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 128 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 128 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
O'Driscoll: Nearly all 2020–2021 venture investments will yield 1x or less
“Because if you think everything in 20, 21 was either priced wrong and makes a one X or early and just totally wrong and makes, you know, less than one X, let's just say, right? Other than a few companies that were the early precursors of AI”
Casado: OpenAI Lost Its Early Leads In Code, Image, And Video Generation
“OpenAI was the first to code, right? With GitHub Copilot. I mean, they provided the weights. As far as I know, and they lost that. And they were first to image with Dali, and they lost that. And they were the first to video with Sora. And as far as I can tell,…”
Cognition Reportedly Raising at $46B Valuation With $1.6B Projected ARR
“Cognition raising round at forty six billion dollars reportedly. They will end the year at 1.6 billion in ARR. Currently doing 800 to 900.”
Stebbings: Menlo to make $10B carry on Anthropic, Founders Fund more on SpaceX
“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”
Meta Offered an AI Candidate $20 Million Per Year in Cash
“There was someone I was hiring the other day, and he had an offer for twenty million dollars in cash per year from TBD, and like that's the kind of stuff we run into on a regular basis.”
Lemkin: Chamath Palihapitiya has been sued by all his former partners
“Chamath, all his ex-partners have sued him. Mamoon sued them. The Grok guys he sued.”
Lemkin: Drift Is Completely Dead After Being Banned by Salesforce
“They kicked Drift off five months ago. Drift will never come back. It is dead. It is completely dead.”
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…”
Stebbings: Mercor hit $500M revenue run rate in 17 months
“Now this company has gone to five hundred million in revenue, faster than anyone else, I believe, in history. I think it was 17 months.”
Calacanis: AI companies built models by stealing all my copyrighted content
“Just like in the beginning to get these off the ground, we had to trample copyrights and destroy everyone's IP rights. All of my IP is stolen. Everything I've written, all my videos were taken without my consent.”
Ross: Chinese AI models cost 10x more to run than US open-source
“The cost to run the OSS model is about one-tenth that of the Chinese models.”
Lemkin: Cognition mandated 80-hour weeks and laid off 30% of acquired startup
“Well, I guess today, Cognition laid off 30% of the folks they bought, and they offered to buy out all the other 200 employees. They gave them a nine-month package. They told them they either had to work 80 hours a week, six days a week in the office, or they s…”
O'Driscoll: Tiger Global and SoftBank are out of the venture game
“I mean, the big, I mean, the big momentum, the two biggest momentum players Of the last decade, Tiger and SoftBank are already out of the game.”
O'Driscoll alleges Poolside effectively cashed out via Nvidia product license
“A few weeks ago, Poolside effectively didn't, they would deny that they sold, but they sold a license for their product to NVIDIA, which was an open weight enterprise US focused model, and they, you know, the company still exists, but they cashed out quite a l…”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 98% of B2C text-to-speech App Store installs
“The first one is if you go to the App Store and you search text-to-speech, Speechify has 98% of the installs in text-to-speech for B to C.”
Stebbings: 30 to 40 startups have raised $100M to $300M seed rounds
“I mean, there's 30, 40 companies that at seed have raised a hundred to three hundred million.”
Uber president's biggest fear is ChatGPT routing rides purely by price
“I just interviewed the president of Uber. What is his single biggest fear? It's actually the disaggregation of UI or the removal of UI where you say, I want a car, and ChatGPT automatically routes you to Lyft, Uber or another provider based on price.”
Stebbings: Y Combinator charges unprecedented carried interest premiums up to 50%
“The carry premiums that they charge are incredible too. People don't know or discuss that enough. Unprecedented. 40, 50% in cases.”
Hassabis: DeepMind's 2010 prediction of a 20-year AGI timeline remains on track
“We used to do this extrapolation of compute and algorithmic progress, and basically we predicted around 20 years it would take from when we started out, and I think we're pretty much on track.”
Weight loss is not the majority of Hims & Hers' revenue
“So weight loss is actually, you know, nowhere near the majority of this business. And I don't think ever will be just because you're continuing to expand core categories and a lot of new categories.”
Clements: 95% of developers switch AI models daily
“And one of the things that we're learning is like 50% of developers switch model families on a daily basis and 95% of developers switch models on a daily basis.”
Lemkin: Top 25 public software stocks slowed every quarter since Q1 2022
“Every single quarter since Q one of 20, 22 growth has slowed for the, for all public software stocks. Every single quarter it has slowed and it continues to slow. And there are a handful of folks that have reaccelerated like Mongo and Palantir. And there are a…”
Lemkin: Agentic AI products have not yet inflected software revenues
“The evidence, you can't argue with the fact that the agentic products have not inflected revenue.”
Chang: Fuse Energy grew revenue from £2M to £200M in three years
“We increase our revenue with Tenex every year since inception. First year was two million pounds, second year was 20, and then this year we're gonna end at over 200 pounds.”
Stebbings: Multi-Billion Mega Seed Rounds Include Undisclosed Cheaper Tranches
“The one lesson that I've learned from a lot of these deals, whether it's Thinking Machines or this or some others, is that although it's 500 or five billion on the sticker price when it's announced, there's actually several rounds before that Sequoia and Andre…”
Mansour: Kalshi is currently profitable
“We are at a point right now where, so we're growing incredibly fast. We are also profitable right now.”
Lemkin: Replit and Lovable achieve over 50% gross margins using cheap models
“Replit and Lovable, frankly, are using cheap models. Most people don't know or care, and they're well marked up. The margins are north of 50, the gross margins, okay?”
Lemkin: The NASDAQ Will Outperform Most Venture Capital Funds
“Just put the rest into NASDAQ, and you're gonna make more than most VC funds anyway”
Stebbings: Top VC firms force LPs into 2:1 fund stapling requirement
“If you're an LP and you want to be in the early stage fund, you will often, very often with top tier brands, have to put in two times that into another fund to get that one dollar in the other, and you don't get your pick of which fund. Very often you have to …”
Stebbings: Erotica is the largest use case for Grok media generation
“And it is the largest use case for Grok on their image and video generation is erotic creation.”
Stebbings: Andreessen Horowitz will generate $40B+ back from Databricks
“They're about to get the payday of paydays in Ventureland with a minimum of forty billion back from Databricks.”
Stebbings: UK Labour government triggered world's fastest millionaire exodus
“I've been very public on my concerns around the labor government in the UK and what it's done for the UK so far. It's the fastest access of millionaires out of any country.”
Processed David bars test cleaner for microplastics than agricultural RXBARs
“RX bars were like really bad on, on plasticizers. So microplastics and RX bars predominantly an agricultural product. It's dates, almonds, eggs. David scores like is super clean. It doesn't have any plasticizers, heavy metals, and that's because of its process…”
Stebbings: Benchmark AI portfolio companies HeyGen, Sierra, and Fireworks hit $100M+ ARR
“McCaw over a hundred million in ARR. Hey Jen hitting a hundred million in ARR. Fireworks a hundred and forty million in ARR. Sierra with Brett Taylor over a hundred million in ARR.”
Stan Boland: EIS and VCT fund returns range from 0.8x to 1.2x
“And, in fact, all the returns are somewhere between 80 cents and one dollar 20 on the dollar.”
Hoggett: UK is second largest equity capital market in free-market world
“We are the second largest equity capital market in the world in a free market economy.”
Feldman: Cerebras inference has been the fastest platform since August 2024 launch
“And every day since August 26th when we launched Inference, our way has been the fastest way across a whole set of models tested by artificial analysis and others.”
Feldman: DeepSeek likely accessed AI chips hosted in Singapore
“It turns out that they probably did use chips in Singapore.”
Morin: Google DeepMind has abandoned model fine-tuning for context windows
“You talk to people at DeepMind And they don't even fine tune anymore. Because they have such, you know, what's called big context window”
Kanji: A $10M seed round doubles outlier odds versus $5M
“And there is a statistical, like, correlation between if a seed round raises, like, a hundred K, the probability of it becoming an outlier is very, very, very, very small. Kind of makes sense. If that seed round goes up to, like, ten million, the odds between …”
Pishevar: London police emails explicitly disavowed fabricated report to journalists
“And there were multiple emails from the London police telling the reporter, like, this is not our report.”
Sequoia still uses the lobby-waiting strategy to win competitive deals
“The classic Sequoia playbook, which literally happened to one of my portfolio companies a couple months ago, where they sit in the lobby and just wait, you know, with the term sheet. Sequoia still does it.”
Stebbings: Tech companies like Klarna build their own customer support AI
“And then the worst thing about this market is that for any sophisticated buyer, an Airwallex, a Klarna, a Navan, a technology-facing company, everyone has built their own.”
Katz: ClickHouse extended its financing despite having $1B on its balance sheet
“And so we did a financing earlier this year, and then we extended it and brought in some strategic investors like yourself and David Sachs and Michael Dell and JP Morgan. We didn't need the capital. We had a billion dollars on the balance sheet.”
Whatnot's GMV is doubling to $16 billion with a 12% take rate
“You measure GMV, which is about eight billion last year, going to sixteen billion this year, and then they get a 12% take.”
O'Driscoll: Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan will make over $10B on SpaceX
“Who will make, I think, over ten billion dollars from their SpaceX. To clarify, I know you think the entire Midwest is the same, Harry, but I think it's Ontario teachers.”