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 10 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
Levchin: Internal transaction data outperforms social data in risk models
“The most valuable data is not social data, not what you eat for lunch, not even debt to income ratio, even though that's fairly predictive, but your own data, because every data set that you're looking at internally Describes your own process, including your b…”
Levchin: Banks fail with millennials due to brand identity, not tech
“Finally, I think the smarter ones of these banks kind of recognize that an impediment to their forays into the millennial demographic in particular is not lack of technology or lack of the right product. It's actually who they are.”
Levchin: Every niche in payments is at least $100 billion
“There are no niches and payments that are smaller than a hundred billion dollars, and so that's probably the most surprising thing I've seen.”
Levchin: Convenience trumps all other factors as transaction size shrinks
“The convenience just trumps everything else as the total amount you're trying to send goes down.”
Levchin: FICO scores are insufficient to underwrite multi-year installment loans
“And to do that, you have to underwrite. Like, you can't shortcut the, I'll just look at your FICO score, or I'll just sort of, you know, I'll look at your Facebook friends. Like, none of that works. You actually have to do a real, very sophisticated degree of …”
Levchin: Seeing peers' human vulnerabilities inspired PayPal alumni to pursue massive ideas
“So if you know kind of the true base version of who we all are, as you watch one of these people go for something really big, like Elon Taking humanity to Mars, which is extraordinary. And yet, you know, he's a human being. Like, I've seen him sweaty and tired…”
Levchin: Revenue opportunity in B2B financing is lower than consumer lending
“There, there's some healthy businesses these days in both accounts, payable financing and accounts receivable financing. So it's not, This is, it's not a bad idea, but the revenue opportunity, despite being an unregulated lending space, is seemingly lower than…”
Levchin: Payments innovations either reach critical mass or fail completely
“There's some unobvious a priori, but clear a posteriori version of critical mass. And if you don't reach it, you're going to fail. Like there's not really a okay outcomes in payments. You either get there and everyone needs to have your widget or your network …”
Levchin: Long-term installment loans serve as touchpoints to upsell financial products
“These long term loans, which are actually quite hard to manage and quite hard to maintain reasonable default rates and delinquency rates on, is the price you pay as a provider of financing to upsell consumers on more and more services.”
Levchin: Instacart grocery delivery is already 100% agentic commerce
“Grocery shopping is 100% agentic, like, for anyone who uses Instacart. Like, you tell your Instacart shopper, go bring me milk. You don't think twice when they say, oh yeah, you wanted whole milk from Organic Valley, but I found some other brand, and here it i…”