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
Andreessen: a16z is becoming directly involved in political policy and lobbying
“We are getting increasingly involved directly in politics which is not something that we would, you know, prefer to do if we didn't have to, but you know, we are doing it in this category and a few others as sort of these challenges have gotten more intense.”
DoNotPay routes requests through user IPs to bypass corporate anti-bot blocks
“And the way we got around that is we have the Do Not Pay app, and it actually uses the IP of the user, so it's like a, it's almost like lots of distributed nodes fighting these companies, and they haven't been able to stop that.”
a16z made zero American Dynamism investments in San Francisco in 2023
“This year we haven't made a single American dynamism investment in San Francisco.”
Luckey: Early VCs rejected Anduril due to moral objections to defense tech
“Many early investors actually turned us down, because while they believed that we had a good team, good people, good technology, good product market fit, they thought that it was inherently wrong to build tools capable of being used for violence.”
Weiss: Common Sense rejects applicants hesitating to work across political lines
“Explicitly hiring people. That are different from me, that have different views, and that the first question I ask in every single interview is, are you comfortable working in an organization with people that vote differently from you? And if the answer is in …”
Rasch: SafetyWing pays all employees a global flat salary regardless of location
“Well, so we have opted for a flat, you know, the argument for it would go something like this, you know, remote has made the world into a global labor market and most people just haven't realized that yet... So we say we chose to kind of like skip to the end o…”
Power: Hadrian's software enables training inexperienced machinists within 30 to 90 days
“We build software that is highly process driven, where we can throw someone new to that role in there. Within 30 to 90 days, depending on the role, they can be trained up into that and have enough scaffolding that if they just kind of follow the instructions, …”
Divvy Homes CEO Adina Hefetz was rejected for mortgages by three banks
“I personally applied for a mortgage last week. I applied to three different banks, and I got rejected from all three banks. I was told that as a founder, my current income was too low to support a mortgage.”
Casado: Neither investors nor founders understand B2B growth sales yet
“So much so, I don't think anybody right now actually understands how to build these, and as investors, we certainly don't understand how to evaluate them.”
Justin Kan Was Too Rich to Waste Time With Slow Seed Rounds
“But for me personally, you know, where it's an execution risk business, I'm too rich to like, Fuck around with the like, you know, ok, I'm just going to do a seed round and like, and just like take a long time, right? Like for me, speed to market and execution…”
Wilson: USV avoids dApps, focuses on NFTs and crypto games
“That's why largely we're not investing in a lot of dApps. I mean, we are playing around with NFTs and games for all the reasons you raised.”
Horowitz: Rival VCs heavily criticized Andreessen Horowitz's GitHub investment for overpaying
“This one probably got the most criticism, particularly from other VCs when we made it. It was, they way overpaid, you know, businesses like that will never be worth a, rational was, went for the most money ever in that space, and they'll never make their money…”
Young: Owner spent $14M on 3D BIM, but inspectors demanded paper 2D drawings
“On one of the projects I was on, the owner paid something like fourteen million dollars for us to essentially play Tetris inside the model. We went into the field, and the inspectors came out and said, hey, look at my stamp, look at my signature. It's on the t…”
ICIJ's Russian reporters fled Russia before publishing their Vladimir Putin investigation
“I know our Russian reporters, before we published that story in Putin, had left the country. So when we published, they weren't there. They did go back afterwards. Journalists are putting their lives in danger in some cases.”
Brie: Skydio bet on computer vision over heavy, expensive LiDAR sensors
“We did a lot of work with LiDAR, but the vehicles were super heavy, super expensive. So when we started Skydio, we made a big bet on vision because we felt like the progress that's happening in computer vision now especially with deep learning, but even in sor…”
Sarandos: Iron Fist is Netflix's worst-reviewed show
“Iron Fist is literally the worst reviewed show on Netflix.”
Glueck: Foursquare profiles 150 million Americans via location data
“We profile hundred fifty million Americans based on the places they go, both through our own apps, but through a network of partners using our technology”
Dalgaard: Took SuccessFactors public earlier than desired due to board pressure
“Because I, honestly, I didn't really want to go public, but my board wanted to go public, and so I was, had a great sense of duty, of doing things that, I mean, obviously, I got a lot of runway, building your own company the way you want it, and so I felt the …”
CIA Analysts Estimated 60% to 95% Probability Bin Laden Was in Abbottabad
“So the lead analyst said, 95% chance he's there. And the senior most analyst said, 80% chance. And I was at 60%.”
Tejada: All PagerDuty board members except the CEO were conflicted during fundraising
“Today, my board
Looks like a lot of venture backboards.
We have two founders and two investors and me.
It has to change because just think of the conflict, right?
I just raised around.
Everybody on the board was conflicted except me.”
Waters: Pivotal kept its user interfaces closed source while open-sourcing infrastructure
“One of the decisions we made is we made our UIs closed source. So everything about the infrastructure of the platform is completely open source. And we chose to make the UI and that last mile of experience built off the APIs. Closed source.”
Hastings: Netflix kicked DVD executives out of management meetings to focus on streaming
“We were hybridizing it with streaming, and we were getting more streaming attention and executives, but the discussion was still a lot around DVDs, and then we realized that we had to kick out the DVD executives of the main management meeting.”
Rampell: TrialPay spun off a high-beta product into a separate startup
“Thing number one is actually we split the company in two. We had a different product within the company that we just thought was very, very high beta. And there was a lot of controversy around this. I think most people thought that we were idiots for doing thi…”
Dahlgaard: Equal status for sales and engineering was SuccessFactors' top breakthrough
“This is maybe one of the biggest breakthroughs in SuccessFactors history was that we made reps feel like they were as important as engineers.”
Andreessen: a16z partners can approve investments even if everyone else objects
“One of the things we have in our firm is we have an ethical veto. And so the way our firm works is we actually don't need unanimity. We don't vote on investments. The person sponsoring the investment can pull the trigger, even if everybody else is opposed to t…”
State estimated Senghor's 17-year incarceration cost at $1 million
“When I got sued, I had about 17 years in, they estimated the cost of my incarceration to be like a million dollars.”
Hobson: Ariel Investments uses ex-CIA agents to train team on management questioning
“We actually use an organization called BIA Associates, Business Intelligence Advisors, ex-CIA agents, who help us in, in questioning.”
De Grey accepts non-biological longevity solutions if biotech stalls
“I'm quite sentimental about being made out of meat, but at the same time, you know, if the Push came to shove and the work that we do and other people do on the biotech side started to, you know, hit diminishing returns and basically run into the sand and work…”
Most US states prohibit rewarding consumers financially for switching insurance providers
“There's actually a law in most states, I know this because we tried getting into the insurance lead generation space at TrialPay, where you cannot reward people for switching their insurance.”
Back proposes scaling Bitcoin block size limit to 8MB over four years
“So the proposal I made was to increase to two megabytes failure immediately, as soon as we can roll out change, which to be clear, any of them would take about six months to roll out. Increase to four megabytes after two years, and eight megabytes after four y…”
McGurk: a16z advises startups against granting board seats to strategic investors
“All things that we advise our portfolio companies generally speaking against. Absolutely. And so there's a balance there. So it's not, those are not things that are automatically granted because they're asked for. And sometimes the right answer is, you know, y…”
Grazer: Poor economics drove my shift from theatrical films to television
“I mean, I can get them made just through, just sheer physics, just the force of me, like, but it's not attractive, so it's mostly what you just said, and for the most part, that's why I've kind of, I've shifted my focus or balance into television.”
Cybersecurity expert Kim Zetter avoids online banking and digital health records
“I don't do my, I don't do online banking. Okay. So I don't have a lot of trust in in those kinds of systems. I don't have a lot of I do very little. I don't put my health records online, that kind of thing. So I keep it as much to the minimum as I can.”
Wanstroth admits he was wrong to believe GitHub didn't need sales
“For a while, I think not having a sales team is the right decision for GitHub, and now I believe that having a sales team is the right decision. So, I, a couple years ago, I would have said GitHub is a company that doesn't need sales, and we did say that. Now,…”
Peretti: BuzzFeed is profitable while funding investigative journalism and foreign correspondents
“And that's why we've been able to grow so quickly generate profits and in, while simultaneously investing in foreign correspondence and investigative news team and other things that people thought weren't possible for internet companies to invest in.”
Shader: I actively attempt to lower investor valuation offers
“When people have proposed things that are sort of too high, I've tried to signal bringing them down, which is a delicate Balance.”
Dixon: a16z sees as many top founders in crypto as in AI
“I think that the you know, it's to me, if you sort of compare at our firm, so at the, you know, if you compare crypto to, you know, I don't know, SaaS, or like all the other kind of, you know, or machine learning, AI startups I'd say it's at least as many, lik…”
Sarandos: Netflix ordered two seasons of House of Cards with zero notes
“House of Cards was our first original show on Netflix. And The deal we made with David Fincher was, I'm gonna give you two seasons of the show, no pilot, and no notes.”
Horowitz: a16z refuses to invest in young founders with obvious ideas
“Like, if two young people just, like, start a company with a good but obvious idea, I would never invest in that because, like, I'd rather invest in, like, the experienced people with the same good and obvious idea.”
George: a16z's best-performing early-stage venture funds have a 60% loss rate
“And so, you know, if you look at our best performing venture funds, Over time, I think the loss rate is 60% or so.”
Selke: Coding theory was Astra's only proof requiring human interaction
“This was the one case where there was some interactivity involved. So for all of, so except for this pair, it was just, you know, we had some problems, we fed them in, and we you know, the model came back with some solutions.”
Levchin: Affirm exited online education financing due to terrible quality
“A firm briefly flirted with being a payment provider to the online educational facilities, which we ran out of kicking and screaming because the reason they're willing to pay these enormous MDRs is because the quality of education is largely terrible.”
Levchin: Affirm will never charge late fees or use deferred interest
“There will never be an asterisk on a firm zero. That, that is the origin story of why we don't charge late fees, we don't do deferred interest, all the sort of gimmicks and gotchas that the industry loves to throw at people.”
Bancel: Moderna's Massachusetts factory is ready for individualized manufacturing at scale
“The factory is ready in Massachusetts, but we have figured out how to make and scale a product for every human being at the time.”
Bancel: Moderna plans Phase 3 lung cancer monotherapy trial for individualized vaccine
“We announced in the spring of 2026, starting a phase three study for patients with stage one lung cancer, but as Intismarine, so Moderna's product, as a monotherapy without checkpoint.”
Tan: Turning down early Palantir offer was a $2B to $4B mistake
“Peter said, I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Like, here's a check for 70 grand. That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time. And I said, thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year. Which I did, but I think …”
Kavak Spawns a Dedicated Agent with Its Own VM per Customer
“So when a customer comes in right now agent will get spawned specifically for this customer with its own virtual machine. It will remember years of interaction of these customers with Kavak, what they visited in the webpage or like Call they had two years ago.”