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 8 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
Blosser: Salesforce succeeds due to brand power rather than product quality
“If you look at Salesforce.com and they don't have the best product in the world, but they have the best brand.”
Blosser: YC partner Paul Buchheit told 100 batch startups none had PMF
“I remember when we were leaving YC, Paul Buchite sat the entire batch down, so all hundred companies or so, and he told us on our last day, he said, look, none of you guys are at product market fit, and we were looking around the room, and it was, we had some …”
Ted Blosser: Founders should build investor teams like sports rosters, not marriages
“Don't just look at it as a spouse you would look for, but really look at it as a team you're building and think about the skill set that each VC brings to the table.”
WorkRamp chose Initialized to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software
“We went to them because not because they were hardcore enterprise seed investors, but really because they understood consumer markets extremely well. And we wanted to apply those same growth strategies to the enterprise market”
Blosser: WorkRamp capped seed round at $1.8M to enforce operational discipline
“And so and we actually did cap it. I think we actually, we raised about 1.8 million and we didn't want to raise much more past that. I mean, we had the opportunity to, but we ended up turning down money towards the end, really because we thought that was enoug…”
Ted Blosser: Investors hyper-focused on early CAC and LTV lack long-term vision
“You can tell that even with small things like how they do due diligence, you see the ones that are focusing It's extremely on the, just the small metrics early on, like LTV or customer acquisition costs. They're not really looking at the long game.”
Blosser: Initialized hired Kim-Mai Cutler to coach portfolio enterprise branding
“I know Gary Tan and Alexis Ohanian from our investors at Initialize, they've been very, very good in helping us build our brand. They brought on Kim Mai Cutler onto their team from TechCrunch, and she's been extremely helpful in actually coaching us through ho…”
Blosser: First startup combining mobile, social, and local was a total failure
“In my mid-twenties, I actually founded my first startup, and it was a huge failure. Pretty much Took everything that was hot at the time, whether it be mobile, social, and local, and try to combine it all into one startup, and it failed pretty, pretty miserabl…”