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 40 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
Libin: Silicon Valley Startup Model Engineered to Benefit Top-Tier VCs
“This idea of making a startup, a Silicon Valley-style startup, the concept has been engineered to benefit top-tier VCs.”
Libin: Calling an industry a relationship business signals it is immature
“A sign of, like, a non-serious business is when people in it say this is a relationship business. This is a sign of, like, it's immature, and it's not professionalized.”
Libin: Big Tech's Data Advantage Will Be a Big Nothing in Five Years
“So I think over the next, like, five years, this, like, alleged entrenched data advantage of big companies will turn out to be, you know, a big nothing.”
Libin: Average Expected Return for Startup Founders Is Sharply Negative
“Because the average expected return for founders of making a startup is sharply negative.”
Great Products Get Discovered Automatically Without a Distribution Strategy
“I've never cared about discovery and about distribution. I think, like, the best stuff gets discovered automatically.”
Libin: Early-stage VC incentives force startups to take damaging shortcuts
“The incentives are when you're investing, especially if you're doing early stage investing, just like me, you're not looking for things that are likely to succeed, right? You're looking for things that have a plausible chance of succeeding, even if it's not a …”
Libin: The shift to video communication is a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity
“And for mm-hmm, since I think this is a multi-trillion dollar thing that's happening right now, I think mm-hmm needed to get pretty big, pretty quickly, raise external capital, and so it was a perfect thing to say, okay, yeah, embodying this in a spin-out star…”
Libin: Founders should be the worst person at every job function
“So never hire someone whose job you can do better than them. Only hire people, only surround yourself with people that are ridiculously better than you or that are superior to you in their job or other things as much as possible. Like always be the worst perso…”
Libin: Evaluating pitches based on what you would build is flawed
“When you hear a pitch, you get excited about what you would do with this idea. And that's a really shitty way to make investments because you're not going to do anything with this idea. You got to try to figure out what they're going to do with this idea.”
Libin: Video integration will transform everything within two years
“Integrating video into everything in this hybrid model is going to literally affect almost a hundred percent of all things in life. It's going to be a bigger transformation as the dot-com transformation was, except it's not going to take 10 years. It's going t…”
Libin: Most startup boards are stateless, but Roelof Botha maintains context
“Most boards' conversations are totally stateless, meaning that the board members walk in, and they don't remember anything that you talked about before, and you start over. And this is the most frustrating thing for entrepreneurs, because, of course, like, you…”
80% of Work Software and 50% of Consumer Software Will Become Conversational
“So my guess is about 50% of what we use as consumers will become conversational, botified, and about 80% of what we do at work.”
Bots Will Disrupt Software by Joining Multi-Human Conversations
“I think it's a major point of disruption. I think that the single biggest change is going to be for the past few decades almost all of our interactions with technology have been one person interacting with some system. So it's been like you using Microsoft Wor…”
Libin: The biggest shortcut early-stage startups take is hiring personal friends
“One of the many things that are wrong with startups is startups are all about shortcuts. All of the incentives are to take as many shortcuts as you can. The biggest shortcut that you can take is just hiring your friends”
Libin: A founder's struggle to delegate is a failure to hire well
“Like, it is your failure if you have not hired people that you think are better than you at their job.”
Libin: Employees earn no credit for following instructions, only for outcomes
“There are no points for following instructions. There's only points for succeeding, for doing the right stuff”
Libin: Formal performance reviews often do more harm than good
“I just haven't had good success with like reviews that felt more useful than harmful.”
Libin: Within a year, native video startups will redefine meetings
“And obviously, within a year, like, this isn't what video is going to be like. Obviously, It's going to be the next generation of like native to video companies that comes along and says, well, no, we're not trying to recreate the old reality. We're not trying…”
Libin: Exceptional talent is global, but opportunity is concentrated near Stanford
“Exceptional talent, like, Mozart-level brilliant, exceptional talent is very, very rare in the world, but it's evenly distributed, and, but opportunity isn't, and so it is bad for the world that so much of the opportunity for crazy, exceptionally talented, cre…”
Libin: A good idea remains good regardless of market cycles
“For the most part, a good idea one year is still a good idea, regardless of whether the market is up or down.”
Libin: Working two years in VC made me a better CEO than operating
“I think that my two year inadvertent vacation in venture capital, I think has probably made me a better CEO than any actual time operating a company.”
Phil Libin: Geographical Silicon Valley is less important than ever for innovation
“Silicon Valley, the actual geographical Silicon Valley, and basically San Francisco, and, you know, the area between San Francisco and Stanford is, I think, less important than it's ever been for tech and for innovation.”
Libin: Forcing Great Product Creators to Become CEOs Makes No Sense
“Like it doesn't make sense to take brilliant product people and force them to become mediocre CEOs before they can actually make that product.”
Libin: All Turtles will expand to eight global cities within five years
“So the vision is, you know, in five years, we'll be in eight different cities. We're in three. Now we're opening up the fourth one next year. We'll be in eight cities, eight world cities, each one working on a number of very practical products that solve real …”
Libin: CEOs face more stress during normal operations than crises
“When things are sharply going wrong, it's actually the part of the job that's, in many ways, the simplest, because you know what you have to do, and then you just do it. And you have like, you have one major objective. The objective is clear. And even if it's …”
Only a Couple Hundred Famous Bots Will Dominate Globally
“There's going to be a couple of hundred famous bots in the world, and everyone's going to know them, and everyone's going to be able to interact with them, and they're not going to be, it's not going to matter what directories are listed in. They're just going…”
Libin Refuses to Invest in Startups Not Advancing a Star Trek Future
“My entire long-term investment hypothesis is really straightforward. Like, I think the world has two possible futures. Like, there's two directions that the world can go in. The world can become more like Star Trek, or the world can become more like Mad Max. E…”
Libin: Startups aren't serious about talent diversity unless they spend money
“I mean, for businesses, you pretty much, it all comes down to the same tool, which is money. So if you're not spending money on it, you're not serious about it.”
Libin: We pay recruiters specifically to source out-of-network candidates
“So we spend money on recruiters and we specifically tell recruiters that we are paying you money to send us people that are outside of our comfort zones and outside of our networks, because we know plenty of, you know, middle-aged white dudes.”
Libin: A leader's strong conviction does not make a belief more accurate
“Just because I believe something strongly doesn't actually make it any more or less likely to be accurate or true than if some random person in the street believed in it strongly.”
Libin: Digital collaboration tools unlock productivity from introverted team members
“When we went from being in person to doing all of these things, you know, we no longer do brainstorming in a big conference room with, you know, stick stickies, post-it notes, you know, now we do it all on Figma, and actually I started noticing, man, I'm just …”
Phil Libin: Exceptional talent is extremely rare but evenly distributed globally
“Like, real talent is exceedingly rare, you know, one in a million. But it is evenly distributed throughout the world.”
Libin: A CEO has only three core responsibilities
“You have to make sure you have the right people and you have to make sure there's enough money in the bank. Those are the three things you have to do. No one else is effectively going to do them. It's always those three things. Anything else you do is kind of …”
Phil Libin replaced himself as Evernote CEO at 400 employees
“And I think the kind of towards the end of my stay at Evernote, you know, I basically decided that I needed to replace myself once we gotten, you know, it's about 400 people that just felt like I just wasn't the problems that needed to be solved at a medium si…”
Libin: A CEO's core job is constant and uncomfortable over-communication
“The core job of a CEO is just to, like, you just have to repeat yourself over and over and over again. You just have to say the same thing for what feels like literally a thousand times, even though it's may only be a hundred times, but it's the constant over …”
Phil Libin almost entirely stopped using email as Evernote CEO
“I'd kind of stopped sitting and I stopped doing email almost entirely. Like for the past few years of my life, like I had very, very slight contact with email”
Phil Libin Only Invests in Bots With Direct Pay-For-Function Utility Models
“The stuff that we're working on, the stuff that I'm investing in or helping to build, it's all like the, these are bots that do specific functions that people pay for.”