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 37 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
Tunguz: Nvidia revenue concentration is 10x worse than Lucent during dot-com bubble
“So Nvidia, two customers for Nvidia represent more than 40% of revenues. Four percent represent more than 50% of revenues. I went back and looked at the dot-com era, the networking companies. NVIDIA is 10 times more concentrated in terms of revenue than Lucent…”
Tunguz: DeSantis will win the Republican primary over Trump
“I don't think so. I think, I bet DeSantis wins. I think it will be tough for him to circumnavigate all the legal troubles, and I wonder if the RNC doesn't get involved.”
Tunguz: AI coding progress is no longer on a steep improvement path
“Coding is no longer on this extremely steep improvement path.”
Tomasz Tunguz: Next market correction will be fast and brutal
“I think we're at a point where if there's some wobble, the magnitude of the correction will be fast and brutal.”
Tunguz: Only one or two startups can compete in foundation models
“I think at the foundational model layer, that's a big boys game or a big girls game just because of the capital intensity required, both for training and the GPU access and all those kinds of things. So maybe there's a startup or two. That's able to raise a co…”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures will back 12-15 companies, concentrating 40-50% in top 3
“It's about 12 to 15 portfolio companies. You have significant concentrations, so you probably have like 40 to 50% of the fund in the top three holdings, maybe more.”
Tunguz: AI Will Generate 70% to 80% of Code Within 10 Years
“I think it'll probably be 70 to 80%, and the reason I say that, I bet that 40%, a lot of it is what's called boilerplate code.”
Tunguz: Chat interfaces will replace traditional web search for many use cases
“I didn't believe that chat would replace search, but I think for many use cases, it will.”
Tunguz: AI model sophistication is far from reaching an S-curve plateau
“We're on the steep part of this geometric curve for the sophistication of these models, and at some point, it will make the shelf of an S, but we're not, it doesn't feel like we're anywhere close.”
Tunguz: Unstructured job interviews predict employee success only 8% of the time
“Unstructured interviews, which is when we interview people by asking just kind of the typical questions, can only predict success in about eight percent of the cases, which is far worse than a coin flip. And so what Adam Grant, who's a professor in this field,…”
Tunguz: Cursor will retain 75% of its users in five years
“And so as long as they're able to continue to grow, I bet they hold on, I don't know, five years from now, 75% of their audience.”
Tunguz: Most hyperscaler GPU capacity is sold out for the next two years
“I mean, most of the hyperscalers GPU capacity is sold out for the next two years.”
Tunguz: Secondary transactions now account for 10% to 12% of VC liquidity
“So private equity, you look at private equity, total fraction of dollars in secondaries is a fraction of the asset class is about 25%. Historically venture has been about two to three. Now we're kind of like 10 to 12.”
Tunguz: Goldman Paid Record Asset Manager Multiple for Industry Ventures
“Goldman bought Industry Ventures, right? Leading secondary fund. Paid, paid the highest multiple, I think, ever for an asset manager.”
Tunguz: PE Took 12% of Public Software Companies Private in 2022
“I think in 22, I calculated PE had taken private 12% of all publicly traded software companies in a year.”
Tunguz: Top 3 cloud providers equal top 100 apps in market cap
“In web two, if you take the top three clouds and you look at their market cap, so AWS, GCP, and Azure, it's about a 2.1 trillion dollar market Just for the cloud businesses. And then if you take the top 100 publicly traded cloud companies, both on B to C and B…”
Tunguz: Software forward revenue multiples dropped from 40x during QE to ~6x
“Historical forward multiple is about five X, let's just say, right? It's a little higher than that's about 5.5. And in the heyday of quantitative easing, the top quartile companies are trading at 40 times. And so you can't go, and today it's about maybe six.”
Tunguz: Snowflake struggled to raise external capital at Series C
“The company was burning a ton of capital and couldn't raise money from the outside. And it was the insiders that stepped up and led that round because they believed in the business.”
Tunguz: Going Public with $100M Revenue Costs $15M in Year One
“Today, if you have a hundred million in revenue, it costs, then it costs you fifteen million dollars in your first year to go public.”
Tunguz: Macroeconomic conditions will deteriorate by end of 2023
“I think we will probably be in a worse place by the end of 23.”
Tunguz: US entitlement spending projected to hit 95% of tax receipts
“Entitlement spending in the U.S. Over the next 10 years is projected to consume something like 95% of tax receipts, and so that can't be.”
Tunguz: AI coding assistant Cursor operates with just 30 total employees
“You don't have a lot of ESOP dilution because total employee count is 30.”
Tunguz: Subprime auto loan delinquencies have hit the highest rate in recorded history
“Subprime borrowers in the past 60 days hit the highest delinquency rate on auto loans in recorded history.”
Tunguz: Startup funding conversion is 60% Seed-to-Series A and 50% Series A-to-B
“The base rate for hiring, for raising a series A from seed is about 60%. Then they need to raise a series B. Base rate is 50%.”
Tunguz: Web2 cloud infrastructure and application layers both have $2.1T market cap
“So in web two, if you take the top three clouds and you look at their market cap, so AWS, GCP, and Azure, it's about a 2.1 trillion dollar market cap just for the cloud businesses. And then if you take the top 100 publicly traded cloud companies, both on B to …”
Tunguz: Healthcare and finance enterprise AI will stay on-premises
“I think if you're in. Like finance or healthcare, you'd probably be completely on-prem for the foreseeable future.”
Tunguz: Top data teams at Facebook and Zendesk focus on internal education
“The first is they have a data team, and there's this data, and that, this exists at Facebook, it exists at Zendesk, and these data teams, they, they're structured a little bit differently, but they all basically do the same thing. They're the experts. They kno…”
Tunguz: Google's Intent Ad Model Failed to Monetize Social Networks
“For Google, they were interesting because they generated huge numbers, huge amounts of traffic, but they didn't actually generate that much revenue. And that's because the intent model that Google was so predicated upon didn't really apply in social networks, …”
Tunguz predicts average seed valuation caps will drop to $5M–$7M
“Seat valuations, from what I've seen, are falling. I remember maybe like a year ago, you know, the high watermark for like Y Combinator companies was something like a twenty million cap or an unlimited cap, and I think you'll see maybe one or two of those, but…”
Tunguz predicts SaaS Series A round sizes will drop to $7M–$8M
“At the Series A for SaaS companies, I suspect you might see like a 10 or 15% reduction. I mean, I ran this analysis for SAS in early 2016. The average Series A for like a premium SAS company was about ten million dollars. And I suspect that will probably fall …”
Tunguz predicts a massive ecosystem will be built on top of Slack
“You know, I think there will be a couple of, I think there will be an ecosystem built on top of Slack. And then I think there will be a handful of companies that that take that UI metaphor and become really successful outside of Slack.”
Tom Tunguz: Microsoft went public with $50M revenue and $2M fees
“Like I went back and looked at Microsoft, you know, you needed like fifty million in trailing revenue and six quarters of profitability to go public, right? And the cost to take a company public was a couple million bucks.”
Tomasz Tunguz: Web2 cloud infra and top 100 apps share equal market caps
“So in web two, if you take the top three clouds and you look at their market cap, so AWS, GCP, and Azure, It's about a 2.1 trillion dollar market cap just for the cloud businesses. And then if you take the top 100 publicly traded cloud companies, both on B to …”
Tunguz: Theory Ventures will write $8M-$12M initial checks
“Yeah, it's about eight to 12 initially.”
Tunguz: Google AdSense was neck-and-neck with Yahoo in early 2005
“Early 2005, we were neck and neck with Yahoo, which was the big competitor trying to run ads on other people's websites.”
Tunguz: Google required product manager candidates to score 3.5 out of 4.0
“I remember at Google, when we were interviewing product managers, we would take these packets and we would have all these different, we were doing structured interviews at the time. It was on a four point O scale. You need to score above a 3.5.”