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 4,810 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
Tobi Lütke calls the climate movement one of the most evil things
“Well, you have to get rid of the climate cult, first of all because it's just like, I mean, it's one of the most evil things that's been wrought on on, on, on population.”
Andreessen: Fears of AI labor displacement are 100% wrong
“This entire labor displacement thing is a hundred percent incorrect. It's completely wrong.”
Andreessen: Most large companies are overstaffed by 50% or more
“Essentially, every large company is overstaffed. It's at least overstaffed by 25%. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50%. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75%.”
Mitchell Green: 50% to 60% of VCs add negative value
“I think 50% of people in the venture business should not actually be in the business. There's too much money and there's like too many tourists. 50, 60% of people in this industry that actually probably add negative value to companies.”
Former Snowflake CRO calls Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi a dick and liar
“I, you know, I strongly dislike the CEO of Databricks, but I think Mike, cause he's a dick and he's a liar, but you know, I look, I think at the end of the day, if I, if I'm honest about it, I think the two companies as a combined entity, that would be a amazi…”
Osika: Invest in xAI's Grok and short OpenAI
“I'd invest in GroK, and I would probably short Anthropic. No, I would short OpenAI.”
Edwin Chen considers company acquisition an admission of failure
“Because yeah, getting acquired would be really limiting. It would be this admission of failure and jumping ship because you can't make it on your own anymore.”
Hyatt: Junior VCs prioritize quick markups from later-stage firms for promotions
“Well, that means if I want to get a promotion and I'm inside of schmooby schmooby VC firm, then I need markups. So if I need markups, how do I quickly get markups? I figure out what the guy one stage after me is interested in. And so my job is not really to go…”
Sivulka: Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) does not work at all
“That's a bit of a plot twist over here. We, I actually don't think RAG works at all.”
Pishevar: Bill Gurley was the wrong VC on Uber's board
“We had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it was Bill Gurley at Benchmark.”
McCabe: DEI initiatives are a bad idea that discriminate by race and gender
“I always thought it was a really bad idea to discriminate against people for their race or their gender or things like that. So I never was cool with DEI”
Vishria: AI foundational models are fastest depreciating asset in history
“Foundational models are the fastest depreciating asset in human history.”
Maguire: SolarWinds hack could have directly altered 2020 election results
“There was an extremely large hack happening during the election called SolarWinds, which my company was deeply involved in investigating and remediating, and there are other cyber experts that disagree with me, but I personally believe that SolarWinds could ha…”
Every crypto company offering an Earn program is a fraud
“I believe every crypto company that has an EARN program is a fraud.”
Lemkin: Coinbase's 10% high-yield crypto program is a pyramid scheme
“And even, I know Coinbase is the good one, but where are they getting this 10%? It's a pyramid scheme. It's fraud.”
Tomaino: Crypto VCs hype private tokens and dump them on retail
“A big part of the crypto VC game is doing these private token deals, and then you kind of build some prestige media narrative hype and then sell the token to retail, and then retail gets sucked in, and the VCs kind of dump tokens on retail. That's like a big G…”
LeCun: AI hard takeoff fears are false; no real-world exponential lasts
“So this is predicated on an assumption that is just false, which is the existence of a hard takeoff. Right? So the fact that the minute you turn on a super intelligent AI system is going to take over the world. And it's going to escape your control and it's go…”
Emil Michael: Benchmark Capital lost its nerve ousting Travis Kalanick from Uber
“I was taken out with Travis because benchmark capital lost their nerve.”
Conrad: David Sacks made wrong decisions across product and strategy at Zenefits
“I got to this point where I was convinced that you know, David was not really interested in making Zenefits successful. And, you know, almost every decision he made at the company was wrong. You know, he the decisions he made from a product perspective, from a…”
Samani: Bitcoin is nonsense and not an inflation hedge
“No. Bitcoin is nonsense. It does not, there are so many ways to, you can choose to have a productive asset or a nonproductive asset. And then there are many assets that are naturally good hedges against inflation. The obvious of which is like Walmart and Amazo…”
Grinda: Switzerland Is a House of Cards That Could Default
“Last year, as I was thinking through what are safe havens for cash, I was thinking of putting a lot of my cash in Swiss francs in Switzerland. And I did an analysis, and I realized, and I actually came to the conclusion that it's the opposite. I think Switzerl…”
Grinda: UBS and Credit Suisse Are Too Big for Switzerland to Bail Out
“They're too big to bail. So it's not too big to fail. They're too big to bail. They're so big, the Swiss government does not have the underwriting power to underwrite it. And I could see them failing and bringing down Switzerland with them.”
Steve Blank: The startup ecosystem is a giant Ponzi scheme
“The startup ecosystem is actually, and I mean it half facetiously, a giant Ponzi scheme.”
Khosla: Most VC Board Members Are Unqualified to Advise Founders
“In fact, I would suggest that most board members, just because they went to business school and joined a venture firm, are not qualified to advise an entrepreneur. They're not qualified to challenge an entrepreneur. They're not even qualified to help them judg…”
Stanton: LP diversity statements inversely correlate with actual diverse manager investments
“And in my experience and several other people I know, we found an inverse relationship between the LPs who are very public about funding diverse managers and those who do so”
Mendelson: 50% of VCs Hurt Entrepreneurs, Only 25% Help
“In my opinion, at least 50% of them hurt entrepreneurs and 25% of them don't do any good. There's only really a quarter of the VC firms that I've worked with that really help the”
Bitcoin Runs on Greed While Solana and Ethereum Show Long-Term Potential
“And that greed element of blockchain, which is exactly what the Bitcoin thing is all about, in my opinion, is about greed, bringing down the, in the whole blockchain thing. While Solana and Ethereum, they're looking like they have a long-term potential.”
Traditional 'triple-triple-double-double' startup growth is no longer attractive for VC
“I turned down a company the other day, Because they were going from, like, one and a half to five to 15, and there's an opportunity cost of capital to say that's very real, and the growth expectations are just very different. In other words, triple, triple, do…”
Stebbings: 20VC hires mostly immigrants because British people lack strong work ethic
“Pretty much only hire immigrants. British people don't work very hard.”
Petersen: Most VCs collude more with competitors than their own partners
“There's a lot of collusion in VC. Like, I have a feeling that most VCs actually collude more with competitors than with their own partners.”
Laqua: New York is a terrible startup hub, founders move there only to date
“That's why I think New York is not a good place to have a company at all. The people that, that move their companies to New York do so because they want to date. And they're, you know, that's the only reason, really real reason why they do.”
Feldman states the Trump administration is unwaveringly better for business
“Unwaveringly better for business. You know, there are things I agree with, there are things I disagree with in this administration, but unwaveringly better for business.”
Chad Peets says Anthropic is inflating the executive compensation bubble
“Anthropic is, is inflating that bubble. Not that they're doing anything wrong. They just have so much money they can spend. And so they are setting benchmarks that the rest of the market is trying to keep up with.”
Peets: Continental European tech sales talent lacks required work ethic
“I just think it's hard to find the types of people harder, I should say to find the types of people, particularly outside of the UK in Europe that are willing to put the effort in that I think is required to be successful. I just think it's challenging.”
Lemkin: Fire employees who brag about team size on LinkedIn
“Anyone on LinkedIn that talks about their team, fire them. My team this. They're all so precious about their team. Lead from the effin' front with AI.”
Tobi Lütke: Everyone should be deeply suspicious of non-profit organizations
“The problem with charity dollars is they can't be given to anything that has a self healing fitness function, like, which is very fancy way of saying the words. For profit. Like markets voting of if a thing should exist. And like a not for profit, like the wor…”
Jake Paul: Donald Trump Is One of the Best U.S. Presidents
“I think he Is arguably one of the best presidents the United States has had in, in this term. There's so much propaganda and things, but at the end of the day he's doing an incredible job, and there's always gonna be criticisms.”
Lemkin: Governments should guarantee 0% financing for AI data centers
“We have to guarantee zero percent financing for all data centers. We'll get all our money back.”
Stebbings: TBPN is the Clubhouse of our era with near-zero engagement retention
“I think it's Clubhouse of our era. And so they have brilliant channel market fit, which is they crush it on Twitter for very specific clips. When you look at any of their view rates, very little. When you look at their retention on engagement rates, fuck all.”
Lemkin: 900 late-stage unicorn startups generating nine-figure revenues will never go public
“And then we've got 900 unicorns that are never going to IPO. Poor guys. We have nine, we all have one or two in our portfolio that are at nine figures in revenue that are still growing and will never IPO. And there is no PE buyer for them.”
Randle: Founders Fund's 'never fire founders' policy is rooted in laziness
“I think it's actually a convenience for Delian and some of the Founders Fund folks to absolve themselves of that weight and that responsibility just by being like, oh, it's not part of our, it's not part of our thing. But I think, you know, it's almost out of …”
Salesforce salespeople are terrible hires because they are just order takers
“Salesforce. Terrible. Terrible. Because they have no idea how to sell. They, they're order takers. To your point earlier is they don't, if you go to a place that's just an order taker, they'd have no idea how to do it. They have no idea how to sell.”
O'Driscoll: AI reverse acqui-hires are regulatory shams leaving dead target companies
“We actually, in both of those cases, that's a pure pretense to get the government off of us, right? Everyone knows both of these companies are toast because in the case of Scale AI, in theory, Meta owns 50% of it, and in theory, their business is selling to ev…”
Frosst: Sam Altman warning leaders about AI threat was disingenuous
“He did a world tour where he spoke to every major leader the world over to tell them, hey, this technology is gonna pose an existential threat. And I think that was academically disingenuous, and I think did a disservice to the technology he loves.”
Casado: Vertical SaaS Tech Is Simple CRUD Where The Team Doesn't Matter
“Every time I look at vertical SAS, I'm like, why do we even care about the technical team? It's fucking crud, man. It's like, crud is like create, you know, read, update, delete. It's like, they all do the same thing. They all just kind of look like a web app.…”