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 389 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 94 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”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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: 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…”
Calacanis: Companies will choose spending on AI tokens over humans by year-end
“I really do think by the end of the year, we're going to choose tokens over humans.”
Calacanis: Software QA departments will be destroyed by 2027 due to AI
“I think what will happen going into 2027 is an engineering QA departments will get destroyed because you'll be like, I got six QA engineers.”
Calacanis: AI Startups Will Eventually Re-Bloat to Historic Headcounts
“And so even, and so our startups that we're excited about, I think ultimately they will achieve the same historic level of bloat, maybe half the size, but they will get as bloated as they can because they will have much larger, broader product lines.”
Lemkin: Tech Leaders Must Hire Thousands to Avoid Social Unrest
“We're gonna have to reflate and hire thousands and thousands of people per tech leader to avoid social unrest.”
Lemkin: Current tech layoffs will be worse than any in our lifetimes
“I actually think It's worse than that Rory, because I think these are going to be by far the layoffs that Harry just rattled off and the ones for this year, I believe are going to be far worse than any layoffs in our lifetimes. And I'll tell you why. And I kno…”
Lemkin: Traditional marketing automation software obsolete within one year
“I don't think in a year we're going to need any traditional marketing automation software. It's too dated. It doesn't work for agents marketing.”
Lemkin: AI agents render Marketo, Outreach, and Salesloft worthless
“They're not going to recommend Marketo for your agent to do marketing automation, ok? In fact, it mocked Marketo outreach and sales loft as tools useless to agents. Ok, this API grid. They said there is no place in the, an agent will never send an email throug…”
Lemkin: Blocked SaaS founders will increasingly pass company control to peer CEOs
“This is a micro trend that I think is going to accelerate this year is founders giving the keys to their friends, not completely quitting, like eight months after an accelerator that didn't work out, but I mean, it's just, I'm at 40,000,050 1,000,020 million, …”
Lemkin is ready to write off portfolio startups failing to adopt AI
“Like you know, I'm ready to move on to the new world and I'm almost, and I'm frankly ready to write off a lot of portfolio companies and a lot of public companies. It's time to move on guys. If you're not going to get there in April of 20, 26, then so be it. S…”
Lemkin: VCs backing late-stage AI startups below Anthropic face zero exits
“So many folks sub-anthropic are going to get their arses burned because they'll end up in the dead zone. They'll have great companies without great IPOs and zero M and A opportunities.”
Lemkin: Existing SaaS and tech products will be obsolete in 12 months
“They, in 12 months, their current products will be obsolete.”
Lemkin: Corporate AI Data Center Budgets Will Come From Cutting Junior Roles
“I think getting rid of juniors is where we get budget for these data centers, in part.”
Lemkin: US government will block Anthropic indefinitely regardless of court rulings
“The government's going to say you're either going to agree to this or we're going to freeze you out of the US economy. And it doesn't matter what a court says. Because they'll come up with another justification. There'll be another one. There'll be a different…”
Lemkin: Junior role elimination will spread to sales by 2027
“This is my big worry for 20, 27 is it happens. It's going to be true in sales. It's already true in support.”
Lemkin: Public software companies will perform worse throughout 2026
“I think all, almost all the public software companies are just going to do worse and worse for the rest of this year.”
Lemkin: Most public software CEOs will abandon growth targets in 2026
“Which I think most public software companies will get to during the course this year. They will give up. The CEOs will give up. This is my point. They will give up on returning to growth.”
Jason Lemkin: Value capture by AI agents will push SaaS incumbents into terminal decline
“I believe the agents are going to own enough of the value that, that that just owning less of the value in your space can create terminal decline.”
Lemkin: SaaS companies adding minor AI features will be irrelevant in two years
“You're going to go out of business and you're not going to fail because your customers are going to renew, but your growth is going to fall so far that you become irrelevant in two years.”
Lemkin: Shopify and Monday will be killed by vertical AI startups
“So they're going to get killed by the startup that does it. They're going to get killed. Killed.”
Lemkin: A major tech leader will lay off 50% of staff in one day within 12 months
“I said, one of the leaders in the next 12 months is going to do an Elon Musk and just cut half their team in one day. They're going to lay off half the entire company.”
Lemkin: AI tools will equal human design quality within 18 months
“I would just be shocked if at some point in the next eight to 18 months, a Claude Code can't automatically make designs that are as elegant, as beautiful as a designer can. Because you already can in some custom LLMs for images, you can build epic images. I ju…”
Lemkin: Fortune 500 will actively replace human employees with AI by year-end
“By the end of this year, that, that train is going to be so far out of the station that, that these growth numbers will be jaw dropping because we will decide enterprises will the fortune 500 or global 2000 will decide we are replacing humans with AI.”
Lemkin: Shopify's storefront software interface may become obsolete within two years
“That software in two years may be obsolete.”
Lemkin: US government will backstop AI data center spend within 24 months
“I wouldn't be shocked if in the next 24 months there are essentially government government backstops for some of this spend.”
Lemkin: Tesla is months away from allowing owners to profit off robotaxis
“As soon as this really works, and maybe it's only single digit months away, he has millions of people who could be paid more than their lease price to allow the car into the fleet. And when he said this a decade ago, it sounded effing insane. He said that your…”