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: Two AAA-list Hollywood directors plan to fully embrace AI
“I know of, like, two, like, A, triple A-list, like, directors, filmmakers, you know, top-end people who are, like, very excited about what's possible and are gonna fully embrace it.”
Rabois: Khosla Ventures evaluates team performance on question quality, not output
“So when people join the team at KV, we don't actually look at their output. Like, Are the companies great? We look at the quality of their questions.”
Rampell: Zendesk is testing outcome-based pricing in New Zealand
“I've been talking to their CEO. They're piloting outcome-based pricing in New Zealand right now.”
Kupor: OPM finally deployed ChatGPT to desktops via a $1-a-year GSA deal
“Until this week, we did not have ChatGPT on anybody's actual desktop, right? And so I've been, you know, pounding my CIO, and pounding my CIO, we finally, literally, you know, thanks to the new deal that GSA did for the, you know, the one dollar a year deal, A…”
Fedus: Periodic Labs uses physical experiments as RL reward functions
“And what we're doing, and by having the lab, is we create a physically grounded reward function. That becomes the basis on which we're optimizing against. And so, If a simulator has some deficiencies or some issues, we always error correct, because for us, the…”
Fedus: Early ChatGPT was mathematically weak due to friendliness rewards
“The reward functions that we were using originally couldn't determine whether you were mathematically correct or not. So early versions of Chachapiti were mathematically not particularly strong, and it sort of results from the reward function. What did you opt…”
Boyle uploads all pregnancy diagnostic reports to ChatGPT for analysis
“I upload every single medical diagnostic, every blood report, everything to ChatGPT, and it gives me a ton of data. That the doctors don't have time to give me.”
Levie: AI currently generates 30 percent of Box's codebase
“About 30% of our code right now Is, is coming from AI.”
Rampell: Uses ChatGPT three orders of magnitude more than Google
“And then number three was just my own personal behavior of it's just like, I probably use ChatGPT like three orders of magnitude more than I use Google now, which is interesting.”
Mark Cuban says the Dallas Mavericks aggressively tried to acquire Tyrese Haliburton
“Indiana didn't have, you know, Halle, we tried to get Halle so hard, right?”
Mark Cuban says Mavericks didn't know Luka Dončić would be a superstar
“Even with Luca, we didn't know he was going to be a superstar. We thought he was going to be really, really good.”
Mark Cuban backed 11 unicorn startups sourced entirely from cold emails
“I saw a list of who has the most unicorns, and I was like, I had like 11, and all of them were just from email.”
Best: Free speech is not Substack's primary mission
“I've always seen the free speech thing as sort of an important pillar, but not the main pillar of what Substack is actually setting out to do.”
Andreessen: Substack will transform media like VC transformed tech
“This actually reminds me of one of the first things Mark Andreessen ever said to me when we were talking about Substack. He said, you're gonna do to media what the venture capital industry did to software companies or to tech.”
Wang: Most a16z AI founders work in office 6-7 days weekly
“Most of the founders that we work with are in the office six to seven days a week.”
Wang: a16z portfolio CTOs reported 10% to 15% AI productivity gains
“Last year, it was notable that when we asked, hey, CTOs across 24 portfolio companies how much is AI actually impacting your productivity? And the answer across the board was pretty much 10 to 15%. We're all using GitHub Copilot.”
Casado: Ilya Sutskever is the Oppenheimer of artificial intelligence
“So, you know, we invested in Ilya. I mean, the guy's Oppenheimer. He's been close to every major advancement in the last 15 years in AI.”
Parker-Holder: DeepMind targeted minute-plus spatial memory for Genie 3
“And then for Genie three, we basically went much more ambitious on the same sort of approach, right? And we made it like a headline goal for ourselves. It's like, can we make the memory be what it is, right? We said we want minute plus memory and real time and…”
Fruchter: Genie 3 is a research preview, not a commercial product
“Gini Free is pretty much a research preview, right? It's not something we are releasing at this point.”
Fulford: OpenAI recycles agent model datasets to train frontier reasoning models
“We're able to take the data sets that we've created for The, you know, frontier agent models and then contribute it back to the frontier reasoning models.”
Raghuram: VMware Did Not Know How to Market to Software Developers
“The cloud, I mean, initially Amazon AWS did not change The abstraction of a virtual machine but everything else, the business model changed, and the most important change that AWS brought about was it made infrastructure available to developers without IT. Tha…”
Patel: Cisco Completely Missed the Cloud Computing Wave
“Yeah, the obvious one is we miss the cloud wave.”
Balaji Srinivasan makes decisions by having multiple AI models debate memos
“I will write sometimes these long memos to an AI, and then continuing, I know maybe you don't love this analogy, but I think it's funny. Continuing the Polytechnology, I'll give them to Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva, ok? So I'll give them to Chachi Bti and Claude,…”
Bornstein: Cursor is a16z's top developer tool company right now
“Cursor is probably our top developer tool company right now.”
Andreessen claims to be the first angel investor in an AI agent
“I'm the first angel funder, or sort of donors, angel funder of an AI agent living its own best life online.”
Torenberg: a16z regrets not investing even more aggressively in AI
“Because when we look back at the last few years of our sort of growth investing in this category, we, We've been very aggressive, but we regret not being even more aggressive.”
Neumann says he did zero diligence on early WeWork investors
“And the answer was actually none. For my first investors. They came to me. I didn't know anything. I didn't know any better.”
Neumann: Flow now exclusively hires software engineers who want in-office work
“So let's say our engineers, we hire engineers that want to be in the office and the ones we hired before who weren't, We let them be wherever they were, because when they were hired, that was the deal that was made with them.”
Rick Rubin says being vegan for 23 years was killing him
“Look, I was a vegan for 23 years, and I was killing myself because I believed current belief.”
Horowitz: a16z founders took zero management pay from $300M Fund 1
“We rather than paying the partners a lot of money or in our case, we didn't pay ourselves any money. What if we took all that money? Cause it was a lot of money. Cause, you know, we're like, even on a three hundred million dollar fund, it was a really a lot of…”
Yudis: Applied Intuition's defense autonomy code is 90% identical to commercial
“The autonomy system that we have running, let's say, on a defense, you know, vehicle, let's say, it's a troop mover or a tank or something like that, It's like, 90% similar to what we're doing on the, you know, on the commercial side, on the, ah, trucking side…”
Tseng Initially Thought Defense Tech Was a 'Stupid Business'
“And, you know, I thought it was an extraordinary mission. I told you earlier, I thought it was a stupid business. And so I wished him luck and, you know, suggested that he come up with a better business to make mission impact.”
Jain: 11x was a customer for a large percentage of YC startups
“If you went to, like, the last, like, YC demo day, you probably saw ElevenX as a customer for such a large percentage of those companies.”
Huang: NVIDIA designed Blackwell architecture specifically for AI reasoning inference
“People are surprised that, that that Blackwell is such a great leap over Hopper, and the reason for that is because we built Blackwell for inference, and at a, just in time, because all of a sudden thinking is such a big computing load”
Sivulka: Managing directors are using AI to audit junior analysts' work
“There are even some you know, MDs like the one off MD that will go in and actually check their analysts work with AI. So they'll create a matrix and like pull out red flags or inconsistencies over something their analysts sent.”
Sivulka: Hebbia is building the Bloomberg terminal for private market investing
“And what Hebbia is trying to build is the Bloomberg terminal for private companies. Not like a pitch book or a crunch base, which is really just for sourcing, but actually to go out and take all of the information private and public and pre-structure that. So …”
Schimpf: Anduril uses bathtub manufacturing techniques for cruise missile fuselages
“And we made the exterior fleet fuselage in this process that you use for making acrylic bathtubs. It's this hot press process.”
Schimpf: Anduril skips proprietary AI model research to leverage commercial models
“We don't do AI model research. We don't need to. We just take the best things that are there.”
Andreessen: a16z avoids investing in self-improving AI because nobody can build it
“Like it's, and by the way, like, I think it's fair to say if we knew how to do it, we would invest in that. And we have not yet.”
Pindrop proved the LeBron James Paris Olympics audio was a deepfake
“We were called into one of these deep fakes where LeBron James apparently was saying bad things about the coach during the Paris Olympics. It wasn't LeBron James. It was a deep fake. We actually provided his organ his management team the necessary detail so th…”
Andreessen bought a $1,500 Unitree Chinese robot dog for his son
“My nine-year-old's favorite toy slash companion right now is a 1500 dollar robot dog from China from a company called Unitree.”
Andreessen and Horowitz disclaim any financial stake in GOAT meme coin
“A-sixteen Z, Ben and I have nothing to do with it. We are not investors. We were not involved in creating it. We have no role in it. We own none of it. We have no economics in it. We are completely unrelated to it.”
Andreessen and a16z provide no-strings research grants to independent AI developers
“We have been giving grants, small grants, but we've been giving basically research grants to these people over time. A-sixteen Z has had a grant program for a while. I've done a bunch directly and, you know, just like no strings attached you know, grants to ju…”
Schmidt: Nous is building fault-tolerant training code for heterogeneous devices
“We're making sure that also like the code we're writing to help to actually do this training is agnostic to the hardware and is able to communicate and operate. You can have an Apple device and an NVIDIA device training together. And this is actually the, for …”
Casey regrets not trimming Meta at $380 before it fell to $90
“The twenty-twenty-two period was rough and, you know, I kinda, my big mistake in twenty-twenty-two was not trimming a lot of stocks at the end of twenty-twenty-one. You know, I looked at Netflix at 6:30 then, and Amazon at one 80, and Facebook at three 80, Fac…”
Capital Group's Mark Casey holds Bitcoin exposure in equity portfolio
“As an equity portfolio manager, there's not too many ways to be involved in Bitcoin in your portfolios, but I have one, and, ah, I'm looking for others.”
Mark Casey: Capital Group is buying AI choke points across chips, clouds, and models
“And then what I'm mostly looking for, where are the choke points right now? And there's a bunch. It's semiconductors and semiconductor capital equipment. There's only a handful of companies that are good at that. There's only three big public clouds. There's o…”