090 without full-time commitment
“So I, I'm out. If literally Chamath drops everything, but 80, 90, everything. And I see the sweat from his brow and I see all, and I see that cause the dude's fit and he's looking good. Right. He just had, A massive, the massive largest win of his career as an…”
Lemkin: Autonomous AI agents could reduce Salesforce and HubSpot to dumb databases
“If the agent can run 24 seven autonomously, take all your data and build all the analytics, build all the dashboards, run autonomously out of it then your data can flow between apps and you won't even care where it lives and all the fears about headless become…”