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: Ben Horowitz and I had a three-hour dinner with Donald Trump
“Ben and I had dinner with the former president 10 days ago at Bedminster his golf club in New Jersey and had a three hour dinner.”
Andreessen: a16z is lobbying U.S. senators to federally fund AI infrastructure
“We've been spending a lot of time in Washington lately, and I've actually been telling the story to a lot of current senators and basically in, in encouraging them to basically do the same thing.”
Andreessen told Reed Hastings in 2004 that Netflix streaming was crazy
“I remember meeting with Reed Hastings in, I think, 2004 and, you know, Netflix was up and running and was very successful doing a DVD rental by mail. And he literally, you know, reads, reads a technical genius in addition to being a business genius. And he sai…”
Andreessen: a16z's mistakes stem from overestimating platform turnover speed
“When we make mistakes, it's Because we kind of overestimate the degree to which this is going to happen. But our whole thing is to basically try to get in front of this and try to, you know, basically make the assumption that you're going to have complete turn…”
Horowitz: Venture firms are better off avoiding public company board seats
“It's actually the only reason that I ever end up on public boards because, you know, like as a venture capital firm, we're kind of better off not being on the public board. But what keeps happening to me is the CEO will go, But then we kind of need you because…”
Horowitz: Nearly all a16z hardware investments required follow-on rescue funding
“I don't think that we've done anything in hardware where that hasn't been the case. I mean, the one was Oculus, but Oculus got, you know, they sold relatively early to meta.”
Horowitz: AI startups reached profitability faster than any in a16z history
“I think probably The companies that have gotten to profitability the fastest, maybe in the history of the firm have been AI companies or have been, you know, AI companies in the portfolio where the revenue grows so fast that it actually kind of runs out ahead …”
Horowitz: OpenAI maintains a small headcount relative to its revenue
“Like if you look at open AI, which is the big spender in startup world which, you know, we are also investors and is yeah, headcount wise, they're pretty small against their revenue.”
Global Payments generated $3 billion in annual software sales by 2023
“By the time I left and retired last summer in 20, 23, we were actually a top quartile software company by revenue in terms of cloud SaaS if we have been listed just, you know, in the public markets in the U S for cloud SaaS software at global payments. So clea…”
Horowitz: a16z is working with the UK government on AI policy
“So we'll, you know, look, we're working on that in Britain. And we look, we've got some pretty good reception from the UK government. There's you know, a lot of very, very smart people there. We're working with them, you know, tightly on their AI and crypto ef…”
Beck: 15% of DIU work goes to traditional defense primes
“DIU does about 15% of its work with primes and works with startups and works with everybody in between.”
Sramek: California Forever purchased 60,000 acres in Solano County
“And we've purchased about 60,000 acres in that area.”
Cuban: Cost Plus Drugs is the easiest business he has ever started
“Of all the businesses I've ever started in my entire life, this has been the easiest.”
McMahill: Las Vegas police restrict facial recognition to past booking photos
“We use facial recognition technology, but we only use it as a tool within an investigation. And we use it, and we only bounce that facial recognition technology off of jail management system. So booking photos, people that have already been booked for a crime”
Horowitz: a16z encourages dropping college degree requirements in its hiring
“In our own hiring process, we encourage people not to have those kinds of requirements because, you know, like people can become extremely smart without ever going to college and very skilled, you know, particularly in computer science.”
Andreessen: Marc Andreessen homeschools his son using private tutors
“We've, you know, we're homeschooling, right? So one of the things we've done is we were, you know, we were homeschooling. We've gone back to the older model, which is actually the previous question, more of like private tutoring.”
Horowitz: a16z invested in dorm-style housing startup for young adults
“Yeah, there's a, there is a new idea in the portfolio that creates a place that is like a college dorm, you know, from a living perspective and has a community and so forth and so on. You pay rent there but, you know, rent somewhere that you would, you know, i…”
Omada Health Will Not Prescribe GLP-1s, Focusing Instead On Lifestyle Support
“Amada's made some decisions we're happy about, you know, the first is to launch this like GLP one care track. And then we, you know, we've chosen to not initiate people on the medicines, but just, you know, support them regardless of where the script came from…”
Neumann: Flow vertically integrates management, technology, payments, and ownership
“One of the things Flo is doing, which also was an encouragement for Mark early on, we are the property manager. We are the technology. We are the brand. We're the payments company. Very important because we said it's 34% of our residents' full income wallet sp…”
Akhund: Fintech startups cannot secure bank partnerships without significant upfront funding
“Basically with Mercury, I was like, okay, I can't build this without raising money because you can't get a bank partnership without raising significant money. So you know, it was like straight into, I did build some like screens and things like that, but it wa…”
Park: Bank of England explores AI agent simulations for economic policy
“For instance, if you're, in fact, some of the places that I'm visiting now are More places like banks, like the Bank of England and so forth, where these places, they need to test their policies before they run roll out new comic policies, or many of my collea…”
Horowitz: Anti-statism means opposing communism and overreach, not government entirely
“When you know, when I say I'm anti-status, I'm really saying I'm anti-communist and anti too much weight on the public sector. At the expense of free markets and basically freedom for the citizens.”
Character.ai's model cost $2M to train, now $500k
“The model we're serving now, we, you know, cost us about, like, two million dollars worth of compute cycles to train last year, and could probably repeat it for, like, half a million now.”
Roblox requires its 3D engineers to test on low-end Android devices.
“All of our three D engineers are working on crappy Android devices as their primary test device”
Murati: OpenAI feared ChatGPT was not good enough a week before launch
“It's a strategy that we, we've been using from the beginning and also with ChatGPT where, you know, the week before we were worried that it wasn't good enough. And we also, what happened, you know, we put it out there and then people Told us it is good enough …”
Murati: ChatGPT was originally released to gather research feedback for GPT-4
“One of the main things was actually to put chat GPT in the hands of researchers out there that could give us feedback since we had this dialogue modality. And so this was the original intent to actually get feedback from researchers and use it to make GPT-IV m…”
Otto: Cedar infers patient job class and demographics for billing outreach
“And then we know, what is the insurance plan? That's also another data point. So that infers, is it a blue color, is it a white color plan? Then, of course, we know what is the demographics of that, of a certain invention, because we have date of birth, right?…”
Doug E. Fresh never charged fellow hip-hop artists for sampling his tracks
“And a lot of artists, just for the record, a lot of fellow hip hop artists, we never charged them.”
Dre Lyon: Hedge funds offered 30x multiples for Cool & Dre's catalog
“We were being approached by several hedge funds, you know, inquiring about purchasing our catalog, and they were offering us a 25 X multiple. Some, one guy was offering a 30 X”
Piff Marti Uses Midjourney to Create Album Cover Artwork
“One, it saves me a lot of money as a creative entrepreneur where I can go into a mid journey and then type in a dope prompt and get some artwork so I can use for my album cover.”
Over half of fleet prospects reject climate-focused sales pitches
“Maybe a third to half of the folks that we engage with commercially are interested in talking about climate change and CO two, but more than half of them, if you start the conversation that way, the conversation's over.”
Eviation aircraft battery packs require replacement every 3,000 flight hours
“We design our batteries to be replaced every 3000 cycles, which given our utilization is about every 3000 hours. So that could be. Two years, three years, four years, depending on how you're going to use the airplane.”
Highland charges school bus fleets $3.50 per mile for turnkey electrification
“So we will often get paid by the mile. We might get charged, we might charge a customer three dollars and 50 cents per mile, And they get all the equipment. They get all the services. If the charging station breaks and the chart, the bus isn't charged, we just…”
Highland pre-purchases electrical switchgear 18 months ahead of signed contracts
“We are buying switchgear, 18 months in advance for projects we don't even have under contract yet, because if we don't have switchgear, we're not We're not getting the infrastructure completed and we can't get up and running.”
Barry McArdle: Hex does not use customer code to train AI models
“We're not using it to train models. I should be very clear. Like that's one thing we've been very upfront with our customers about, like we're not training models where they would expect to ever have like some code they've written be a completion for someone e…”
Nothing integrated community members as shareholders and elected board observer
“We allowed our community to also become shareholders in our company, and our community has an elected board observer on our board to keep us honest and give us feedback from the users.”
Sriram Krishnan Assisted Elon Musk During the Twitter Acquisition Transition
“I was briefly helping Elon at Twitter. I was there on the let it sink in day”
DoNotPay received 300 requests for AI courtroom defense and accepted two
“We had about 300 people step forward and offer their cases, and we accepted two of them”
Steve Zhao invested 95% of his life savings into Sandbox VR
“So that's when I decided to basically take my life saving and put it into you know, Sandbox. And I remember the moment I did that was at the bank. Even the bank executive was like, are you sure you want to do that? That's like, 95% of your savings. I'm like, y…”
Neumann: Flow founders matched Andreessen Horowitz's capital investment
“We contributed into this business at least as much as Andreessen contributed into this business”
Astranis secured a U.S. Space Force contract in six weeks
“So I'm very proud to say that visit was extremely fruitful, and we are now on a new contract that General Gutlein was able to put in place in just six weeks from when he visited and we are off and rolling on that.”
Hefets: Divvy capped annual home buyback appreciation at 6% during market spikes
“It didn't feel right to me, so instead of using exactly what that third party said, I set a cap, and I said, we're not gonna charge any more than six percent appreciation annually, and I don't know where to pull that number from, right?”
Hefets: Divvy and major institutional buyers have paused buying homes
“Yeah, I would say, right now, if you look at any institution, whether it's an iBuyer, a single family rental platform, Divi, then we're not buying homes right now.”
Wozniak: I do not invest in stocks or cryptocurrency
“I don't invest. I don't even invest in crypto. I don't invest in stocks.”
Andreessen: a16z invests in tech meeting two core criteria
“The way I think about it, like for our firm is for every new technology that we're exposed to, right? It's like, okay, does it pass like the basic sniff test of like, okay, if this worked, would it be a big deal? Right. And then it's like, are there really sma…”
Clozel: Owkin gives hospitals free software and 10% revenue share
“We're going to give you this, you know, technology our platform we're going to help you on the data science side. We're going to have to curate data. No, we also even generate data, single cell data, special transcriptome, really high quality data sets they do…”
Abernethy: FDA is testing machine learning to predict border truck inspections
“And so right now we've got an experiment going on where we're looking at machine learning based prediction of which trucks we should inspect on the border.”
Abernethy: FDA pilots preconditions to allow medical software updates without full review
“Can we come up with, essentially, preconditions for software updates? So that if there are strong quality controls in the way software is developed, well understood product performance as an expect, in terms of the expectation updates, can you now have algorit…”