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 5,465 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
Shulman: Using copyrighted works in AI training data is industry standard
“Yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. That's not illegal. It's stock standard for the industry. It's what every AI company does.”
Curative Canceled $600K Salesforce Contract For An Internally Vibe-Coded CRM
“We just recently canceled our Salesforce contract because we have an internal CRM that was vibe coded, that is working better, that is managing our process better, is more integrated into what we're doing. We run our agents inside of it, and no one was using S…”
Andreessen: a16z passed on Anduril Series A out of political fear
“The most straightforward example is the deal we didn't do, we should have done, is the Andrewle Series A right, which was like, which was just, like, sort of obvious that it was gonna be special, and, you know, Palmer, we had worked with Palmer at Oculus, and …”
Stripe founders asked Robinhood not to tokenize their shares, says Tenev
“I've shared this viewpoint with Patrick and John, and they give me some variant of, oh, well, we're just a small Irish family company. Please don't tokenize my shares.”
Freise: KKR Lost Around $500 Million in Turkey
“In Turkey, I think we lost around five hundred million. What we didn't see was rule of law was a bit of a flexible concept there.”
Scott: Microsoft chose not to launch models more interesting than DeepSeek-R1
“We've had models more interesting than Deep Seek R-One that, like, we didn't even We chose not to even launch them.”
Storonsky: Revolut paid $2M for 55 executive hires and fired 50
“I think I hired like, you know, 55 through executive recruiters, paid like, you know, two million in fees. I ended up, you know, firing 49 or 50 of that, so it's such a waste of money.”
Anduril and Co-Founder Matt Grimm Officially Stand With Israel
“I don't at all, no. Absolutely not. Personally stand with them, and we as a company do too.”
Tavel: Benchmark barely reserves capital for follow-on investments
“We don't think about reserves. Period. Barely. We're very oriented towards our initial investment, and in that moment, you know, we are more ownership sensitive than probably most other firms. But then after we invest, we are 100% aligned with whatever objecti…”
Suster: VCs settled with embezzling founder, getting equity but zero cash
“It's one step worse than that, which is, I know of a company in which the founder embezzled money. Ok, literally stole millions of dollars. In order to not end up in a big legal battle, their VCs ended up settling, and they got all the stock back, but none of …”
Dixon: a16z Crypto currently holds 94% of all historical investments
“Throughout the lifetime of the crypto funds, we could, we today hold 94% of our investments.”
Gontovnikas built CEO deepfake technology for personalized outbound sales emails
“You can even, and we've created this, you can even create deep fakes of CEOs telling you something on a video, on an email, even though it's not really the CEO.”
Claure: I Invested $150M Into FTX at SoftBank Due to FOMO
“So I invested hundred and fifty million dollars on FTX, which I mean, apologies to SoftBank, because I should have never made that investment, but it's probably one decision that has changed my life forever. I'm never going to invest in something that I don't …”
Stebbings: Series B investors are offering founders $1M payouts to return capital
“You know, it is, but I'm seeing now I've seen four this month where the series B's are saying, Hey, preemptively we fucked up, but give us our cash back and we'll give you a million each.”
Zeev: I banned an LP who complained about rapid fund deployment
“I had a, an LP who joined in the third fund, and four months later, I tell him that you know, I'm raising our fine for, I finished, I'm raising, and he totally freaked out, and he started lecturing me on, he didn't call it what you called it, he called it vint…”
Conrad: Zenefits investors forced his resignation by threatening lawsuits despite board control
“At my last company, I had board control and everything, but when investors sat me down and said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to sue the company, we're going to go to war with you know, suddenly you're like, crap, how do I survive that?”
Abuzeid adopted a privileged white male alter ego to project confidence
“I pretty much adopted an alter ego, and this alter ego actually happens to be a white male who, you know, who is highly privileged as well, because I had observed how members of that demographic operate. Like, I see them walking into a room, and the amount of …”
Collin Understated Front's MRR to VCs to Guarantee Growth Later
“I always talked about the one that was the best, but also I always said that, so let's, let's say I was at 30 KMR. I would say we're at 20 KMR. So I would always give a number that's below so that, you know, if I raise it in two months and for some reason thin…”
Stebbings: Scaling From $1.5M to $15M ARR Is No Longer VC-Fundable
“I turned down a company the other day that went from one and a half, and they were gonna go to five, and then they were gonna go from five to 15, and it's just not enough anymore. It's just not interesting. I'm sorry for venture. We have an opportunity cost of…”
Lemkin refuses to invest in Chamath's 8090 without full-time commitment
“So I, I'm out. If literally Chamath drops everything, but 80, 90, everything. And I see the sweat from his brow and I see all, and I see that cause the dude's fit and he's looking good. Right. He just had, A massive, the massive largest win of his career as an…”
Randle: Benchmark missing early AI model providers was a complete failure
“No, it fucking sucks. It's terrible. It's a complete and utter failure on, on our part. And I think we, we'd all say that.”
Laqua receives death threats over Corgi's intense work culture
“The death threats and the DMs you know, people, people think I'm nuts.”
Lemkin: Founders should accept buyouts unless they refuse $1 billion
“That's why I tell all founders to take the offer. I tell all founders to take it. The opposite of VCs, take it. It's, it is an intensity test. And if they push back and say, no, a billion is not enough. Great. Then go for it. But if they're not sure you may no…”
Adam Foroughi Never Holds One-on-Ones or Performance Reviews With Direct Reports
“If people on my team, if they directly report to me, I never do one-on-ones, I don't do reviews.”
Lemkin refuses to buy public SaaS stocks with sub-par AI solutions
“No, I wouldn't buy any of them. I wouldn't buy, because I'm looking for products that are more than a 60% solution.”
Midha: 21 of 22 Sand Hill Road VCs Rejected Anthropic
“So I introduced them to 22, you know, friends up and down Sandhill road. And so there's some investors there and we got 21 no's, right?”
Andreessen: a16z Should Reflexively Back Every European Founder Moving to US
“One of my things in the firm is I say, we should back every single European founder who moves to the US. Like, we should just reflexively say yes.”
Raanan: I never discuss gross margins with early-stage startups
“How much I discuss, how often I discuss gross margins with our, with my early stage companies? Never.”
Lemkin: Two of my portfolio investments from last year are now obsolete
“I have two investments I made last year. I love them. Those products no longer have a reason to exist today because of Claude.”
Harry Stebbings: Sweet spot for hiring is under-24 Asians and Eastern Europeans
“So I hire, bluntly, Asians or Eastern Europeans, and very young, sub-twenty-three, 24. That is a sweet spot for us.”
Andrew Ng refuses to hire experienced engineers who ignore AI tools
“Those people, I just don't hire people like that anymore, but there are people that, you know, did a comfortable job, they kept coding the old way, and they just did not learn AI.”
Lemkin: Legacy CROs Are No Longer Relevant for Today's Tech Roles
“I struggle to even recommend a lot of the CROs and executives I know for roles today. I just struggle to find them a job. They're not the right people anymore.”
Startup Reps Who Join Legacy Tech Will Never Be Recruited Again
“You went to IBM for five years. We're never talking. I'm never recruiting you. Not because you're not a good rep, because by that move, I know what I need to know. You're done with, you don't want to do the heavy lifting anymore.”
ElevenLabs built its own data centers for training AI models
“So we've built our own data centers for training, and then for inference, we of course use some of our great partners across across the traditional.”
Stebbings: 20VC hires candidates with extreme trauma or extreme masochism
“For us, I look for people who have either extreme trauma or extreme masochism.”
Junestrand: Legora implemented a 9-9-6 work schedule with team buy-in
“I mean, the short answer is yes, because we did it for a while, and we did it with large team buy-in”
Lemkin: Stacking trusts shields up to $50M per exit from federal taxes
“And frankly, you can stack it with trusts, like for me, it's probably 40 to fifty million per, because I have five trusts on this, so that means for each exit I get, fifty million has no taxes.”
G Squared lost 20% on Uber and made 3x on Lyft
“We lost I think we made, we lost like 20 cents on the dollar, and Lyft we made like a three X.”
Matrix Partners signed an Airwallex term sheet then revoked it
“But I think one of the founders of the VC, that is the metrics partners, and they give the term sheet they signed, and they took it back. Yeah, so they basically said I had a call with the founder after they signed a term sheet, and they were like, oh, I don't…”
Pony Ma rejected Tencent's investment in Airwallex to build WeChat Pay internally
“The founder of Tencent didn't approve. After three months process, RCO pass you know, he just basically is like, because the idea is that this is going to help Tencent to do global, you know, VHAP settlement. And then Pony, the founder was like, why can't we b…”
Jack Zhang is taking $70M in personal debt to buy Airwallex secondaries
“I'm actually buying back the Airwaller stock myself, so I actually in the process of taking a debt of seventy million dollars to buy Airwaller secondaries.”
Michael Moritz hosted Jack Zhang at home to urge selling Airwallex
“Michael Morris invited me to his home, tried to convince me to sell the company.”
Akhund: I passed on Scale AI because the founders were too young
“I saw scale AI and I was like, okay, you know, like good idea, but these people are so young. I think they were like 19 and 20 at the time or something. I was like, yeah, this is like, I was like, I think I could run this company better if I was doing it and I…”
Grinda: FJ Labs maintains 30% IRR by selling winners early
“I want to say the cheat code I use for IR, why I still can get 30% IR today, is the virtue of being diversified means I own two, one to three percent of any of the companies, and so what I've been doing is getting secondaries on the way up. So, I've been doing…”
Lemkin: Top portfolio startups work 12-hour days, seven days a week in-office
“All the best startups I've invested in are working seven days a week, 12 hours a day in the office, seven days a week, 12 hours a day.”
O'Driscoll: Scale's portfolio companies bypass VC preferences in acqui-hires
“When I'm on the other side of the table and my late stage companies are trying to buy early stage companies, I do exactly the same thing. I don't give a shit about Jason and his bloody preference. I want to hire those five great engineers. Let's just give them…”
Green: Lead Edge bought ByteDance at 5x earnings
“Late last year we were buying ByteDance. We were paying five times earnings for it. It grows, like, 25, 30% a year.”
Riparbelli: Synthesia has no obligation to uphold free speech for $30 monthly
“We don't, as a company have, we don't see ourselves as having to uphold any kind of right of free speech. And frankly, from a business perspective, having someone pay me 30 dollars a month to create very questionable conspiracy content, it's just not good busi…”