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 47 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
Crashlytics Raised $6M and Spent Only $3M Before Twitter Acquisition
“So at Crashlytics, we took an incredibly cash-constrained approach, because we were conscious, honestly, of the challenges of the developer tool space. And so for that company, we only ever raised six million in funding. We only ever spent three million of it.…”
Digits Holds Over 10 Years of Runway After Raising $33M
“And so I think the key differentiator here is yes, we've raised thirty three million. We aren't spending it. The big mistake people make is they scale their burn sort of in proportion to their raise. And we haven't. We've kept our team super small and lean. We…”
Seibert: Radical transparency during M&A talks paralyzed InCrayo for two months
“So for the two, two and a half months that we were going through these acquisition discussions, we built basically nothing.”
Seibert: Crashlytics reaches 5 to 6 billion active monthly devices
“Today Crashlytics is on five or six billion MAU, roughly every active smartphone on earth.”
Seibert: Apple Silicon prioritizes energy efficiency over pure compute power
“And look at Apple Silicon, right? They've done an amazing job. Like, yes, they're fast, but instead of pushing the bounds on pure compute, they're pushing the bounds on energy efficiency, which for Apple's use case is critical.”
Seibert: AI R&D will focus on smaller, specialized models
“And so I think there will be a lot of really interesting R and D on how do you make these models maybe smaller and perform it in certain use cases.”
Seibert: Enterprise AI adoption will follow cloud's path as privacy concerns ease
“And so I think this will go in the same direction. And like you'll, you'll have very clear guidelines around how the companies use the data for model training and it's off limits and so on. And sort of that trust will be overcome.”
Seibert: Top AI models are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth, not just compute
“It's very clear the top models are memory bound as well as CPU bound. So you can't just make the CPUs, the GPUs faster. You need to increase memory bandwidth in sort of on par with that.”
Seibert: Tech companies are locking down data, reversing 20 years of open APIs
“You're seeing Reddit, Twitter, et cetera, shut off APIs, put in more strict rate limits, et cetera. And so the whole world is starting to lock down data, which was counter to the trends over the past 20 years, when everything was being pushed more and more ope…”
Seibert: Many tech employees are trapped at startups with underwater stock options
“A lot of folks, you're right, are trapped in companies with high valuations where their options are likely underwater.”
Seibert: High late-stage salaries prevent talent migration to early-stage startups
“And that's probably the counterforce is all of these big companies who raised huge rounds in 20, 21 have high salaries. And if you switch, you'll get more equity, but way less cash. And so that's probably keeping folks where they are.”
Digits Averages Five to Seven Minutes for Ad-Hoc Internal Meetings
“We have those three meetings, and then nothing else on the calendar, and everything else is ad hoc, and so I'd say our average meeting length is probably five to seven minutes.”
Digits Requires a Take-Home Work Sample for Every Job Role
“For the skill side, we have used basically a take-home work sample, a take-home challenge that we use for every single role.”
Seibert: The average startup fundraising round takes four to six months
“And if you look on the, at the data, the average round takes six to four to six months to close.”
Seibert: Crashlytics is installed on substantially every active mobile device on Earth
“So today Crashlytics is installed on well, well over a billion devices. We're on substantially every active mobile device on earth.”
Seibert: Crashlytics team tripled at Twitter with only one employee resignation
“Our team had not only has tripled, but only one person has left in that time.”
Seibert: Legacy Twitter required two to three weeks for statistical data
“Particularly at Twitter, we need to get stats, SIG data, which always took two to three weeks.”
Seibert: Crashlytics scaled to 300 million phones in 12 months
“We scaled from zero to three hundred million phones in 12 months.”
Seibert: Twitter, Slack, and YouTube originated as completely different products
“Twitter was a podcasting startup. Slack was a game. YouTube was a dating website.”
Digits Has Only Fired One Employee Since Its Founding
“We have let one person go in the life of the company, but it's just one.”
Creative Selection Accurately Depicts Steve Jobs' Apple Product Design Process
“Ken Kosienda's book, Creative Selection, I think it came out a couple years ago or so. My time I spent at Apple actually overlaps with the period he covers in the book, and the book is stunningly accurate in how it portrays how Apple designed and shipped produ…”
A Large Portion of Crashlytics' Original Team Now Works at Digits
“We were very, very thoughtful with how we built the Crashlytics team. And believe it or not, a large portion of that team is now the Digits team, and we're still working together nine years later.”
Seibert: Twitter acquires an average of one to two companies a month
“Twitter on average acquires one to two companies a month. They have for years.”