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 13 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
Quintini: VCs shouldn't offer operational value-add just to satisfy LPs
“I think the important thing is you should only do it if it matches your skills and it matches your The relationship and the way you want to work with your founders, right? You shouldn't do it because the industry is doing it. You shouldn't do it because LPs, y…”
Quintini: Sector-specialized VC funds risk missing tectonic technological shifts
“Number one, if that industry or that sector is out of favor, you have your glory days, but you kind of go away with that. And number two, you know, it's very hard to branch and think differently. And you might miss big tectonic shifts in other areas that becau…”
Quintini: Startups must plan for massive scale at founding, not dynamically
“Because this growth is so exponential, companies need to plan for that day of a hundred million users or the ten million users at founding, not as they go, because I think there's a lot of trouble that can happen, and there are also a lot of important advantag…”
Quintini: VCs should evaluate startup pitches with a 'yes mentality' first
“I think for me, the biggest lesson was approach each conversation, each pitch with a yes mentality, right? So thinking about how does reality look like if this company is successful, let's leave the how aside for a minute. Let's get creative and let's stretch …”
Quintini: Stanford's endowment helped launch the venture capital industry
“The Stanford endowment put venture capital in business in a sense.”
Quintini: The best VC firms are built to outlast their founding partners
“I think the best firms, they really build something to last beyond themselves, right?”
Quintini: Lower startup costs enabled the emergence of smaller VC funds
“Cloud, mobile, processing power, all those things that happened in the past, you know, call it 1520 years, they made founders need differently, and I saw what in 2006, seven, eight, people kind of taking that big step back and say, okay, what's changed now, an…”
Quintini: Connected devices and cloud software must assume eventual hacking
“If you're thinking about this connectivity, the internet of everything, and when we're sending everything to the cloud, there are vulnerabilities everywhere, and we need to operate under the assumption that everything's going to be hacked.”
Quintini: Juicero cut prices reactively due to backlash, not strategy
“Juicero that, you know, went out, didn't talk product effectiveness aside, they didn't talk about how they were going to bring costs down, and they actually just did it as a reaction of backlash instead of a strategy.”
Quintini: Ignoring regulation until big enough to lobby is a costly strategy
“The idea of I'm just gonna ignore it or be big enough until I have a voice and then I'll lobby. I think it's a very binary and costly strategy.”
Quintini: Products competing solely on lower cost are unsustainable
“Things that exist because they're just cheaper for cheap sake and don't make anybody better off. I don't think it's sustainable.”
Quintini: Winning frontier tech companies build end-to-end products with empathetic design
“What I see happening in Frontier now is a humanization of technology, right? Companies are building end-to-end solutions. Even if you're, you know, if you think about the big successes in Frontier, like a Tesla, Nest, Invest an Oculus or Cruz. They're going al…”