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 19 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
Wilson: Big tech won't be significantly disrupted by AI
“I don't think that they were disrupted very much by the shift from web to mobile, and I don't think they're going to be disrupted very much by the adoption of AI power software.”
Wilson: Software revolution will unlock 10x to 1000x more value than manufacturing
“Total economic value that will be unlocked with the software revolution should be at least one, maybe two, maybe three orders of magnitude bigger than what we saw with manufacturing, automotive, you know, for the reasons you describe.”
Fred Wilson: Crypto is uniquely disruptive due to token business models
“I think crypto is, is the one innovation out there that feels highly disruptive because it's a real change in business model. It's not just a technological change. It's a fundamental change in business model. You're not monetizing with ads. You're not monetizi…”
Wilson: YouTube sold to Google due to copyright fight costs
“Right, but that ultimately caused them to have to sell to Google. Because they concluded that they couldn't continue to play the game that way, which was the right way to play the game. As an independent company. They needed somebody who could fight the conten…”
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Fred Wilson: Crypto unifies being a product user and investor
“I reject that idea, and I think what's powerful about crypto is that they're the same thing, that using and investing are the same thing that they, and you don't have to be a user to be an investor, and you don't have to be an investor to be a user, but if you…”
Wilson: Web2 users deserve financial equity for building platform value
“It's just not right, particularly for a lot of these businesses where the user is the product. Right? Facebook users made Facebook. Twitter users made Twitter. You know, YouTube users made YouTube, right? It's just not right that the people who make the produc…”
Wilson: Twitter could have stayed open using a token business model
“If Bitcoin and tokens had existed in 2005 instead of 2009, I think it's very possible that Twitter could have adopted a token-based business model Left the protocol open.”
Wilson: Personal capital moved into crypto will never return to fiat
“Once my money gets into the crypto ecosystem, it's gonna stay in the crypto ecosystem. It might, you know, move like, I'm definitely gonna be playing around in all these networks and, you know, using them and staking and doing all this incredibly cool shit tha…”
Wilson: Native crypto applications are 10x–100x better than tokenizing real-world assets
“That's why I don't love when entrepreneurs, founders come to us, And they're like, we're going to take mortgage-backed securities and put them on the blockchain, or we're going to take like, they're really interested, a lot of people are interested in taking t…”
Wilson: USV avoids dApps, focuses on NFTs and crypto games
“That's why largely we're not investing in a lot of dApps. I mean, we are playing around with NFTs and games for all the reasons you raised.”
Wilson: Porting offline models online was an early internet investing mistake
“When we first started investing in the internet in 94, 95, 96, what we were doing was dumb. We were just basically investing in things that had existed in the offline world that were getting moved onto the internet. Like, ok, so let's, let's invest in a, Let's…”
Wilson: Crypto tokens will drive massive innovation in staking and governance
“I think that we're gonna see a lot of really innovative things being done with staking, because I think crypto tokens make staking super easy to do, and there are, like, I think Richard's idea is that if I can get data scientists to stake their models, to put …”
Fred Wilson: Internet tech is the primary 100-year technological revolution of this century
“Many of them last for kind of a century, right? Like automotive, or more broadly speaking, industrial or manufacturing based businesses were kind of the technological revolution of the 20th century, and even though internet and tech kind of emerged very powerf…”
Wilson: Top 100 mobile apps mirror top 100 pre-iPhone websites
“If you look at the top hundred mobile apps, And you look at what the top hundred websites were before the iPhone came out, it's not a very different list, right?”
Fred Wilson: Business model shifts disrupt incumbents by making strengths weaknesses
“Everything changes when you change the business model. It's like all of a sudden, you know, your strengths become your weaknesses and that's what allows A lot of new entrants to come in.”
Fred Wilson: YouTube succeeded due to broadband tipping and social sharing
“I think the two big moves that That made YouTube successful, whereas all the people who tried YouTube before YouTube were broadband, that's like, 80 to 90% of it, and also social sharing.”
Wilson: 90% to 95% of USV portfolio companies run on AWS
“90% of the companies Maybe 95% of the companies we back are built on AWS.”
Wilson: Enterprise software markets are not winner-take-all like consumer
“They're also not winner take all markets, right? So the, it probably still a power law distribution in the outcomes, but maybe it's not as severe. Maybe it's not, maybe the winner's not 10 times bigger than number two, who's then 10 times bigger than number th…”