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 416 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Casado: US AI export controls failed; regulation is sole obstacle to winning
“China is a lot of very smart people. They're incredibly capable. They're great researchers. They can build stuff as great as well as we can, and they can open source it. We did not enable them. They do this even with export controls on chips. Right? So there's…”
Casado: Google's AI models are getting trounced by OpenAI and Anthropic
“Google is Google. They have all the data, they have all the intelligence and like their models are getting trounced. By open AI and by anthropic.”
Casado: Adapting software by merely marketing APIs to agents is wrong
“People in the abstract say things like, now you're marketing to agents, you're like an API, you've got a good idea. I actually think that's almost exactly wrong.”
Casado: Replacing H-1B lottery with pricing helps startups beat big tech
“This system has been gamed for a very long time. It's very hard for startups. To hire because of the lottery system. It's locked up by the large companies, the consultants, Amazon and Google and like that has to change, and I think a very reasonable way to do …”
Casado: H-1B consulting firms squeeze out $80k to $120k US IT jobs
“It's very, very tough to get a job between like 80 and a 120 K in, in much of the United States because of this, right? And so this isn't about like a new grad being a software engineer, because the reality is, is the expected value of a software engineer over…”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Casado: DeepSeek R1 standalone will not have a deep impact
“I don't think that R-One itself as a standalone is going to have that deep of an impact.”
Casado: AI startups are the fastest-growing companies in internet history
“We're seeing the fastest growing companies we've seen in the history of the internet, including, by the way, the internet itself. And this is by measure for revenue or the number of users, et cetera, right?”
Casado: Society should regulate regulators rather than restricting AI development
“And so I know the question and the heart of the question is, is we should regulate, you know, AI and this and that. And I think it's the actual opposite. I think we should regulate the regulators and let it be what it wants to be.”
Casado: Apple resists third-party security to protect its public image
“And I think, like, for me, like, the crowning example of this has been Apple. Any number of security vendors will tell you, like, when we try and, you know, provide a solution on top of Apple, they don't want to admit that they're insecure.”
Casado: The AI infrastructure layer will eventually become free
“One thing which is different than IT and industry in the past is it seems pretty clear because the value is in data, and because the value is in optimization, that the infrastructure layer will be free.”
Casado: Closed-source shippable software is dying out
“We've talked about this, but it seems like closed source shippable software is, is on its way out or dead.”
Casado: Open Source Succeeds by Cannibalizing Markets, Not Innovating
“If you look at these examples of quote unquote successful open source companies, in almost every case, they were going after and cannibalizing an existing market, which is way more difficult than actually doing new innovation, right?”
Casado: Global AI hardware supply is basically booked out through 2028
“I mean, the supply, if you look at the supply across the board, it's basically all booked out to twenty-twenty-eight.”
Casado: AI compute demand will persist for decades like electricity
“The right analog here is like the steam engine or electricity. In the following way, like, we've introduced this new thing that you can turn to work, and there's some very obvious applications now, but there's probably 3040 years of throwing computer problems.…”
Casado: AI agents work best as autonomous digital employees with dedicated computers
“GrokBot got really right is, no, how about if it's actually an employee? So now you have this thing that's an entity, and it doesn't have, like, special access to your keys or whatever. It has its own computer, and it has its own browser, and because these are…”
Casado: Multibillion-dollar AI training costs justify building per-model custom ASICs
“Today to build a frontier model costs, let's say, three to five billion dollars, right? So, and let's, you know, and that's to train it. And so the inference has to pay back at least that. Of course, right? You know, in order for any of this stuff to be viable…”
Casado: US power constraints force startups to deploy GPUs in Mexico and Australia
“By the way, it is so bad that right now if we have new companies going for GPUs, it's often in Mexico or Australia or in other country just because it is so difficult in the United States.”
Casado: Hardware optimization will directly dictate AI business margins and upside
“We may actually be entering an era where the optimization in the hardware is absolutely meaningful to the upside of the business in a way that we haven't seen in the past.”
Casado: Desperate AI labs ink commercial deals before startup hardware even exists
“The first one is the labs are so desperate that they will engage with startups. And so, like, we actually have quite a bit of signal early on because they're, you know, the labs are, Inking deals with companies before they actually have hardware available. And…”
Casado: Building an AI Coding Model Requires a Frontier Language Model
“It turns out that you don't speak to these models in code. You speak to these as humans in natural languages. Therefore, the model has to, like, understand, like, the breadth of human experience and language, right? And so, you know, that means in order to bui…”
Casado: Product-First Startups Should Build Standalone Apps Over Plugins
“Like if you really believe in the product, you would never do a plugin because then you're part of somebody else's product. If you really believed in the product, you wouldn't do enterprise early, you do it later, because the product itself is the kind of go-t…”
Casado: Large AI labs subsidize consumer tiers while extracting enterprise margins
“So very classically, if you view your competitive set, say the large labs will basically subsidize or give away the single surf tier. But then they actually have, they command great margins in third party and they command great margins in the enterprise.”
Casado: AI programming differs from past abstractions by abdicating deterministic logic
“If I'm writing a program, I'll like, whatever, I'll use a cloud database, I'll use storage, I'll use networking, you know, whatever it is, but like correctness and logic for the program is under the programmer's control. Maybe I'll use a third party library. B…”
Casado: 20-person AI startups can productively deploy $1 billion
“And right now, if I give. 20 people a billion dollars, they can actually use it usefully. It's very, so it's like we've kind of moved the industry from like this engineering bound problem to a capital problem.”
Casado: AI converts complex scientific exploration into pure capital problems
“No, you're building the machinery. I'm saying in this case, if you're like, I want to exhaustively explore every protein combination. Right. We can just turn that into a money problem. Yeah, yeah. It's kind of very strange.”
Casado: Board-mandated, consultant-led enterprise AI projects are bound to fail
“I sit in these boards too. So the board goes to the CEO. What does the board say? We need more AI. And what does the CEO said? Oh, okay. I'll get like a consultant to do more AI. And then they have some centralized project that nobody knows how it works. They …”
Casado: Software design is shifting to treating AI as a user
“What we're seeing instead is instead of viewing AI as software, like just view it as a user. And so instead, like take your product Make it a CLI tool and then have the AI be an agent that actually uses this. You're not fusing the two. You're just making it mo…”
Casado: Many Companies Measure AI Adoption by Token Counts
“Right now, many companies are incentivizing people to use AI by counting tokens.”
Casado: AI models integrate better when treated like human workers
“These models don't integrate well with software. Actually, I think it turns out and what we're learning as an industry is if you view them more like humans and you draft on the mechanisms we put in place for humans, they are much easier to integrate.”
Casado: AI onboarding will rely on human training, not databases
“Given the technical nature of these agents and how much entropy they have and kind of how unruly they are, we're gonna have to go through the processes that we've refined around humans, because humans have all of those things, and so I just, you know, it's mor…”
Casado: 2026 will be the year of AI computer use over coding
“And now this year is going to be the year of computer use. So it's almost like they're much more like humans using computers than them generating code”
Casado: Enterprise AI agents should be treated as separate human identities
“You know, we've actually built in a lot of these permission systems. You have to treat it like a human. As a separate human, and then instead of like building another auth layer”
Casado: AI agents select software based on core performance, not interfaces
“And at the end of the day, like, it's the semantics that end up mattering a lot more, right? And so, like, the agents, in my recollection, or in my experience, are very, very good at picking the right Back end for whatever they're doing. So they don't, they're…”
Casado: Senior engineering teams using AI are superhumanly productive
“The more senior small teams that use AI are superhuman. It's like they woke up, and they were all f***ing Tony Stark, and it's unbelievable, and like, their productivity is insane.”
Casado: AI coding assistants improve code quality rather than shipping velocity
“So like, what do people, in my experience, the more senior folks actually use AI for code? It's like documentation, writing, testing. I mean, it's a lot of the other stuff that may not actually like increase like the shipping schedule, but like you get a lot m…”
Casado: Generative AI monetization is driven by professionals, not casual users
“If you draw a dollar at random that's monetized, it's from a professional. And for obvious reasons, because, you know, like, you know, they can produce, if you draw a user at random, it's casual and it's in the tail. And so it's fairly clear that, you know, th…”
Casado: Contracting AI creatives costs the same as using traditional techniques
“I have seen the shift for contracting someone that uses traditional techniques to AI. Dollar amounts are the same. And so again, like, you know, this is Jevon's paradox all over again. Like, they spend just as much time. You know, it's just the output tends to…”