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 71 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Chen: Only one physical book printer remains in the United States
“There's literally, I think, like one book printer left in the U.S.”
Chen: Game developers must design for streamability, not just playability
“Now that this has, is very clearly a you know, major sort of like growth hack to be able to generate to make things that are streamable, now I think you have to, you know, almost work backwards, right? If you're working on a new you know, if you're working on …”
Andrew Chen: The VR industry rushed to consumer homes too early
“As an industry what we sort of seem to want to do with VR was basically invent the technology and then immediately bring it home. Right. Into homes. Right. And that's certainly not what happened in the, in, in, in the, you know in the film industry because the…”
Andrew Chen: Location-based entertainment requires interactive gaming mechanics for replayability
“I'll bet on something interactive, ah, any day, because that's how you get the frequency, that's how you get, you know, in, in terms of all of our, you know, interest in everything from, you know, e-sports and streaming and so on, that you sort of need to actu…”
Andrew Chen: Declining retail malls create attractive real estate opportunities for VR
“On retail, it's not a bet towards the success of the future of malls and the future of these retail spaces. It's actually kind of a bet against it. It's actually saying, like, look, there's actually really attractive retail opportunities because of the fact th…”
Chen: Viral software products inevitably shift toward enterprise sales
“Virally spreading products end up going, tilting towards enterprise over time for a really simple reason, which is that With larger companies, your cohorts will look better because there's revenue expansion.”
Chen: SMB software products struggle to get below 5% monthly churn
“No matter what, when you're working with SMBs, I find it very hard to get better than let's say a five percent per month churn rate.”
Chen: Incumbent enterprise B2B software companies cannot compete with freemium models
“Eventually free tends to go away or become, you know, pretty crippled as the whole business evolves. But freemium can be so disruptive in these industries because if you're a large enterprise B to B software company, you're not going to be able to do this kind…”
Chen: Cutting ride-share wait times below five minutes does not boost conversion
“So for example, in Rideshare, if you are going to get a car called 15 minutes versus 10 minutes, that's very meaningful. But if it's, you know, five minutes versus two minutes, your conversion rate doesn't actually go up.”
Chen: Substack saved the dying blogging ecosystem
“This was also an era where, like, the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. A really important moment to actually save blogging, really, and sort of, like, writing on the internet.”
Chen: Social platforms are replacing follower graphs with algorithmic feeds
“It turns out then the algorithms are so good that maybe that should be their entire feed is just suggested content. But then what does it mean as a creator to even build a following on one of these platforms? If, you know, even if you have, you know, a 100,000…”
Chen: Esports talent and team owners will gain power over publishers
“And so, I think over time, if that, if you get to that level, you'll get to a point where you know, the talent ends up holding, you know, the cards in the whole thing.”
Chen: Game studios build network effects via competition, streaming, and UGC
“E-sports and sort of this tournament play and, you know, the competitive aspect, that's one version of this. Being able to create a streamable thing, which then, you know, has a community around you know, your whole product, that's another version of this. And…”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR's gaming DNA drove a16z's investment thesis
“The fact that both of you guys have you know, games DNA as opposed to Hollywood DNA was actually a really part, key part of the investment thesis.”
Andrew Chen: Video-generating products have an automatic customer acquisition advantage
“Any product that then generates video as part of the usage automatically has a leg up in, you know, in, in, in customer acquisition.”
Chen: Product engagement is the primary leading indicator for enterprise growth
“That is why one of the really interesting things that Martin and you and I end up talking about with these bottoms up companies is evaluating the engagement on the products using consumer metrics, because often it's the engagement. That's really the leading in…”
Chen: Bottom-up software should monetize by gating IT admin features
“And so what you end up wanting to do is you're gating these features that, you know, the IT admins want, and those are the things that end up being how you differentiate the enterprise customers from purely the consumer ones.”
Chen: Uber employees secretly used Slack despite official HipChat mandate
“One of the funny anecdotes at Uber was that for a long time we were officially on HipChat, but there were so many teams across the company that would have their little secret Slack, you know, team chat going because they just didn't want to deal with it. I fee…”
Chen: Daily-use consumer products with DAU/MAU under 15% will likely fail
“If you think that your product is a daily use product, and you're going to monetize using, you know, a little bit of money that you're making over a long period of time, but your DaoMao is low, is like sub 15%, then like, it's probably not going to work.”
Chen: Products must excel in retention, frequency, or monetization
“That's retention versus frequency versus monetization. And I think you gotta to be like really good at least on one of those axes.”
Chen: Modern Games Must Include Built-In Twitch Sharing Features
“Like, there's no point these days in building a new game that doesn't have built-in recording and publishing to Twitch and built-in tournament systems and all the community features and all that stuff that you need.”
Chen: Amazon Has No Incentive to Stop Echo Accidental Triggers
“They have no incentive to fix that. Because, like, it reminds you that it's there and reminds you to talk to it.”
Andrew Chen's Three-Part Framework for Breakthrough Consumer Startups
“One of the easy ways to think about the intersection of all the things that I'm looking for are ultimately these three things, which is a new platform, a new technology that's hitting scale, right? Maybe it's providing a product experience that maybe has never…”
League of Legends Championship Viewership Dwarfed Wimbledon's Live Audience
“League of Legends, you know, had a championship in 2017, and you had over a hundred million concurrent viewers you know, watching it, right? And Dota you know, has had fifteen million. And when you compare that to something like Wimbledon, which is under ten m…”
Chen: Ben Thompson proved subscriptions work, but setup was too painful
“You had Ben Thompson from Stratechery really show that like, oh, there's maybe an alternate model but it was almost like, always like a curiosity and something that was like annoying to actually build.”
Chen: Selling 10,000 pre-orders makes a book a bestseller
“If you literally just get enough pre-orders that you can get 10,000 units sold, that's like a bestseller.”
Chen: User-generated gaming platforms face same regulatory scrutiny as social media
“A lot of the most interesting new platforms like you know, UEFN and Roblox, which are user generated, you know, content platforms, you know, all the metaverse work that's also happening as well. You know, all of those kind of fall into user generate, you know,…”
Chen: Gaming generates $148 billion annually, surpassing music and box office
“As David mentioned, it generates a hundred and forty eight billion dollars of revenue every year. It's bigger than music. It's bigger than the box office.”
Chen: Cloud gaming success will unlock entirely new game genres in 10 years
“I think we will sit back, you know, 10 years from now, and if the whole cloud gaming thing works, it'll be sort of this, Whole new genres that are unlocked.”
Chen: Gaming will be the primary entertainment medium for new adults
“You're gonna start getting you know, a really interesting group of adults who, ah, they, their primary form of entertainment by hours through their, the, you know, all of growing up, all of, you know, getting into their twenties is gonna be gaming, not all, al…”
Chen: Watching others play games delivers 20% of direct enjoyment
“It turns out that watching somebody enjoy something, it gives you like, I don't know, 20% of the same enjoyment as like actually getting it yourself, and then it just turns out that then watching people, you know, play you know, games you know, also kind of is…”
Chen: Talent is migrating from traditional sports into esports
“A lot of the talent is sort of moving from traditional sports into eSports in order to sort of supercharge the IQ, you know, within all of this, which is super fascinating.”
Chen: Streamable games will cause market-wide game fragmentation
“As all of the publishers all move towards building, you know, sort of this flavor of streamable game, that actually there are more and more, there's more and more fragmentation of games, right? And the overall market will be growing, but there's more fragmenta…”
Andrew Chen passed on Sandbox VR's seed round as an angel
“And so I passed on the, you know, on, on, on, on the seed round, which is a really interesting, you know, place to start, start the whole conversation.”
Andrew Chen: Pitch decks acknowledging market challenges build investor credibility
“So I think by actually going negative, it actually felt more real.”
Andrew Chen: Virtual reality is the best tech demo of recent years
“VR is the best tech demo that anyone's ever seen over the last couple years.”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually transform into a VR game publisher
“The company's gonna be a publisher one day.”
Andrew Chen: Gaming DNA is the best foundation for location-based VR
“I came into this thinking, Of, you know, if you're gonna bet on a theme park plus plus, film plus plus, arcade plus plus, or gaming plus plus, like of all those DNAs as kind of the root, that I would bet on the games piece you know, like more than anything els…”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually require thousands of retail employees
“This is going to be like a retail, you know, large retail like chain that is going to need to employ one day, Many, many, many thousands of people on the ground, and it was going to be extremely operationally complex.”
Chen: Horizontal enterprise products spread faster because all employees can use them
“Things like Dropbox, Asana, Slack. These are all things that everyone in your company can use. And so naturally is going to spread much faster because At every moment, each node in the network is gonna be able to have access to all 15 to 30 people around them …”
Andrew Chen: High enterprise signup proportions signal market pull to uplevel faster
“And if you find out that a large proportion of them are actually enterprises, that's actually pull demand from the market that you should actually be up leveling faster.”
Chen: B2B software is significantly less price elastic than consumer subscriptions
“When Netflix increases their monthly subscription by two dollars, everyone's, you know, screaming bloody murder. And B to B is obviously less elastic.”
Chen: Envoy achieved rare B2B virality through workplace brand experience
“Like Envoy, that is an amazing B to B viral story. It's, they're very rare, but the reason why people use that now is because offices are part of the brand experience. And then after they use the thing, then they're kind of like, oh yeah, we're using pen and p…”
Chen: Elite product retention curves eventually swing back upward
“For the good ones, They start to flatten out and they plateau, and then for the really good ones, they'll actually swing back up and, you know, people will come back to the service.”
Chen: Extra push notifications can inadvertently lower DAU/MAU ratios
“The challenging thing is actually usually sending out more notifications will actually cause more of your casual users to show up, because your hardcore users were already kind of showing up, you know, already. And what that does is that'll increase your month…”
Chen: Network effects exist on a continuous curve, not a binary state
“When you look at the data, what you really figure out is network effect is actually like a curve. And it's not like a binary yes, no kind of thing.”
Chen: Modern consumer apps must steal time from existing products
“Well, because it used to be that you were, you know, what kind of time were you competing for in the first couple of years of the smartphone? You were competing against literally, I'm going to stare at the back of this person's head Or I can, like, use some co…”