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 553 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
Pishevar: Bill Gurley hired PIs and met weekly to oust Travis Kalanick
“We found out in our investigation that he hired Some private investigators had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.”
Pishevar: Benchmark Hired Private Investigators Against Naval Ravikant
“There's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing and in Benchmark's case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators and Naval Ravikant. He had a company called eGroups, and he got thrown out of it.”
McCabe: COVID mRNA vaccines were harmful while traditional treatments worked
“During COVID, it turned out that these gene therapies were really bad for you, and that these traditional treatments were really, really helpful. Don't slap your face like I shouldn't have said that, because it's fucking true.”
Shaun Maguire claims Iran has recently obtained nuclear weapons
“Allegedly they have just recently obtained nuclear weapons.”
Hommels: US fighter jets require real-time remote US clearance to start
“Even if you buy US fighter jets, Yeah. So the way how it works is you are the owner. It stands somewhere in the hangar, and you want to, you know, start flying. You have to put it in the way where, where you want to fly, and then this data is sent to the US, a…”
Hommels: Europe cannot independently launch satellites after Ariane sold capacity
“Yeah, currently we either we get a slot in a SpaceX, yeah, with all the with all the restrictions that there are, or we have Ariane, but Ariane base lastly sold a hundred percent of the defense transport capacity to Amazon. So basically, as Europeans, we are, …”
Maguire: Colombian and Venezuelan drug cartels report directly to Iran
“Like the cartels in Colombia and Venezuela basically report into Iran. Iran handles most of the money laundering for them and coordination processing of a lot of like the precursor chemicals, stuff like that.”
Hulme: Microsoft acquired Inflection primarily for its 12,000 H100 GPU cluster
“I do not believe that Microsoft were buying the Pi model. I think Microsoft are GPU constrained, and we're buying a cluster of 12,000 H-one hundreds.”
Rabois: No $100 billion European tech company has been created since 1990
“There hasn't been a hundred billion dollar European company created since 1990.”
Cyan Banister: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute crimes
“We have a DA, Chesta, who will not prosecute crimes. I just found out yesterday a friend of mine whose house was burglarized. The perpetrators were let out of San Quentin for COVID. They robbed his house, almost kicked in the door of his neighbor who had a chi…”
Reyes: Major AI model providers explicitly plan to compete with customers
“At least, you know, two of the largest companies that provide models today have explicitly said, we are going to go after every single one of these industries and businesses that we provide like intelligence for.”
Stebbings: VC firms need a $400M fund to lead Series A today
“You can't do Series A unless you have a four hundred million dollar fund today. Absolutely no chance.”
Chad Peet: Fired sales reps in France and Germany stay on payroll for a year
“Go to Germany and France, I can't fire people. Like, dude, they're on, I, they'll be on the books for a year after you want to get rid of them.”
a16z's larger venture funds consistently outperform its smaller funds
“Our funds consistently beat small, large, Diversified, concentrated venture funds. So our larger funds have outperformed our smaller ones, and our larger ones actually have similar multiples of money to our smaller ones across, across strategies.”
Alex Schultz admits Meta's Llama 4 missed the leading edge
“It's pretty clear Llama was not, like, Llama four wasn't leading edge where Llama three was. So, you know, our big release this year was not a slam dunk, but our big release last year was, and I'm pretty confident our next big release will be again.”
Databricks is growing at three times the rate of Snowflake
“And if you look at it too, right, we're three times their growth rate.”
Feldman: US export controls led US VCs to fund Chinese EDA startups
“You, ah, sought to limit Chinese access to EDA tools to delay the growth of a Chinese chip market. And so U.S. Venture capitalists backed tons of Chinese companies in Shenzhen to build EDA tools, right?”
Morin: GPUs cannot deliver latent space AI reasoning at scale
“Fundamentally, GPUs cannot deliver, deliver this, plain and simple at scale.”
Ramaswamy: Databricks Buys Revenue and Has Double Snowflake's Sales Headcount
“It's very clear that they're buying a bunch of business. That they don't have to worry about things like you know free cash flow. They have doubled the number of sales people that we have.”
Mostaque: 50% of All Code on GitHub Is AI-Generated
“50% of all code on GitHub is AI generated now.”
Braun: No Industry Peers Backed Taylor Swift's Claims Against Me
“Was that no one else said it. You know, a lot of times when someone comes out and says, oh, this whole time, this person's been this way, there's an onslaught of everyone coming out and being like, I agree. I agree. And no one did that. You know, no one actual…”
Jordan: Amazon was the only profitable e-commerce business due to low defensibility
“Early on, I was a big proponent of that e-commerce was going to clean the clock of the department stores. I got the thesis half right. Share did shift. No one could make money other than Amazon because of there's just no defensibility, no barriers to entry.”
Sacca: Travis Kalanick was ousted by 13 Uber managers, not VCs
“In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that's really the only force that Silicon Valley leader…”
Amazon and Walmart lose trillions annually in inventory waste
“If you look into the inventory losses and the wastage costs of the likes of Walmart, or even an Amazon, or like normal supermarket chain, it's in the trillions of how much they're losing on a yearly basis of like food and other items that are actually being so…”
Ek: US tech ecosystem outside Silicon Valley and Seattle lags Europe
“If you take Silicon Valley and Seattle out of it, the US actually would be worse than Europe if you took those two out of it.”
Hargreaves: US business creation is at its lowest since the Great Depression
“Fewer businesses are getting started today than have been started at any point since the Great Depression.”
Stebbings: ElevenLabs has secured government buy-in across all major Western democracies
“Now, 11 Labs is an unstoppable machine at this point, to the point where it has government buy-in across All of the large major Western democracies.”
O'Driscoll: Hyperscaler RPO depends entirely on foundation model commitments
“Because, let me be clear, if you know the answer to that question, that one question, you know the answer to the entire direction of the U.S. Stock market for the next two years. Because all the hyperscaler RPO, all of it, is a function of the commitments they…”
Jain: Enterprise fears over AI models training on company data have vanished
“When AI just came, there was a, companies were a lot more afraid of getting their data outside of, you know, their own control and model companies training with, you know, with their data. But that sort of is a fear that it's no longer there. Like, you know, l…”
Jain: Glean was the first enterprise AI company to deploy RAG
“We actually get a lot of credit for being the first enterprise AI company in the world. The first ones to actually bring RAG into the enterprise. The first ones to build conceptual semantic search.”
O'Driscoll: AI developers now require Washington permission before shipping software
“Six months ago, you could ship software like a free man, and now you have to get permission from Washington before you do it. It's a big change, right?”
Lemkin: DeepSeek's AI model is intentionally crippled inside China
“And DeepSeek is intentionally crippled in China. It's not as good as it is here. It can't search the web and it is trained on different data as near as I can tell.”
Arora: Compute costs have increased 2x to 4x over two years
“If I abstract, if I step back today there's not enough compute for what the world is demanding. Unequivocally not enough compute, right? You can't buy compute. Compute is costing two to three X or four X more than it used to cost two years ago. There's not eno…”
Feldman claims Cerebras is the only pure-play AI public company
“But what we did know was that we had a chance to be the first and only AI peer play in the entire market. There's only one, and that's us.”
Lemkin: Anthropic has secured more compute capacity than OpenAI
“And now Anthropik, I hate the five D eight D chess metaphor, but now it's gonna, it's figured out a way to have more capacity than open AI.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
Weitzman: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
O'Driscoll: Microsoft's revenue growth is flat without its AI initiatives
“Without the AI initiative, Microsoft is flat revenue.”
AppLovin Cut Departmental Staff 40-50% in 2024 Despite Fast Growth
“Mostly in 24, we had a year where we probably grew near double digits. Sorry, near triple digits. But we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40, 50% in most departments.”
Reyna: Outbound cold email response rates have dropped below 0.01%
“And you see, like, the response rates on outbound emails Has dropped to the lowest of any point in time. It's like less than 0.01%.”
Stebbings: Anthropic made $6B in February, exceeding Databricks' lifetime revenue
“28 day month of February, where they did six billion in revenue, which was more than Databricks has done in their entire lifetime.”
O'Driscoll: SoftBank is 1.5x to 2x levered, threatening equity in downturn
“It's around two X levered, right? One and a half to two X levered in terms of equity, right? What that means is a 30, 40% decline, you know, wipes them out.”
Lemkin: Salesforce has more Agentforce AI demand than it can service
“I'm long on Salesforce. The simple reason, and I know this being super deep on agent force and everything, is unlike a lot of folks on this list, they have more demand than they can service.”
Jerry Murdock: Meta rejected Nvidia GPUs to bet on custom ASIC chips
“I mean, look, you know, a lot of people like to criticize meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen. We don't need you. So why did he do that? Because he's betting on a six chips. No question abo…”
Emberikos: OpenAI is the only firm building OS-level sandboxing for Windows AI agents
“We're basically the only company that cares about OS level sandboxing for coding agents. For instance, there's none that exists on Windows. We're the ones building that and we're doing it in open source, so hopefully other people can use it.”
Klarna's AI customer support performed the work of 600 human agents in 2023
“I announced already in 23 that, you know, our AI customer service had, you know, done the equivalent of 600 agents jobs, and it caught a lot of attention at the point of time.”
Fitzpatrick: AWS report shows 70% of AI agents are traditional automation scripts
“There was actually a report AWS came out with today, it's interesting, that like, 70% of agents are actually not even, ah, AI agents, as you think of it. Like, most of the agent, agentic processes today are actually traditional script writing and just traditio…”