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 835 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 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
Horowitz: SoftBank and Tiger Global created a mess by over-capitalizing
“As we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance, you just end up creating a mess.”
Horowitz argues the venture studio model is fundamentally flawed for founders
“With the studio model, the, to me, the big problem with that historically and, you know, I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically is that it's not idea. It's an idea maze. And so and it's very hard to run through the idea …”
Horowitz: Shutting down open-source AI serves regulatory capture and monopoly
“If AI is a super weapon that will also be true there, and so if you believe that, then I think what you want is open source, and I think if you want regulatory capture or monopoly for yourself, you want to shut that down.”
Horowitz: Crypto is more transparent than Visa or dollars
“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”
Horowitz: Media praised Facebook under Obama, called it dangerous under Trump
“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”
Horowitz: Facebook internal probe found virtually no evidence of Russian hacking
“You know, what they found in terms of the quote-unquote Russian hacking was just about effectively nothing. Like, there was nothing. And so, but the dominant media narrative Was that Facebook had been hacked by the Russians, and I think like probably half the …”
Horowitz: 2009 VC Rivals Missed Crypto, AI, and American Dynamism
“None of them got to crypto in any real way. They, you know, they're trying on AI, but they're way behind. And they definitely, you know, and they mostly missed American dynamism entirely.”
Ben Horowitz: Adam Neumann is top two in the world at what he does
“He was clearly, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, like, as Mark said, you know, top two in one thing. There's just very few people on Earth that are top two in anything.”
Ben Horowitz says media ignored a massive shift in Trump's Middle East policy
“Yeah, it was actually a big thing in Trump's Middle East speech where it was such a, Remarkable speech in the sense that he advocated for the Middle East living or evolving from their own culture as opposed to being changed into our culture, which is a massive…”
Horowitz: Traditional VC is a mediocre product whose value drops to zero
“Venture capital is so underwhelming in that it, you know, it's a great product for investors for LPs, but it's a kind of very mediocre product for entrepreneurs because like we, you know, you get almost nothing. You get like some money and then a smart person …”
Horowitz: Building products impacts the world more than political activism
“Maybe the single best thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that, you know, Deliver some product or something that, that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than has a better impact than …”
Horowitz: a16z top partners outperform executive teams at Meta, Google, and Apple
“If you look at the top people, you know, if you look at Martine Cassato and Chris Dixon and Alex Rampell and David Ulovich and so forth, like that team is better, like IQ wise capability wise than the executive teams of Meta or Google or Apple or any of them.”
Horowitz: DOD culture has become politically and bureaucratically driven
“The bad thing that's happened to the culture in the DOD is it's become kind of, You know, politically and bureaucratically driven as opposed to mission driven.”
Horowitz: Crypto provides the core network infrastructure for AI
“So every piece of network infrastructure you need to make AI work, Is, is in this new technology that's invented”
Horowitz: We will continue funding police tech despite TechCrunch criticism
“And to Margot at TechCrunch you can write what you want about me, you can say what you will about us, but we're not going to stop, so sorry.”
Horowitz: Biden administration was the worst for tech in his career
“It was probably the, I think Unarguably the worst four years in our career in terms of White House policy as it related to technology and, you know, probably to business more broadly.”
Horowitz: Dozens of a16z portfolio companies were debanked under Choke Point 2.0
“And we had, you know, dozens of companies kicked out of the banking system simply for In a very legally compliant way trying to build a company, you know, that would, you know, employ people and, you know, make the country strong.”
Horowitz: Regulators targeted compliant crypto firms while ignoring fraudulent meme coins
“One of the really remarkable things about the whole crypto crackdown was, you know, the claim, the lie, and it was clearly a lie, and I'll explain why, was that, oh, we have to protect consumers. But as they were, you know, basically terrorizing every complian…”
Horowitz: Major tech and pharma CEOs couldn't get Biden administration meetings
“It's like every major, you talk to any major tech CEO of the biggest companies in the world of the, you know the biggest pharma companies in the world, none of them could get meetings with this administration.”
Horowitz: Government pressure on tech platforms came via informal threats, not legislation
“So it hasn't, Congress did not pass a law. The, there was no executive order. There was no policy. There was no nothing. There was just phone calls and letters and threats you know, from you know, from various kind of people in the government, you know, rangin…”
Horowitz: Using restrictive regulatory policy to beat China will cause US to lose AI race
“Probably the one thing we could do to lose to China is try and use policy to beat China.”
Horowitz: Highly automated US factories are almost impossible with union labor
“The way around that for America is highly automated factories, which are almost impossible to build if you have union labor.”
Horowitz: California essentially kicked Elon Musk out over automated manufacturing
“Most of the kind of issues that he's run into have been based on the fact that he is, you know, a modern manufacturing facility that's highly automated. And that's why California in particular has been You know, basically kicked them out of the state.”
Horowitz: U.S. AI policy focuses on software instead of robotics hardware
“If you think about what we're concerned about in terms of our AI policy, which is really at the federal level, almost a hundred percent kind of competitiveness with China. We're probably focused on entirely the wrong issue because the real issue competitively,…”
Horowitz: SEC sues utility token issuers over alleged asymmetric information
“All of those under the Gensler regime are essentially illegal because or they're legal but you'll get sued by the SEC, by the US government, and the reason that you'll get sued is they claim that anything with utility is has asymmetric information attached to …”
Horowitz: Biden White House has been extremely bad on crypto policy
“The White House in particular has been extremely bad on this issue.”
Horowitz: The Biden administration subverted the rule of law to attack crypto
“They've basically subverted the rule of law to attack The crypto industry.”
Horowitz: Proposed federal compute limits threaten rapidly growing foundation model startups
“For little tech, which is, by the way, you know, everything that we've invested in foundation, not everything, but almost everything is growing incredibly fast and doing incredibly well, and these will be snuffed out by this kind of regulation.”
Horowitz: Biden administration sued to block a16z portfolio's Sanofi drug deal
“We have a company with an incredible drug platform. They cured. A rare disease, like past phase one clinical trials, carried it, sell the drug to Sanofi because, you know, so they can get some of the money back to develop more things, and the Biden administrat…”
Horowitz: A radical faction controls the Biden administration's tech policies
“These policies are from kind of the radical side, which is, you know, like it's a significant side of the Biden administration but it is, it's a powerful side, and they really are in charge I would say, you know, kind of much more than the moderates.”
Horowitz: Big tech is lobbying to eliminate open-source AI in universities
“They're not only underfunded to do AI, but the, there's a push among the big tech companies to Enact legislation that would essentially outlaw AI in universities by eliminating open source.”
Horowitz: Attending school to learn will be obsolete by 2030
“I don't know why you have to go to school to learn anything, you know, in 2030. Like, that's not gonna be true. So, like, I think education's gonna reemerge much better than it's ever been.”
Horowitz: GM is vulnerable to Tesla because it only assembles cars
“GM is totally vulnerable to Tesla and BYD. This is why, you know, HP ended up being totally vulnerable to Apple because Apple was still building computers and HP was assembling computers and GM is assembling cars and Elon completely kind of re-engineered how y…”
Horowitz: Fears of widespread AI job loss are overblown
“Yeah, like, I mean, I think, I, that, that's the most overblown fear ever, right? Like, so we've now had this AI revolution started in 2018, and I think unemployment has gone nowhere but down since then. And, you know, like, they're gonna take all our jobs. Ev…”
Horowitz: Restricting genetic data access will cost more lives than FDA saves
“I think that this is a interesting, like, weird misapplication of good intentions in a policy way that's probably going to Kill more people than ever get saved by every kind of health, FDA, et cetera, policy that we have”
Horowitz: Misguided AI regulation will cede US leadership to China
“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”
Horowitz: FDIC rejected SVB buyer to avoid creating another G-SIB bank
“One of the blocks was there was a bank that was going to buy Silicon Valley bank and by buying Silicon Valley bank, it would move up into the G-SIB category, which is globally systemic important banks. And they're like, no more G-SIBs.”
Horowitz: Car thieves are not prosecuted in almost any blue state
“One of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is like grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealin…”
Horowitz: Google suffers from a low-accountability corporate culture
“So if you have a place like You know, a very low accountability culture, like say Google, which, you know, has a monopoly that kind of supports the other businesses. So it's hard to have accountability when there's like a single profit center that dominates to…”
Horowitz: 'Do well and do good' is a dangerous corporate concept
“We want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect in that You know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that. And you kind of want to stop it th…”
Horowitz: Big Tech influenced Biden's AI executive order language
“Big tech actually got this, you know, some of this language into the Biden administration executive order.”
Horowitz: Big Tech monopolies could surpass US government power within five years
“If we don't do that, you know, over the next five years, these monopolies are going to get much, much stronger. Probably some of them will be stronger than the US government itself.”
Horowitz: Tech lobbying failed due to arrogance and Democratic partisanship
“I think there are like a few kind of important issues around that. One is, you know, really arrogance in that I think, you know, we in tech and a lot of the people who went in are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're for the good and everybody will love us whe…”
Horowitz: Apple aggressively abuses smartphone monopoly with 30% App Store fee
“I think that's happened on the smartphone now. You know, particularly with Apple, I think the kind of the Epic case and the Spotify cases are really great examples of that where, you know, I am fielding, you know, a product that's competitive with Spotify and …”
Horowitz: Senator Elizabeth Warren takes totalitarian view of the financial system
“Elizabeth Warren, who has taken a very totalitarian view of the financial system and is moving to consolidate everything in the hands of, you know, a very small number of banks and basically control who can participate and who cannot.”
Horowitz: Big Tech is lobbying Washington to outlaw AI competitors
“So if you look at what big tech has been trying to do, they're trying, they're very worried about new competition to the point where they've taken upon themselves to go to Washington and try and outlaw their competitors.”
Horowitz: AI is actual communism while blockchain is advertised communism
“AI is what communism actually is a massive concentration of power and blockchain is what communism is advertised to be, which is power to the people.”
Horowitz: Biden administration uses extra-legal regulatory pressure to choke crypto companies
“We're seeing you know, this administration do the same thing. In something called choke .2, but this time with crypto companies and, you know, there's no law that they're following. There's no rule. There's no legislation. There's no vote. There's no nothing. …”