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 1,082 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
VC Rejected Gamma Pitch as Worst Idea Due to Incumbent Distribution
“He basically, you know, says, this has got to be the worst idea I've ever heard. And he said, not only are you going up against massive incumbents, they have ultimate distribution. There is no way you're going to compete against them.”
Amjad Masad: Replit left San Francisco over its get-rich-quick culture
“I think we're in an era of Silicon Valley where it's like very very get rich driven. And that makes me a little sad. And that's partly why I moved the company out of SF.”
Andreessen: Frontier AI synthesis outputs have been 100% accurate for months
“What I'm looking for is like, yes, explain this to me in like the Like, the clearest, most sophisticated, most complex, most, like, complete way that it's possible for somebody to, you know, for a real expert to be able to explain things to me. And that's what…”
Rose: I avoided AR/VR investing and disagree with Zuckerberg's strategy
“I don't agree with his direction around classes and AR VR. I never have. I've been anti AR VR for years. Never made an investment in the space, always avoided it altogether because I think that we're not considering the social side of things enough, like the i…”
Rabois: Google Search is so inferior to ChatGPT that he no longer uses it
“I don't use Google for anything. Like, I can't remember the last time I used Google versus ChatGPT. Like, it's just so inferior.”
Rabois: Trade Republic is better than Nubank on every metric
“One of the best investments I've ever made is a company in Europe called Trade Republic. It's actually better than Nubank on any metric, actually.”
Ghodsi: Databricks passed on acquiring a successful company over weak talent
“There is one really good company that well, one really successful company that we never acquired. And I always vetoed it whenever it came up because I just think that the quality of their employee base is not great. And I didn't want it to dilute Databricks.”
Altman: I was wrong to oppose vertical integration in tech
“I was always against vertical integration. And I now think I was just wrong about that.”
Altman: Rights holders fear Sora won't feature their characters enough
“In the case of Sora, we've heard from A lot of concerned rights holders and also a lot of... And a lot of rights holders who are like, my concern is you won't put my character in enough.”
Kupor: Silicon Valley recruits resorted to using ChatGPT on their personal phones
“The people on my team who, you know, came from Silicon Valley who are working in my department, What they were doing was just, they would just, you know, on their personal phone, they were using ChatGPG to help them do stuff”
Bhattacharya: NIH researchers no longer need supervisory approval to publish papers
“I found out that a lot of folks at the internal investigators at the NIH, in order to publish their work, had to seek permission from their supervisors. I changed that. Like, no more permission. You, if you're an NIH researcher, you have a scientific paper, yo…”
Bhattacharya: NIH eliminated paywalls for taxpayer-funded scientific research articles
“They want, they actually had a sort of a if you, a policy where if a regular person wanted to go find a scientific article they had to go, there was a paywall where they pay like 50, a hundred dollars. We got rid of that paywall for NIH-funded research.”
Appenzeller: Intel's customer concentration allowed hyperscalers to push down prices
“One of the biggest problems we had was that our customer base sucked, right? I mean, we were selling to, most of the chips went to the large hyperscalers, you know, which they're way too concentrated, and they build their own chips, and so you can push down yo…”
McCune: a16z donated to Leading the Future PAC for AI political advocacy
“And that's, you know, part of the reason that we have recently announced our donation to leading the future pack, which will have, you know, several different entities underneath it, which I think is, Is designed to sort of be that political center of gravity …”
Polovets: Humba Ventures paused defense investing due to inflated valuations
“We invested in defense a lot three, four years ago, and then we kept looking, we're basically paused for a year and a half or two, because after the Ukraine and Israel thing, you know, prices just went up like two, three, four times, but the company fundamenta…”
Polovets: Most of Humba's 10-12 unicorns lacked multi-stage seed leads
“I think we've invested in like 10 or 12 unicorns roughly. Maybe like a third of those or quarter of those had a series A investor at seed.”
Casado: Founders get to block one direct 'mortal enemy' a16z investment
“For any company that I'm an investor in, If I'm talking to another company that looks similar, I'll ask the founder. I'm like, listen, is this your mortal enemy? You only get one. You can't, you know, you only get one, but it's just, if this is your mortal ene…”
Casado: a16z avoids lesser-known SOTA AI model startups due to heavy subsidies
“So the state-of-the-art model market, this is like the, you know, the Anthropics and the Open AIs it's incredibly competitive, and it's very heavily subsidized, right? I mean, like with Meta and like Google, et cetera, and so kind of our view is, is you have t…”
Fruchter: Genie 3 generates environments without explicit 3D representations
“One thing that we didn't want to do, and we didn't want to build an explicit representation, right? So there are definitely methods that are able to achieve consistency, and they did that through an explicit, some three, you know, their nerves, and other metho…”
Andreessen's new California city project acquired four times Manhattan's acreage
“We have a project to build a new city in California. We've bought, you know, four times the acreage of Manhattan in Solano County.”
Ulevitch: Chinese battery cutoffs have severely impacted a16z portfolio startups
“Being cut off from being able to buy batteries from China is incredibly punitive to a company, and we've certainly seen that happen with some of our startups, and then they have to go, you know, then you find out quickly that the ability to procure and source …”
Cohen: Hesitant to invest in AI edtech focused solely on teacher productivity
“One of the reasons why I've had, like, a little bit of a hard time investing in these early education companies is they're allowing a teacher to be a lot more productive and be 10 times better at their job, have feel like burnout is a lot lower. Incredible, ri…”
Cohen: AI startup charged $500 monthly promising 3rd-grade literacy in 3 months
“I think, like, one of the most interesting pitches I've seen, and the company was super early, was an AI reading company, which basically, like, sent kids books, and then they had AI teach the kids how to read, And it was mostly three to four year olds, and it…”
Bryan Kim: ChatGPT knows more personal context about him than Google
“I pour my heart and soul into ChatGPT. It knows more about me than probably Google, potentially. Which is an insane thing to say. Like Google, I've been using, using Google for a decade plus, and ChatGPT may know more about me than Google, because I type more,…”
Ben Horowitz reveals early a16z rejected founders who yielded to their ideas
“One of the things that, that Mark and I used to do a lot in the early days was Basically try and convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted. And then if they did that, we would not invest because they didn't, you know, they're coming in with their beliefs.”
Banks initially categorized missile startup Castelion alongside porn and gambling
“We couldn't even get a bank account. We tried to open a bank account and they, we just got dumped into like, well, you're basically the same as porn and gambling. So we're not going to give you a bank account.”
Tariffs have overall been positive for Apex Space, says Ian Cinnamon
“I think the tariffs overall have been positive for us, frankly.”
Horowitz: Trump and Kushner felt they were too deferential in term one
“In talking to Jared and, in talking to, ah, the president, It was, well, we didn't go hard enough. You know, we kind of were too differential to the system, which has probably shocked a lot of people because they're like, they were differential. But they were …”
Bry: Skydio's First Drone Generation Failed in Ukraine Battlefield Conditions
“Candidly, like, our first round of drones in Ukraine basically failed.”
Dixon: Audible and publishers completely ban authors using AI voice narration
“I wrote my book. I wanted to have my own voice use AI to read the book, using my own voice. Both the publisher and the, and Audible, the podcasting platform, ban AI completely.”
Horowitz: Donating to Las Vegas police aims to build safest US city
“There's been a little controversy lately about donations that I've made to the police department, and it's really a collaboration. You know, we've been working together to kind of make Las Vegas both kind of the safest city in America and the best police, the …”
Song: Dream Machine Learned Physical Simulation and Lighting Without 3D Priors
“But what's really surprising about Dream Machine is that we almost did nothing with regards to these NERF datasets or have zero, three D priors into how the model works. But the model just by itself learns to kind of uncover these interesting physical aspects …”
Casey: Capital Group avoids investing in companies with overly high margins
“There's a lot of companies I won't invest in because they're not investing enough, right? I'm like, your margins are too high. I don't think you're being aggressive enough about future investments. And if you lowered your margins and it showed some progress on…”
Horowitz: a16z met with Trump and White House, but Biden declined
“Mark mentioned we met with President Trump. We did meet with White House, many White House officials including Jeff Zeitz, the Chief of Staff and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary, and so forth. We have not met…”
Horowitz: a16z never saw private company Wells Notices before crypto crackdown
“They've issued Wells Notices, which in our whole career we never saw a Wells Notice, which is kind of a form of a, of an SEC declaring they're investigating and going after a company for any private company, and these are all private companies.”
Horowitz: Worldcoin launched globally except in the U.S. due to regulations
“And they have launched their product everywhere in the world except the United States, because the United States of these, of this behavior and these laws”
Andreessen: a16z launched an ambitious political program to defend startups
“We've launched a sort of a really ambitious political program in the last year, because we've just had it with people basically taking free shots on goal on startups, and so we're trying to support a lot of the politicians on the right side of these issues”
Horowitz: a16z supports regulation in crypto, drug development, and finance
“We're, you know, in representing little tech, we're not a pure libertarian, anti-regulatory kind of You know, force here. We think we need regulation in places. We certainly need it in drug development. We certainly need regulation in crypto and financial serv…”
Horowitz: a16z made a major donation to the Fairshake PAC
“We have a big kind of donation to something called the fair shake pack, which is kind of work on this and just identifying for kind of citizens like, okay, which politicians are on what side of these issues?”
Tseng: Shield AI program allocated 60 aircraft despite commander wanting 1,000
“We're in a program of record. If you ask, you know, this was brought up. He's, they asked the commander, how many of these aircraft that shield AI produces do you think you're getting? He said, I hope we're getting a thousand. They're getting 60, right?”
Beck: Special ops was his most innovative workplace, standard military his least
“The most innovative place that I've ever worked in my entire life was actually a joint special operations task force downrange. And the least innovative place that I've ever worked in my entire life is also, was also with my uniform on.”
Cost Plus Drugs captures 17% of cash mail-order market with $0 ad spend
“We think we have 17% at cost plus, 17% of the cash mail order market, and that's, you know, how much we've spent on marketing and advertising? Zero.”
Horowitz: Worldcoin is unable to list on exchanges in the United States
“We have an investment in a company called world coin, which is like a very kind of topical relevant technology because it's proof of human. They can do a zero knowledge proof that proves you're a human being and not an AI bot. But the one country that they can…”
Andreessen: VCs treat admission to elite universities as a standalone credential
“For VCs like us, like it actually, the fact that you got admitted MIT is itself a credential. Yeah. Even if you never went right. Even if you never actually completed the thing.”
Frustration over inability to launch AI products drove Google exit
“You know, some people are motivated by publishing, you know, like, I was frustrated I couldn't launch at Google.”
Ghodsi: Databricks restricted MosaicML sales because of severe GPU shortages
“So we bought Mosaic. I did not unleash our sales force and go to market of 3000 people. To sell the thing that we bought because we just can't satisfy the demand. Like there's not enough GPUs.”