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 18,204 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 249 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
Patel: OpenAI signed up to pay Oracle $80+ billion annually
“With OpenAI, it's not, and so there's gotta be some, like, error bars as you go further out in terms of, like, Will OpenAI exist in 28, 29 30, and will they be able to pay the 80 plus billion dollars a year that they've signed up to Oracle with, right?”
Rampell: Coupon extensions like Honey steal affiliate attribution at checkout
“And then it's like, do you want a coupon code? Oh, why? Yes, I do. Why would I not want a coupon code? 10% off, click here. You go click here. What does it do? It redirects you to an affiliate page. It puts a cookie on your machine. It redirects you back to th…”
Hsu: AI pharma commercial pitches outpace fundamental research breakthroughs
“I think in many ways the kind of pitch and the framing of these companies precedes The fundamental research capability breakthroughs.”
Acharya: Today there are no marketing problems, only product problems
“There are no marketing problems, only product problems because the technology allows you to be so ambitious on behalf of your customer.”
Mark Cuban calls Zohran Mamdani a progressive Trump who lies to voters
“He learned from Trump. He's the progressive Trump. Just lie. You know, Day one, groceries are going to be cheaper. I'll just, I'll open the grocery store because I'll sound more progressive that way, right? Day one, buses are free. And then everything else, he…”
Mark Cuban says research hospitals are idiots to publish or patent IP
“Because if I'm MD Anderson, if I'm Stanford, any research hospital, any scientist in healthcare, you're an idiot if you publish it. You're an idiot if you patent it. Because it's immediately going to get absorbed into a large language model. And you've lost co…”
Mark Cuban says Pharmacy Benefit Managers are the core problem in healthcare
“You know, everybody, Amazon, everybody else. Okay. We're going to work with the big PBMs. Cause that's where the money is. And I'm like, no, they're the problem.”
Mark Cuban says only Steph Curry and LeBron James are arena draws
“There's only like two players that fill an arena. Steph and LeBron.”
Mark Cuban says a 15% tariff would wipe out small business margins
“You increase, you know, from a two and a half percent average tariff to a 15% tariff, that's their profit margin, and it's gone.”
McCune: Effective Altruists spent a decade funding think tanks to steer AI
“You know, from my point of view and look, you know, they deserve a lot of credit. I think the effect of altruist community for 10 years backed by large sums of money were very, very effective at influencing think tanks and nonprofit organizations in D.C. And t…”
McCune: Current AI tech lobbying is dwarfed by decade of safety spending
“But I mean, when people are writing these articles about the fact that the AI industry is, you know, pumping all this money into the system, Certainly, like, I'm not suggesting that there's not money in the system. We're obviously active on the political and p…”
McCune: Regulating AI like nuclear power would cause U.S. to lose to China
“Had we done the same thing in AI in that period of time, then you don't have the medical advancements. You don't have the breakthroughs. You don't have all of the things that come from this that are incredible. But beyond that, we lose to China. Full stop.”
Perault: Proposed AI regulations would have entrenched market incumbents and stifled startups
“Many of the politicians who are put, were pushing concepts that would have really put a stranglehold, I think, on AI startups and would have led to more monopolization of a market that already tends toward monopoly because of the high barriers to entry already…”
Casado: Non-consensus investing is dangerous because solitary views are often wrong
“It's dangerous to do non-consensus investing. Like, that's a dangerous idea. If you're alone in your view, you may just be missing something.”
Casado: Early venture markets are far more efficient than people realize
“My underlying belief is early markets are actually pretty darn efficient, a lot more efficient than people realize.”
Casado: Traditional media turned on tech and hates the industry
“One of them is the traditional media just turned on tech and it hates tech.”
Casado: Tech platform shift value accrues primarily to infrastructure, not apps
“My view is, is the infrastructure is where the value is. Every time you have a platform shift, you'll get a new set of infrastructure companies, and then a bunch of apps get built on top of those. But like the value is going to accrue largely to the infrastruc…”
Casado: Ignore TAM and valuation when investing during fast-moving tech booms
“I think in these times where you don't know the TAM and things are moving quickly, you definitely want to pick the best team. I don't think you should overthink the space, but like asking questions about like TAM or valuation or value makes a lot less sense be…”
Casado: VCs can take on unlimited board seats
“Anybody listening who is a VC, you can take as many board as you want. The actual board work itself is not. The question is, can you still be available to founders and add value whether you're on the board or not?”
Boyle: Substack was the only platform protecting free speech
“There was one platform that stood up and said, hey, we are protecting free speech. And that was Substack.”
Best: Liberal media figures bore the brunt of 2020 cancellations
“The people that it really, I think in 20, 20, the thing that surprised me, the people that felt the brunt of that were not conservatives. We're not Republicans necessarily. It was the people in the liberal media. In, you know, in, in, in my telling, I would sa…”
Joe Schmidt says targeting 85 percent AI gross margins is a mistake
“I think that's a tremendous mistake. Like I think it's actually probably the biggest mistake you can make right now.”
Horowitz: SoftBank and Tiger Global created a mess by over-capitalizing
“As we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance, you just end up creating a mess.”
Horowitz argues the venture studio model is fundamentally flawed for founders
“With the studio model, the, to me, the big problem with that historically and, you know, I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically is that it's not idea. It's an idea maze. And so and it's very hard to run through the idea …”
Horowitz: Shutting down open-source AI serves regulatory capture and monopoly
“If AI is a super weapon that will also be true there, and so if you believe that, then I think what you want is open source, and I think if you want regulatory capture or monopoly for yourself, you want to shut that down.”
Horowitz: Crypto is more transparent than Visa or dollars
“It's like literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than visa, more than dollars, more than anything.”
Horowitz: Media praised Facebook under Obama, called it dangerous under Trump
“The funny thing was like, if you go back to 2008, All the stories on how Obama got elected were Facebook. Like, he mastered Facebook. He got elected on Facebook. Facebook's the greatest thing. It's making the world more democratic. Arab Spring. Wow, this is so…”
Casado: The AI technology stack offers no inherent competitive moats
“There is no, as far as I can tell, as far as we can tell, there is no inherent endemic mode In the technology stack to AI, other than just overcoming the bootstrap problem.”
Wang: All 24 surveyed a16z startups use Cursor, driving up to 10x productivity
“This year I was pretty blown away by the answers that we got. They spanned from, call it, 30 to 50% on the low end in terms of productivity gains to, I kid you not, one CTO told us that he had seen a 10 X productivity lift from himself and his team. They were …”
Casado: China excels at AI models but struggles in enterprise software
“Historically, China's just not been able to build software, at least for, like, the prosumer enterprise market, which is kind of my world. They've just never really been able to do that, and so I think that, you know, their ability to compete at, like, a softw…”
Casado: VC firms ignoring AI have become irrelevant and absent from deals
“Some firms that were very, very relevant, we just never see anymore. I mean, like the founders don't talk about them. They're not there. They're not in the deals.”
Cass: Trump's tariffs will boost US manufacturing output within years
“I think if the long run is you know, anywhere upwards of a few years, I think it will. I think the question is how long does it take to actually change investment decisions? And then how long does it take investments to come online? But I would expect to see t…”
Cass: Economic consensus warnings of instant tariff doom were wrong
“Everything from, you know, the direction of the dollar to the performance of the stock market, to the level of retaliation we should expect. There was a sort of consensus Model of here's what's going to happen if you impose tariffs and why it's extreme. It's a…”
Smith: US factory construction boomed under Biden after decades of stagnation
“But when you look at factory construction, real, real factory construction, you saw this enormous, you saw it basically flat at a flat level for decades and decades at a fairly low level. Then you saw this enormous boom during the Biden years and all the facto…”
Smith: Elon Musk is the only entrepreneur to scale US manufacturing
“Who's the only entrepreneur who's been able to successfully scale manufacturing in America, you know, even in the face of international competition, and it's been pretty credible because his supply chains are far more domestically sourced than most manufacture…”
Cass: A 10 percent baseline tariff would protect domestic production
“My view has always been that a baseline tariff on the order of 10% is a sort of skewing of the playing field in international trade in a way that helpfully reflects a preference for domestic production. And that if you could do it in a way that actually had lo…”
Patel: Claude Code and Cursor have surpassed GitHub Copilot in ARR
“If you look at the revenue ARR chart, it's like, Cloud code in, like, three months has surpassed them, and, like, cursor, you know, easily surpassed them, and then, like, even, like, companies like Replin or, like, and Windsurf slash Cognition are, like, gonna…”
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Casado: China has the best AI models and the US is behind
“And then you forward by a year, and they've got the best models by far, and we're way behind.”
Midha: Slowing frontier AI delays critical medical breakthroughs like curing cancer
“Until we've solved cancer, every month that we're not rushing to the frontier of accelerating biological discovery or scientific progress is a month that millions of people are suffering from disease that we could be solving with the eye.”
Casado: The probability of existential doom is higher without AI than with it
“The answer is the PDoom without AI is actually quite a bit greater than the PDoom with AI.”
Midha: Existing regulatory tools are sufficient to manage AI risk
“Marginal risk is, I think, a slightly just more technical way to say, we have the tools to manage risk. We don't need new ones.”
Srinivasan: US regulatory assault blocked tech IPOs and M&A for four years
“For four years, it was just a desert. A bunch of companies silently died. The state blocked IPOs. They're blocking M&As. It was just an all-out anti-tech assault.”
Srinivasan: Twitter elected Trump in 2016, and X elected him in 2024
“Twitter elected Trump, and then Twitter deplatformed Trump, and then ex-elected Trump.”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms replaced government agencies as functional industry regulators
“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you sai…”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms face market constraints, but Washington DC is a monopoly
“See the thing is these platforms are at least competing with other platforms, and if Apple or Microsoft or Google makes too bad decision, Then the people on those platforms have exit, they have choice, they can move between platforms, so there's ultimately a m…”