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 250 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
Horowitz: a16z replaces venture partners who lose touch with deep tech
“Investing in technology you really have to be in deep in the tech to be good at it. And I think that it's very possible as, you know, people get older, you know, they get less into it sometimes. And so, you know, at that point we got to make a change.”
Horowitz: Declining to enforce laws punishes victims without fixing prisons
“You can't, you're not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like, that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do.”
Horowitz: Operational knowledge lives with ICs and customers, not executive staff
“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”
Horowitz: CEOs should never try to fix underperforming executives
“Don't try and fix them. They can't be fixed. It's not going to happen.”
Horowitz: Building products impacts the world more than political activism
“Maybe the single best thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that, you know, Deliver some product or something that, that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than has a better impact than …”
Horowitz: Crypto provides the core network infrastructure for AI
“So every piece of network infrastructure you need to make AI work, Is, is in this new technology that's invented”
Horowitz: Using restrictive regulatory policy to beat China will cause US to lose AI race
“Probably the one thing we could do to lose to China is try and use policy to beat China.”
Horowitz: Highly automated US factories are almost impossible with union labor
“The way around that for America is highly automated factories, which are almost impossible to build if you have union labor.”
Horowitz: 'Do well and do good' is a dangerous corporate concept
“We want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect in that You know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that. And you kind of want to stop it th…”
Horowitz: Tech lobbying failed due to arrogance and Democratic partisanship
“I think there are like a few kind of important issues around that. One is, you know, really arrogance in that I think, you know, we in tech and a lot of the people who went in are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're for the good and everybody will love us whe…”
Horowitz: AI is actual communism while blockchain is advertised communism
“AI is what communism actually is a massive concentration of power and blockchain is what communism is advertised to be, which is power to the people.”
Horowitz: Negotiators must do anything legal and moral to close deals
“Look, I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. And I believe that you have to do anything and everything possible short of Immoral or illegal to get the damn deal done.”
Horowitz: Freezing engineering hiring for a year improves engineering team productivity
“My experience with engineering has always been that if you freeze engineering hiring for a year, engineering gets way better.”
Horowitz: Wartime CEOs must prioritize strict discipline over employee feelings
“It does get down to, look, there are times when you need so much precision that, like, if you're gonna lose somebody in the whatever war for talent because they got their feelings hurt, well, that's just gonna be how it's gotta be, because you need to Teach th…”
Horowitz: Stanford and Berkeley grads often lack veterans' sense of purpose
“And a lot of people come out of Stanford or, you know Berkeley Computer Center don't understand what that means and don't understand what it means to do something bigger than yourself. But if somebody's been in the Marines or, you know, and decided to do that,…”
Horowitz: AI compute demand will not decline until humanity lacks problems
“Any problem that you have can be solved with enough infrastructure and money. And so until we run out of problems, we're not going to run out of demand.”
Horowitz: Billions in compute can now instantly erase a startup's multi-year lead
“The one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you, and you try and cast me by hiring a thousand engineers, you're gonna wreck your company. Like, that never works. It's a mythical man month. Nine women can't have a baby in a m…”
Horowitz: AI models are not objective and carry inherent cultural opinions
“When AI becomes the interface for everything, every tool we have, every technology we use is going to be built on these models, and the models are not objective. They have opinions. They have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on values, and t…”
Horowitz: Restricting AI vulnerability scanning leaves exploit discovery to bad actors
“If you kind of lock that up, lock that capability to understand vulnerabilities, then the only people who will be able to understand vulnerabilities are the bad actors who jailbreak the system.”
Horowitz: Brands must provoke strong love and hate to stay interesting
“You really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral. You don't want to be lukewarm. Because then you're uninteresting.”
Horowitz: Capital and GPUs can now solve almost any software problem
“If you have enough money and some good data, you can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything in software.”
Horowitz: AI agents will destroy traditional software moats like UI lock-in
“So it's very easy to replicate the code. It's very easy to move the data, and then it's not even going to be a human talking to your software. It's going to be an AI, and, you know, AIs are really flexible on how they use user interfaces, so That mode is gone.”
Horowitz: AI is better at programming humans than humans are at AI
“AIs are really good at programming humans. Much better than humans are at programming AIs.”
Horowitz: Mixing legacy PR with new media strategy is fatal
“The whole motion of the old world Will kill you in the new world. And vice versa.”
Horowitz: Modern AI development allows solving problems by throwing money
“In the old world of software, the one thing you knew is you couldn't throw money at a problem and now you can throw money at a problem.”
Horowitz: Best time to raise money is when nobody has capital
“And it turns out that the best time to raise money is when nobody has money.”
Horowitz: Proprietary data plus sufficient GPUs can solve almost any problem
“With AI, if you have proprietary data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem.”
Horowitz: AI breaks software history because capital and GPUs can buy product leads
“With AI, if you have data, you know, particularly proprietary data, and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem. It is magic. But it means that you can throw money at the problem. And we've never had that in tech.”
Horowitz: Focus on a startup's core strength over weaknesses
“The biggest mistake we make is we get too wrapped around the axle about some weakness that a company has, as opposed to focusing on what they're great at and how great they are.”
Horowitz: Investment teams should not exceed five members to maintain debate
“An investing team, like, shouldn't be too much bigger than a basketball team. You know, a basketball team is like five people who start And the reason for that is the conversation around the investments really needs to be a conversation.”
Horowitz: VC investing should focus solely on potential company scale and profit
“Investing is hard enough without like introducing other criteria other than is this thing gonna be a giant company and make a lot of money.”
Horowitz: AI Foundation Models Cannot Subsume Application Complexity
“Right now, currently, I would say that the complexity of the application itself is very high and is not subsumed in the foundation model. And so I think these things are not as straightforward as they appear and the benchmarks can be misleading.”
Horowitz: Short Any Company Operating on a Five-Year Corporate Plan
“A great Investing strategy is to, if you see a company with a five-year plan, short it and it works every time, and yet they still do it, and I, it just comes, it really has no basis in anything.”
Horowitz: Specialized AI startups thrive despite threat from foundation models
“Ideas that we thought would for sure get subsumed by the big models are becoming amazingly differentiated businesses just because the fat tail of the universe is very fat and you need really kind of specific understanding of certain scenarios to build an effec…”
Horowitz: Financial bubbles require universal belief that no bubble exists
“A bubble is a psychological phenomenon as much as anything, and in order to get to a bubble, everybody has to believe it's not a bubble.”
Horowitz: CEOs must fly low and fast to get the truth
“Generally, like you, if you're a CEO, and you don't fly low and fast, It's going to be a mess because you don't, you never get the truth because the truth never makes it to you, like through your people.”
Horowitz: Big company partnerships fail without massive financial commitments
“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matt…”
Horowitz: Usually only one co-founder contributes long-term to a startup
“Usually founders, usually only one of the co-founders contributes long-term.”
Horowitz rejects the standard venture capital maxim to only support winning startups
“There's this kind of thing in venture capital that a lot of venture capital will say, well, spend all your time with your winners. Like we don't believe in that at all. Now, like if you look at a spreadsheet, that's the exact right thing, right? Like because t…”
Horowitz: In early AI, almost any deal works temporarily
“We're in this phase where it's such a profound change that anything you do like will work at least for a while. And so it's kind of hard to pass on any deal in, in that way.”
Horowitz: Drug development funding depends on an active M&A market
“It's pretty impossible to do drug to fund drug development if there's no M&A market.”
Horowitz: Democratic Party must reject legacy media to be true rebels
“If I was running the democratic party, I would say, okay, look, we either have to, we gotta go full rebel and like, then we can't be like, we actually have to be against CNN as well as Fox news and all this shit. And the New York Times and the Wall Street Jour…”
Horowitz: Relying on the press for a company's main narrative is dangerous
“I would never, like, I think there's no reason to like tell your primary story through the press. I think that's very dangerous.”
Horowitz: Founders should avoid political involvement unless strictly necessary
“Politics would be the number one thing I would say don't try at home in that it's so, it's almost always, you know, and I'm saying this as a kind of firm that's gotten very involved in politics but it was, unless it's necessary It's very tough.”
Horowitz: Shared Partner Control Prevents VC Firms From Scaling
“When we started the firm we had shared economics like every firm does, but we didn't have shared control, and that gave us a giant advantage over every other VC that had shared control, Because if you share control, you can't scale, because if you share contro…”
Horowitz: Venture investing should focus on world-class strengths, not weaknesses
“Philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness or has weaknesses. And some of them show up in like crazy ways. But that doesn't even matter because everybody's…”
Horowitz: an idea VCs easily understand is not a true breakthrough
“If you're truly gonna have a breakthrough, you have to, Kind of get to something that the world doesn't understand that, that, that you see. And like, if we can see it, you know, like that, it's not a breakthrough.”
Horowitz: Building a small boutique company takes as much effort as a giant
“So the thing that Mark and I knew from like our experience in starting companies was It is just as hard to start a small boutique thing that means nothing in the world and build it as it is to build the world-dominating monster. Like it's no more amount of wor…”