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 16 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
Rampell: a16z Rejects Consensus Voting Committees for Investments
“We don't have a committee where we, everybody votes, and then you have to have this many votes, and then it's all this political horse trading.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Rampell: I viewed TrialPay's layoffs as a colossal personal failure
“Like I viewed this as a colossal failure by me. And if somebody was mad at me, it's like, yeah, they should be mad at me. And I don't hold that against them.”
TrialPay Reached 10,000 Merchants Without Salespeople or Paid Ads
“It took us a long time to get there, but the key thing that caused us to cross the 10,000 merchant barrier was not having individual salespeople, or actually not even buying ads.”
Rampell: Ben Horowitz checks if AI can do a job before hiring
“Ben is the CEO of injuries in Horowitz. Like he's asking that before we hire people here.”
Rampell: An a16z partner pitched Costco's board on financial services
“It's funny, we, we've met with the one of my partners met with the Costco board and like pitched them on financial services.”
Rampell: a16z prefers startups not dependent on incumbents for customer acquisition
“We don't always like this because we want to see, do you have your own acquisition strategies, your own acquisition channels? You're not dependent on the big company.”
Alex Rampell: Credit cards outperform mobile payments except when ordering ahead
“I use my credit card for everything. I haven't yet found a situation where using my phone is actually better, except in the order ahead situation, but that's saving me time.”
Rampell: We laid off underperformers during strong growth due to missing reviews
“I wouldn't even call it a riff, but we did a layoff of some people on our team that we just didn't think were performing, and we should have done that a long, long time ago. This is actually when results were great, but we never got around to actually enacting…”
Rampell: TrialPay Sold to Visa Due to Lack of Distribution
“We didn't quite hit it just because we had the innovation, but we didn't have the distribution, which is why we sold the visa.”
TrialPay Generated $5 Million Annually From Download.com's Unmonetized Site Space
“But also from download.com's perspective, like, if they could make five million dollars a year from real estate that they weren't doing anything with on their site, that's incredibly relevant for them against kind of a shrinking P&L.”