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 136 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
Pande: FDA regulations would not have prevented the Thalidomide crisis
“Ironically, nothing that the FDA has done would have helped the phlegmide crisis because you don't test on pregnant women and so on”
Andreessen: Invention of atomic bomb prevented World War III
“Sitting here in the year of 2023 and looking back I think we now know, I would say, quite conclusively you know, as much as you can know anything involving counterfactuals, I think we know, or I would argue that we know that the invention of the atomic bomb an…”
Ovitz: CAA could not have succeeded using a less aggressive approach
“Someone asked me the other day, do you think you could have done it differently in the day? And I don't think that we could have because we were in a cutthroat business to start with.”
Chen: AlphaGo Zero discovered 1,000 years of human Go strategies in days
“Thousands of generations of games playing each other sort of arrive at places that maybe humans would have gotten to if we played another thousand years, but like, you know, it figured out in three days.”
Evans: Face ID from Google or Facebook would have triggered privacy backlash
“If Google or Facebook had announced that, we'd be having a different, completely different conversation.”
Ehrsam: Requiring economic staking on email accounts would eliminate spam overnight
“Spam email is killed overnight, probably.”
Horowitz: Loudcloud wouldn't have survived without accepting a worsening market
“We definitely would not have survived as a company if I hadn't just admitted to myself that things might not get better in the kind of funding environment.”
Oyelowo: A decade ago, Queen of Katwe would feature a white savior
“It's because Of Tendo Nagenda being at the center of getting this made, that my character isn't a white missionary which is what it would, which is what it has been up until, you know, when I say a white savior, that's how this film would have got made 10 year…”
Currier: Path Would Be a Major Company Without Mobile Competition
“Had there been no competition like there was for Facebook when they were growing for two years in colleges, path would have been a big company.”
Kevin Kelly: The music industry lost ground by fighting digital copying
“I mean, can you imagine if the music industry had accepted? From the front. I mean, how far ahead they would have been if they say, okay, this is inevitable, this copy thing. We're not, we're just going to try and work with it. You know, there's things to adju…”
Walden: Legacy Taxi and Hotel Regulations Would Have Stifled Airbnb and Uber
“If they had to live by all the laws of, like they were a hotel, I mean, that doesn't make any sense, or Lyft, or Uber. Having to, you know, be under the regulatory confines of the old taxi laws. We would never have this competition innovation coming to consume…”
Popper: Bitcoin code would have died quietly without early adopters
“The code in itself would have died a quiet death if it were not for all of the people in this book”
Andreessen: A modern internet would be completely decentralized with built-in cryptocurrency
“I think if we were to create the internet today, I think we would do it completely different. I think we would have it be completely decentralized and I think we would have cryptocurrency built in at the core. And I think it would be far more robust and would …”
Evans: Investor demand for immediate cash returns would collapse Amazon's stock
“If for some reason investors decided, you know what, we're going to fundamentally change your attitude to what kind of returns we want from this business. We're going to stop thinking about it as a bridge. It needs to start spitting out cash to us right now to…”
Li Jin: Uber and Lyft required unlicensed drivers to reach scale
“And without that kind of unlock, without expanding it to the unlicensed pool of potential drivers there's no way that Uber or Lyft could be anywhere near the size they are today.”
Haun: Corrupt federal agents wouldn't have been caught without crypto tracing
“Had cryptocurrency not been used in that case, we would have never caught these individuals, and they would have still been working for the government instead of in prison, which is where they are today.”
Mars: Converting search to AI assistants requires 100x data center scaling
“If you moved all of the queries that were search queries and turn them into intelligent personal assistant queries, we would have to grow our data centers by two orders of magnitude.”
Casado: Perfect foresight couldn't have prevented AI infrastructure capacity shortages
“So even if we had a perfect Oracle, once it started working, I don't think we could have built the capacity. We could have built the capacity. There's no way. And we're talking about like chip cycles, which tend to be three to four years. We're talking about b…”
Jake Paul: Early YouTube growth playbook would fail today
“It's no, I mean, I don't think it would.”
Magic Johnson: 1979 Nike equity offer would be worth over $1B today
“If I had a deal, did that deal in 1979, it'd be over a billion dollars.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs would not exist if started outside Europe
“And we, I think 11 Labs wouldn't have existed if we weren't starting from Europe.”
Andreessen: Current AI capabilities were considered impossible 5 to 10 years ago
“We're dealing with magic here that we, I think, probably all would have thought was impossible five years ago, or certainly 10 years ago.”
Augusto Marietti realized API marketplace economics would not work even at scale
“I could never make the economics works, even if this thing would have scaled.”
Ghodsi: Launching Databricks one year later in 2014 would have failed
“If we started the company in 2014, a year later instead, so a year later than we actually did, then we would have had our difficult year in 2016. But by 2016, the cloud was starting to happen. AI was starting to happen, you know, so we would have done the fixe…”
Boyle: Anduril wouldn't exist without Oculus and Palmer Luckey's gaming obsession
“Because Andrel would not have happened if not for Oculus. Oculus would not have happened if not for Palmer's obsession with gaming, right?”
Mark Cuban admits he should have been more patient developing draft picks
“I think I just would have been more patient and waited guys out to see how they turn out.”
Song: EliseAI would have launched in affordable housing first if starting over
“I probably would have started with affordable housing, actually.”
Moore: Generative video enables indie creators to build studio-budget characters
“I'm starting to see a mix of totally new characters that, like, aliens, like in the Neural Viz series that people never would have been able to create and, like, film before unless you're, like, a Hollywood studio with a big budget.”
Jain: Having product designers from day one would have accelerated 11x development
“I think we hired a designer too late. And I think that's one thing I think we would have changed if I could go back, is like, have them very, very involved, like, from day one of the process. Because that's, it determines exactly how the user is experiencing y…”
Schimpf: Anduril depended on a strict 2-to-3-year window for success
“I don't think we could have done it five years or later would be too late. Five years earlier probably would have been too early. I think we were in this like two to three year window where we could ride all those waves correctly.”
Wickramasekara: Benchling wouldn't exist if he knew it required enterprise sales
“If you had told me when I was 21 that I was signing up to do like enterprise sales to big pharma, I'd have been like, absolutely not. I'm not starting this company.”
Sheriff McMahill: LVMPD couldn't upgrade 911 via standard municipal budgeting
“In fact, if we would have relied on normal budgetary process, we wouldn't be where we're at today. Today, now I can deliver a service to the citizens of Las Vegas. That I would have never been able to deliver to them because we change the environment.”
Global Payments regrets cutting UK technology investments following the Brexit vote
“And I think our business would have been better positioned, you know, have we not cut those technology investments.”
Beck: Current defense procurement system would not be designed today
“If we were designing a defense procurement system from scratch today, we would not design the one that we have.”
Auchincloss: US would never have permitted Soviet ownership of 1960s networks
“I just don't think, we would never have allowed CBS, ABC, NBC to be owned by the Soviet Union in the 19 sixties.”
Gardner: Early focus on monetization would have yielded terrible decisions
“I feel like if we decided in the very early days, like let's just build a product to go make money, we would have made terrible, terrible decisions.”
Andreessen: Hollywood strikes would have occurred without AI
“There would have been a strike just on the basis of the changes to the streaming thing.”
Without early universe density variations, gravity could not form galaxies
“If the universe had been completely exactly uniform, gravity wouldn't know what to do. It would not have any way to pull material back together again. To stop the expansion locally and make galaxies and stars and planets and people.”
Andreessen: Manhattan Project would have failed without Oppenheimer's parallel detonation strategy
“Which was very prescient and turned out to be the thing that really, I mean, without that, they would not have succeeded and We would be living in a different world today.”
Balaji: Almost every VC in 2007 would have dismissed founding a currency
“Had somebody actually said, oh, I'm going to found a currency in 2007, 2008. Almost every VC would have looked at them like they had four eyes.”
Traditional payment friction would make global artist sales impossible without blockchains
“Without any obstacle around customs, foreign exchange, wire transfers that would have perhaps, perhaps made this interaction impossible without blockchains and without foundation.”
Sivak: Spellbreak Community Required Mandatory Playtest Voice Chats to Form
“And I think without us really pushing these play tests, I don't think it would have actually happened because I think that that sort of loose social connection of just being in text chat or whatever is not the same as like forcing you to play with the same gro…”
Casado admits he would have clicked a context-aware phishing link
“Like, I mean, I would have clicked on it.”
Ulevitch: Open source movement could not function without revision control
“The entire open source movement would not work without the revision control system.”
Pruden: Blockchain tracking would have exposed aid corruption in Iraq
“Applied to Iraq, this means that the sender of the military aid, which in this case was the US, would have been able to trace along the whole path that that aid took and ensure that it got to its intended recipient. And if anybody tried to siphon it off along …”
Levine: Open-Source Renaissance Required Business Model Innovation
“And I would argue without business innovation, such as pay for support, open core, and of course, SAS, open source as a service, there really wouldn't be an open source renaissance.”
Andreessen: Dapper Dan would have built a multi-billion-dollar brand in another life
“In another life, he'd have gone, he'd have a major national global apparel brand by now worth billions of dollars.”
Lohman: Incremental executive equity refreshes pass boards easier than delayed pool grants
“This would have been a lot easier if they'd been on top of this, if they'd been granting equity along the way, The numbers that they were proposing in the absolute were not ridiculous. If they had gotten there in stages, it would have been a lot easier.”