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
Grimshaw: AI software will sell work and outcome SLAs rather than seats
“I think the way to encapsulate would be this idea of selling the work, not the software, and that we'll move from a paradigm where you might think of it as moving from what we see right now as a copilot and moving to what I think about as a control center, whe…”
Grimshaw: Tens of millions of software engineers will become AI engineers
“Tens of millions of engineers would become AI engineers versus like hundreds of thousands of ML scientists. That would beget the need for an application sort of framework for AI and tooling for that computing environment.”
Grimshaw: Benchmark uses no deal sheets, memos, or data room presentations
“We have no deal flow list, no sheet, there's no memos there's no data room presentations.”
Grimshaw: AI will yield new software architectures and business models
“And I think if AI is to be the force that it can be, I think you will get a new architecture and new business model emerging from it versus what we only see right now, which is kind of a sustaining architecture, which is just that of a co-pilot.”
Grimshaw: AI software will sell finished work outcomes rather than seat licenses
“The way to encapsulate would be this idea of selling the work, not the software. And that we'll move from a paradigm where you might think of it as moving from what we see right now as a copilot and moving to what I think about as a control center, where we'll…”
Grimshaw: AI startups building co-pilots won't create massive value
“And so I think the opportunity offered up to a startup being a co-pilot for something else, like probably won't be that amazing. And there might be pockets of it where it can really work, but the opportunity to disrupt is to be orthogonal to the incumbents.”
Grimshaw: LLMs will centralize media trust in established subscription brands
“I think as a function of LLMs, trust centralizes, and there's huge economies of scale to subscription businesses and advantages, and so it's a silly, silly fun idea, but if we're in media.”
Grimshaw: AI applications will capture massive value and pull through infrastructure
“I think in the arc of time if it is a shift like the internet was in many ways the applications, Which might not look like an applications, right, in the way that we think of them, but might look more like, you know, this control center idea will have profound…”
Grimshaw: Benchmark is first institutional capital in 50-60% of deals
“I think it's something like 50 to 60% of all the investments we make, we're the first partner. I might want to use the word real, right? But like first sort of institutional investor, so to speak.”
Grimshaw: Roughly one-third of Benchmark investments occur at inception
“I think it's something like 30 odd percent. We're like literally the first investment. We don't use the term incubation. I'm sure there's a bunch of things we've done. People would call incubations. We don't use that term, but like, I think probably about a th…”
Grimshaw: Benchmark will accept adoption risk if market behavioral dominoes are falling
“Force of will can do a lot, but you know, it's got to feel like the, you know, you've got to feel like the dominoes got tilted over, you know, you're looking here, But the domino chain is, is sort of happening conceptually in the market or for behavior, whatev…”
Grimshaw: Benchmark's equal partnership aligns incentives across all portfolio companies
“We're an equal partnership, so it's a whole firm commitment. No person is incentivized to do more, help more one thing versus another. A founder really gets the whole partnership.”
Grimshaw: Benchmark backs only about three inception-stage startups per year
“The N of that in a given year, even for that percentage is like three companies, right? And so it's not like we're doing 30, ah, that way and again, you know, so, so the N is small.”
Late-stage startups spend roughly 3x more per seat on Figma than Slack
“And so how that actually plays out is probably a third of the company from my surveying has paid seats inside of Figma, and they pay about three times as much as they would for something like Slack.”
Grimshaw: Incumbents will remain focused on lucrative AI co-pilot features
“I think incumbents can have a lot of cake with a co-pilot idea right now, and that'll be the focus.”
Grimshaw: Founders will launch Benioff-style 'no more software' AI campaigns
“I think there'll be some entrepreneur or a few entrepreneurs, hopefully in the coming year or so, let's say, who channel maybe the Mark Benioff, 1999, like no more software, right?”
Grimshaw: Cloud spend grew from $10B to $400B between 2012 and 2022
“If you go and look, call it 2012 to like 2022 ish timeframe, cloud spend went from like ten billion to three, four hundred billion.”
Grimshaw: Monzo Has Reached 7 Million Accounts in the UK
“Monzo now has seven million accounts. It's like a 10th of the British population has signed up to this thing.”
Grimshaw: Tobi Lütke divested a Shopify acquisition within 18 months
“For Toby at Shopify to make an acquisition and then divest it With, I don't, I think within a year, maybe it was a year and a half, like not very long for an organization to say, to make a big move and say, nope, we made the wrong decision that fast and not ge…”