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 95 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Seibert: AI will be commoditized quickly without disrupting existing software pricing
“So this may be just me, but I very much see AI as a tool, not a product. And so it's a technology. It's like your database. It's like Memcash back in the day, and so because of that, I don't think it'll change how people price in specific industries. Like, if …”
Seibert: On-device Apple LLMs could make OpenAI obsolete within five years
“I bet Apple can and will. And so if you project forward five years, if they get to the point where they can run a sufficiently large LLM on your iPhone, then OpenAI is out of the picture. You don't even need to hit their servers. It's just on your phone.”
Seibert predicts runaway climate change is less than ten years away
“Runaway climate change is less than 10 years out.”
Seibert: AI will boost productivity rather than replace human jobs
“Ah, so I would say actually, on a good light, AI won't replace many jobs, I think, actually. It'll drive productivity, not replacement, and it'll be like other technologies that have come out, like phones didn't replace people, now you just use them and you ca…”
Seibert: Foundational AI models will inevitably be commoditized
“I certainly think we will, and this may not be a popular position, Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work mean there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears to…”
Seibert: On-device iPhone LLMs will make OpenAI obsolete within five years
“I bet Apple can and will, and so if you project forward five years, if they get to the point where they can run a sufficiently large LLM on your iPhone, then OpenAI is out of the picture. Don't even need to hit their servers. It's just on your phone.”
Seibert: Google delayed Gemini to Q1 due to poor performance
“They've just punted Gemini into Q one, which tells me it's not doing very well.”
Seibert: Google is the most vulnerable tech incumbent to AI disruption
“I think Google's by far the most vulnerable.”
Seibert: OpenAI will evolve into an infrastructure platform like AWS
“I view OpenAI probably evolving more into an infrastructure company like AWS.”
Seibert: Apple's custom silicon provides a massive advantage for on-device AI
“What very few people I think are paying attention to is Apple, because again, they control the silicon. Imagine they're able to pioneer small models that run on device, and then they do custom silicon to make them run. The performance could be outlandish.”
Seibert: Elon Musk moving fast at Twitter beats standing still
“Agree or disagree with some of Elon's decisions, but he is moving quickly in a direction. That is way better than sort of standing still.”
Seibert: The vast majority of startup founders are bad at running companies
“The vast majority of founders are simply bad at running companies. And I'm sorry, but it's true.”
Seibert: Founders attempting a pivot need 12 months of cash runway
“You need at least a year of cash left, because if you don't have a year of cash, you're not going to have time to see this pivot through. And so it's really like founder grit and enough cash. If those aren't there, return your capital.”
Seibert: Great founders build true alignment rather than 'disagree and commit'
“I will not disagree and commit. I think this is the hallmark of great founders is you need to be able to convince your team and have the trust of your team to go all in on a new direction.”
Seibert: Large language models will inevitably become commoditized
“I certainly think we will. And this may not be a popular position. Obviously, opening eyes, charging ahead, sort of leading the way right now. I think the market forces at work I mean, there's just immense energy to have an open source equivalent. Meta appears…”
Seibert: Open-source LLMs will become the 'Android' to OpenAI's 'Apple'
“So the closed may win in terms of having the most advanced model, but I think the Apple versus Android comparison is exactly accurate. So you're going to have something proprietary that might be best because it can be fully vertically integrated. They have, th…”
Seibert: AI startups that are thin wrappers will get killed
“Startups are gonna get killed because they're very thin wrappers.”
Seibert: In 5 years, AI wrappers will look like MySQL forms
“It's really important to me that people view this as a technology. It is like your MySQL database. MySQL was very popular 20 years ago, right? Like it was super cool what it could do. And it's still cool, but if you try to go raise money on you've built a form…”
Seibert: Horizontal AI wrappers OpenAI will solve are bad investments
“If you're working on a use case that's pretty horizontal, that like OpenAI is going to need to solve within five years in order to scale. That's not a great investment, and that's not a good use of your time as a founder.”
Seibert: Startup book values from 2020-2021 are far from reality
“A lot of them are basically holding at their 20, 21 valuation whenever the last round they raised was, and it's nowhere close to the reality.”
Seibert: Secondary market data shows startups trading down 80%
“I do get data from the secondary markets, and so I can see with some of them like where they're trading versus where their last preferred round was, and it's a bloodbath. It's like down 80% for many of them.”
Seibert finds secondary pre-IPO share sales more lucrative than post-IPO exits
“I've actually had more success selling on the secondary market pre IPO than I have had actually waiting the whole time.”
Seibert: Twitter's biggest past internal issue was leadership indecision
“And this was one of the biggest challenges Twitter faced internally back in the day was just complete indecision from leadership.”
Seibert: Emotional attachment to a problem is a founder superpower
“I think it's so much easier to build something that you personally feel than have to sort of try to interpret other people's thoughts and beliefs about it. So no, I would not be worried about getting too emotionally involved. I think that's a superpower.”
Seibert: Imposing a paranoid founder mindset on teams is demotivating
“If you have that mentality with the team, it's very demotivating, right? It's like, what are we trying to go to? Like, when are we going to get somewhere? And so it's really important to celebrate small wins.”
Seibert: A dominant open-source base LLM will emerge with fine-tuning tools
“My sense is there'll be a very common popular open source sort of base LLM and then tools to allow folks to fine tune it easily.”
Seibert: LLM fine-tuning requires surprisingly little data if high quality
“While it creates, it takes so much time, data, energy, money to train an LLM, fine tuning it can actually be done relatively straightforwardly with a surprisingly small amount of data, as long as your data is very high quality and focused.”
Seibert: Most angel-stage AI deals are thin OpenAI wrappers
“Most of what I'm seeing on the angel side right now are these very thin wrappers on top of open AI.”
Seibert: Products built in 2-4 weeks scripting GPT are thin wrappers
“If your primary product value is, is scripting GPT, that's a thin wrapper. If you've built it in two to four weeks, that's a thin wrapper.”
Seibert: OpenAI won't build direct Notion or Salesforce competitors
“I would doubt if opening eye goes and builds like an ocean competitor or an HR or Salesforce competitor or so on, they probably want to stay at the more generic level”
Seibert: Apple was caught flat-footed on AI and is way behind
“Apple was caught flat footed for sure. They're way behind at the moment”
Seibert: IBM ridiculously charged enterprises for useless blockchain consulting
“And like IBM's at fault. IBM was consulting, like charging for services to consult on how to adopt blockchain into your enterprise. That's ridiculous.”
Seibert: Enterprise AI consulting products will be mediocre and ineffective
“Like, yes, there'll be a lot of consulting to help enterprises adopt AI, and the products won't be that great, and they won't really make that much of a difference.”
Seibert: AI adoption will happen radically faster than previous tech waves
“And so I actually think the adoption curve here will be radically faster and industries will be disrupted probably way quicker than prior tech waves just because of the barriers are so low.”
Seibert: Google must go all-in on AI to prevent existential disruption
“They need to go all in on it. I don't think they have a choice. I agree with you. I think it's existential for them because if AI replaces search, their golden goose has been killed. And so it is way more effective to kill your own golden goose than let and wa…”
Seibert: AI will not alter established SaaS pricing models in specific industries
“I don't think it'll change how people price in specific industries. Like if your market does per seat pricing, that'll probably stay. If your business and product does consumption pricing, that'll probably stay.”
Seibert: Scale-ups adding AI features like Dropbox are just riding the hype wave
“They really are. And one of the funnier ones to me is Dropbox. Now Dropbox has a built-in AI, and I don't know, I mean, I'm sorry, Drew, but I just want Dropbox to store the files. Bandwagon ride the hype wave aspect.”
Seibert: 30 of my 97 angel investments have failed outright since 2014
“So since 2014, I have angel invested in 97 startups. And I just did the count so far, 30 have failed outright. So about a third, another 19 are still at one X. So basically haven't gone anywhere. And if you look at the overall portfolio, really, it's like 10 o…”
Seibert argues small angel investors shouldn't face six-month post-IPO lockups
“I mean, I understand why, but I don't understand why small time angel investors should be locked up for six months.”
Seibert exited his $10k Alchemy investment at a 200x return
“A college friend of mine was prototyping what was gonna be a new teenage social network, and I invested 10 K. I was like, the guy's smart. Let's see what happens. He eventually pivoted that into down to lunch, which did well for a bit and then failed, unfortun…”
Seibert: 10-15x paper valuations often fail to deliver actual cash returns
“So I had the opportunity to take some money off the table in a deal. So I got a three X return, right? Returned cash in the bank, three X return on paper. It's gone on to do another 10 to 15 X, but I'm worried that valuation's fake. I don't think it'll ever re…”
Seibert: Investors should avoid asking motivated founders for cash back
“I, so I am biased obviously by the founder side, but I think it's very scenario dependent. So if the founder is still like excited, the team is there, they have grit. Like, I don't think you can ask for cash back. I think like, You want to bet on the founder? …”
Seibert: Startup valuations will crash dramatically with major layoffs in Q1-Q2
“A lot of valuations will still crash from here dramatically. And there's probably going to be huge layoffs going into Q one, Q two as well.”
Seibert: Cash-strapped startups will struggle to raise follow-on funding next year
“What'll be really interesting is the number of companies that raised and have sort of struggled through 20, 23, but now we're down to six months or so of cash. I think next year could be very tough because they're not all going to be able to raise follow on ro…”
Seibert: Down markets enable higher startup talent density than bull markets
“I actually love sort of down markets because I think in the very hot markets, it's too easy to raise capital and you peel off all the sort of like fantastic second engineers or product managers or designers or whoever they might be, and they go get funding and…”
Seibert: Customer obsession drives founder success over technical skill
“I'd say looking at my portfolio, it's not even necessarily the most techie founders that are successful, but the most sort of customer obsessed and just like really deeply personally understand the market and really want to solve it. And usually have some patt…”
Seibert: Product managers focus on competitors when lacking product vision
“I think a lot of product managers get too distracted watching the competition. And they don't have a vision for their own product.”
Paired Buddy Systems Remove the Need for Scheduled Meetings at Digits
“The way this works is we do what's called a buddy system, so every project every week is tackled by two people, some two to four people, but usually two people, and the reason is it's because you're remote, right? Instead of sort of working by yourself in your…”