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 44 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Mitchell Green: China will win the global AI competition
“Don't count China out. I bet they win the AI world.”
Mitchell Green: 98% of VC and PE investors have never run a company
“I've never run a company in my life. By the way, nor have, like, 98% of venture investors or private equity investors.”
Green: Software stocks will remain dead money for a quarter or two
“What you're going to see is they're going to take numbers down at a bunch of companies. Give it a quarter or two. Companies will start to then, you know, beat numbers. Then they'll raise the numbers, and the stocks will start to work. But it's probably dead mo…”
Mitchell Green: Internet stocks stay expensive due to stock-based compensation dilution
“Well, the reason a lot of these stock or stocks and internet stocks are actually still not cheap is because the stock-based comp, like, the stock-based comp in a lot of these companies is totally nuts. Like, the amount of equity compensation and dilution of, l…”
Green: ByteDance could reach $70B to $100B in earnings within five years
“I think it is possible to see in a few years that this company's doing, you know, 70, eighty, hundred billion of earnings in the next five years.”
Mitchell Green: ByteDance will list in Hong Kong, not the US
“Zero percent chance it'll list in the US. No, I mean, just to answer it, I have no clue, but no, it'll list in Hong Kong.”
Green: China can engineer and reverse engineer tech cheaper than Americans
“Don't underestimate, like, Chinese creativeness and, like, ingenuity to, like, figure out how to, like, reverse engineer and engineer things in much cheaper ways than Americans can do.”
Green: High 2020-2021 Valuations Destroyed Returns for Good Companies
“There are a lot of people that invested in good companies or great companies in twenty-twenty and twenty-twenty-one at really stupid prices and didn't make money.”
Green: Investors Will Still Hold Unsold 2012 Stakes in 2030
“At some point, I don't know if it's three years, or five years, or seven years, for sure. People are gonna wake up in 20, in 2030, in 2032, and realize it's, oh my god, they're still all in this stuff from 20 12 and 20 15.”
Green: VC liquidity crisis will persist until LPs refuse re-ups
“When LPs go to the biggest venture funds in the world, and private equity funds, and say, we're not investing in your next fund until you get liquidity in these names.”
Green: Prices for AI infrastructure are going to plummet
“Same thing's gonna happen. Prices are gonna plummet.”
Green: Only three $100B+ companies were created post-iPhone
“You know, since the iPhone came out in 2007, 2006, whatever it was, there's only been three companies built that did not exist before. That were a hundred billion dollar companies. ByteDance, Pindo Doe, and Uber.”
Green: AI software startups show shockingly low gross dollar retention rates
“We look at a lot of these AI software, tons of these AI software companies, and like, the gross dollar retention rates are just like, Really, really low. It's actually, like, shocking.”
Green: ByteDance North America generates only single-digit percentage of total revenue
“ByteDance North America is a, you know, single digit percentage of revenue.”
Green: ByteDance will be a top global AI company within ten years
“I think they're gonna be one of the foremost AI companies on, on the planet over the next decade.”
Green: Existing software companies will not be wiped out by AI
“Are all of our software companies going to be completely disrupted and all of them go away? And like, I don't know, like I'm taking a stand that it's they're not. But like, I guess I could be totally wrong.”
Green: ByteDance grows 30% annually with massive profits
“ByteDance Grows at, you know, 30% a year with massive profits.”
Mitchell Green: Current market volatility is amateur hour compared to 2008
“This is nothing like this. This is like amateur hour. This is like nothing. Like, this isn't even volatile compared to like what was going on back then.”
Mitchell Green: Companies will retrain workers displaced by AI
“A lot of these, like, companies will retrain people. They'll do different things. It's a, it's remarkable throughout history. There's been, like, lots of technological disruption over the last hundred years, and, like, people find new things.”
Green: Stock option dilution is significantly higher in Silicon Valley tech firms
“Just look how much, like, stock option dilution there is at a bunch of these big Silicon Valley companies. It's not as bad outside of Silicon Valley, but, like, the dilution is real.”
Mitchell Green: VC LPs are hyper-focused on cash distributions over paper gains
“I do think that investors are very, very, very focused on DPI now.”
Green: Lead Edge rejects founders who refuse to ever go public
“Listen, if your plan is to try to stay private forever, you're just not for us. Like, we just don't want to invest in you.”
Mitchell Green: The IPO market is fine and recent performance is strong
“The problem with the IPO market is actually totally fine. If you look at IPO performance of companies, they've actually done pretty well versus opening day prices.”
Green: Lead Edge Capital is 95% backed by individual LPs
“And our model is like, we're going to be 95% backed by individuals and we're going to treat those individuals like gold.”
Green: ByteDance will definitely list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange
“Hong Kong, for sure. Like, by the way, Tencent's listed in Hong Kong. It's gigantic. Hong Kong, a hundred percent.”
Green: ByteDance matches Meta in earnings while growing faster
“This is the same size business in terms of earnings grows faster.”
Green: Opportunistic 'tourist' investors will eventually be washed out of venture capital
“A hundred percent. When? I don't know. It might be like a slow You know, it might be like a slow hole in the canoe, but eventually, yes, they will, yes, a hundred percent.”
Mitchell Green: Most top US e-commerce companies are traditional retailers
“If you look today at the 10 largest e-commerce companies in the United States, You know, six or seven out of 10 of them are traditional retailers.”
Green: Apple spends far less on AI CapEx than tech peers
“And, you know, like Apple's spending very little right now, you know, and those other three or four companies are spending insane amounts of money.”
Mitchell Green: Average public software company spends ~30% cumulative on R&D
“So if you were to look at your average software company that goes public, You know, if you look at cumulative spend since inception, it's usually around, like, 30% is R&D. So like, a huge amount of these businesses are about, like, sales and marketing, distrib…”
Mitchell Green: AI's biggest disruption will be in manufacturing and healthcare
“I actually think the biggest disruption you're gonna see is in, like, manufacturing, is in, like, healthcare, is in you know, think about, like, the companies that can figure out how to get drugs to market much faster than anybody else. Like, I think AI could …”
Green: Most regulated companies block access to Claude and ChatGPT
“Most big companies that are, like, financially regulated, you can't even go on to Claude or ChatGPT. Like, you can't even, like, get on the system to do work.”
Green: More tech companies will launch major stock buyback programs
“I would suspect over the next, you will, as our names come through, you know, you will see more things like sales, like Salesforce, people put in place big buyback programs to start buying back stock here. I think you'll see it.”
Mitchell Green: US will face major power infrastructure bottlenecks for AI
“We, in the US, we are gonna run into major issues around power.”
Green: Only VCs Who Continually Return Capital Will Survive Long-Term
“LPs want money back, and the people that stay in, they're gonna be in business 1015, 20 years from now, are people that will continue to give money back to their investors.”
Mitchell Green: Tech buyout firms boost EBITDA margins from 5% to 40%
“If I was them, like, I know that all these companies, they drive EBITDA margins from five percent to 40%.”
Green: Private equity funds cannot write single $40 billion checks
“Private equity funds don't have enough money to write like, forty billion dollar checks in the companies.”
Green: Insight Partners replicated Summit and TA's cold-calling deal sourcing model
“And all that Insight was doing was replicating what Summit and TA did, which was hire 22 to 24 year old knuckleheads, which my now partner Brian and I were, and pound the phones calling companies all day long.”
Green: 50% to 60% of mid-market PE funds buy software companies
“And now it's not a hundred percent, but 50, 60% of these bid market private equity firms also buy software companies. Like they have a sleeve to do software.”
Green: Zoom went public primarily to counter competitors' claims about its size
“I do think like a company like Zoom went public because there, you know, it's a very profitable business growing fast. They went public because private, public companies they compete with were constantly like, well, Zoom, it's a tiny business. Like, why do you…”
Green: VC Fund Count Rose Despite Lengthening Exit Timelines
“It's actually shocking that like, that the number of venture funds over the last like five or seven years has actually increased given that the exits are getting longer, not shorter.”
Green: Alibaba made $1B in profit when Lead Edge invested
“Alibaba was very cash efficient, actually, when we invested, it was a billion dollars of profit.”