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 115 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
Kupor: Federal workforce will shrink by 300,000 employees due to DOGE
“We've done a lot of work over the course of this year, a lot of which was catalyzed by Elon and the Doge team. As a result, we expect probably that we'll end up with somewhere around 2.1 million employees at the end of the year, so roughly about a 300,000 redu…”
Kupor: OPM introduces forced distribution, capping top executive ratings at 30%
“So one of the things that we're doing, we just put out guidance on this, at least with respect to what are called the SES, which are the most senior level people in government, is we are effectively doing a modicum of a forced distribution. And so we put out g…”
Scott Kupor: U.S. government is unprepared for rapid technological advancement
“Technology continues to advance rapidly and, you know, just to be blunt, the government is nowhere near prepared for it. We just don't have the right talent here.”
Kupor: Federal culture treats risk as binary while ignoring upside
“We've kind of just embedded in the culture, this idea that risk is like this pass fail thing. Like you either have risk or you don't have risk. And if you have risk, God forbid, like, you should ever go there, basically, and so that to me was like the most eye…”
Kupor: Political weaponization of failure prevents a portfolio approach to innovation
“There's no concept I would say of a portfolio. Everything is a one-off project. And when a one-off project fails, then whichever party didn't sponsor it says, those guys are idiots.”
Kupor: 99.7% of federal workers receive performance ratings of three or higher
“So fours and fives, so the very, very top, is roughly 65 to 70% of people get a four or five. 90, when you add threes, fours, and five, that's 99.7%, ok? So 99.7% are a three or higher. 0.3%, therefore, is a one or a two.”
Kupor: Government tech roles fail to attract engineers by focusing on contractors
“The other problem we have with getting, you know, engineers here is many jobs in, in the engineering organizations are managing contractors. Right. And so if you're some like, you know, super smart person, you know, whatever coming out of, you know, MIT comput…”
Kupor: Silicon Valley recruits resorted to using ChatGPT on their personal phones
“The people on my team who, you know, came from Silicon Valley who are working in my department, What they were doing was just, they would just, you know, on their personal phone, they were using ChatGPG to help them do stuff”
Rolling SAFEs cause founders to accidentally over-dilute their equity
“In some respects, because number one, it's so easy to raise money on a safe, you often find people do what are called rolling closes, which is, you know, usually on a priced round, we're like, this is your date, right? Get your money in by June 30th or else yo…”
Kupor: Pricing impacts startup valuation more than any other business decision
“I want you to be very careful because no single decision will impact the valuation of your company more than the decision you're about to make on pricing.”
Kupor: Low initial pricing devalues tech products and cannibalizes revenue
“What happens just in human psychology is actually like, we'll set the value on whatever they're getting based on how they acquired it. And so in early markets, nobody really knows how to value what you have. And so it's very important for you to establish the …”
Jack Dorsey's dual CEO role likely reduced Square's forward valuation credit
“It may have been in the case of Square that kind of this dual CEO role for Jack Dorsey might've had some impact on, you know, to kind of the earlier point, just, you know, how much forward credit do we want to give to the company? And do we believe that, you k…”
Cooper: Structural market shift concentrates tech returns among private investors
“It does illustrate, I think, a longer-term structural change, which is that the returns to many of these companies, you know, to the extent there are returns that can be much more likely concentrated among the private investor class versus the public investor …”
Kupor: Startups stretching on valuation should maximize capital taken
“If you're going to stretch for valuation, you better take as much money as you can possibly get at that valuation to give yourself way more running room than you ever think to kind of insulate yourself from macro changes that might kind of impact the financing…”
Kupor: Excessive Federal Oversight Drives Government Agency Risk Aversion
“You've created this culture of oversight Which therefore then means, like, we should never take any risk because nobody wants to, like, see their department show up in a GAO report, basically. So we've just overdone this concept of risk as a way to actually, y…”
Kupor: Most federal operations do not involve critical national security
“The vast majority of things we do don't involve sovereignty or national security, or does somebody actually get a social security check?”
Kupor: Only 7% of federal employees are under 30 years old
“Seven percent of government employees are under the age of 30. That compares with close to a quarter of the normal workforce outside of government.”
Kupor: Many managers in federal tech organizations are non-technical
“A significant portion of people in technical organizations are not actually technical, and they're managing people who are technical, and therefore they're just not, quite frankly, able to provide career, career development, other things that happen.”
Kupor: OPM finally deployed ChatGPT to desktops via a $1-a-year GSA deal
“Until this week, we did not have ChatGPT on anybody's actual desktop, right? And so I've been, you know, pounding my CIO, and pounding my CIO, we finally, literally, you know, thanks to the new deal that GSA did for the, you know, the one dollar a year deal, A…”
Kupor: Government technology adoption fails through long-term white papers
“If we say, like, you know, we've got this big agenda to get AI, then people are gonna build these five, 10, 15 year plans, and quite frankly, nothing will ever happen. Like, we need, like, micro-level projects at each agency with basic use cases to say, how do…”
Kupor: Government power is measured by budget and headcount, incentivizing bureaucratic bloat
“Today, like, everybody's power in government is measured by how big their budget is and how many people they have. And so, again, we get the exact behavior we incent, which is everybody wants to, like, grow their budget and grow their people.”
Kupor: Government can and should be a leading tech innovator
“Look, I think it's a I think the myth that I'd like to retire is that the government actually cannot and should not be A leading innovator with deployment of technology. I just think it's silly. And again, this whole risk mindset has totally warped everybody's…”
Cooper: Investment banks face IPO conflicts balancing issuers and institutional buyers
“Where the conflicts potentially come up is, you know, they've got kind of two clients, right, which is you're their client for this transaction, but, you know, a firm like Fidelity or T. Rowe Price or BlackRock, who is a, The institutional investor who buys sh…”
Cooper: Any Andreessen Horowitz GP can independently approve investments
“Here at Injuries and Horowitz, we do things differently, which is as long as people follow the process, you know, consistently, you know, any single general partner has the ability to ultimately make a decision to invest and go on the board of a company.”
Departing founders practically bear the burden of proof in IP disputes
“And the challenge with these cases is you're kind of proving the negative, right? So in that case, you know, ah, you know, Anthony Lewandowski, who was the person, he had to prove that, you know, he didn't take anything, right? As opposed to them proving that …”
Participating liquidation preferences are fundamentally unfair to founders
“Fundamentally, you know, and I say this in the book, like, I think that's very unfair to the entrepreneurs and to the common shareholders, because liquidation preference is really intended to protect your downside, and so it's not obvious to me.”
Founders should prioritize clean term sheets over higher valuations
“You know, kind of people are trying to balance off valuation with some of these other rights, and that's really a lot of what I try to point out in the book is that it's very hard to look at these in isolation because they all have some kind of economic value,…”
Square's full ratchet forced double share issuance at its IPO
“When Square went public, they went public at eight dollars a share. Their last round of financing was at 16 dollars a share. And those 16 dollar investors had this full ratchet that we were talking about. So those 16 dollar shareholders basically got issued tw…”
Dual-class shares are unnecessary in private markets due to illiquidity
“The reason why those tend not to exist in the private markets is we're all completely aligned, which is none of us have liquidity, right? So we can't, you know, in general, and many times we are prevented from selling our shares legally, so there's no liquid m…”
The two cardinal sins of venture capital investing
“There's kind of two big cardinal sins in this business. One is you miss one of those companies. You don't invest in them. The other is that you invest in it, but you don't own enough of it so that when it gets to be Facebook, it still doesn't meaningfully chan…”
Cooper: Market crashes always have visible precursor signs
“There are always signs
Nobody could foresee the crash, but there were precursors to problems.”
Cooper: Every founder wishes they hired a CFO six months earlier
“We found in, in a hundred percent of the cases that having done it, they all kind of now say, gee, like, had I done that six or 12 months earlier, it would have been better.”
Cooper: 95% of Americans only access capital appreciation via public markets
“I think it's like, 95, 96% of people in the U.S., The only access they have to capital appreciation is through the public markets”
Kupor: Start with high pricing in pre-chasm markets and iterate
“The only way I've been able to establish pricing in a pre-chasm market is, is you start pretty high and then you let the salespeople shake it out.”
Kupor: Only direct sales feedback can accurately determine enterprise pricing
“When it comes to setting pricing and to understanding what the market will bear, like there's nothing that can do it except for sales. Like this is just my experience. It's not market research. It's not marketing. It's not the entrepreneur. I don't believe if …”
Kupor: Aggressive early pricing filters out passive learning buyers
“One thing I really learned to appreciate about, you know, setting pricing aggressively early on is you start to get real market feedback. You can't delude yourself anymore. People aren't buying it to learn about it. They aren't doing this because you're super …”
Cooper: Startups should offer larger equity grants over longer vesting periods
“Maybe an answer is to think about, gee, people should get more options, you know, even more options they do today, but with the understanding that they vest over a longer period such that it ties more closely to when you think the liquidity happens.”
Companies should deliberately underprice IPOs to ensure positive initial trading momentum
“You know, for better words, momentum does matter in the market. So, you know, all things being equal, you do want to leave some money on the table so that actually the initial trading out of the gate is positive as opposed to, you know, we had a recent deal, n…”
Andreessen Horowitz advises startups to reach $1B market caps before IPOs
“So in general, kind of, you know, our bias for our companies is, look, you want to get to a certain minimum size, and typically that's probably a billion dollars plus of market cap, where you're going to have enough heft that the institutional community is act…”
Late-stage mutual fund investors like Fidelity are not 'dumb money'
“I really find it very hard to believe when, you know, other, when people talk about fidelity and others as, you know, dumb money or not knowing what they're doing, right. These are some of the most incredibly, you know, sophisticated Financial investors there …”
Cooper: Mutual funds must buy late-stage private assets to beat benchmarks
“I'm Fidelity, or I'm Wellington, or I'm, you know, T. Rowe Price. I've got to be able to beat my S&P 500 benchmark. I can't do that by buying, you know, kind of large cap incumbents in the public market. And so an option for me to actually buy growth is go dee…”
Cooper: Modern tech IPOs have $150M+ revenue versus $12M in 1999
“Coupled with four and a half year time to IPO for a company, so you've got kind of massive risk both on the public markets and the private markets, whereas now at least we have kind of much better distribution of funding, as you talked about, kind of only 20% …”
Kupor: a16z advises portfolio companies to stay private while capital is available
“Right now, the advice we're giving our companies is in general, quite frankly, is to stay private, you know, as long as they have access to the capital resources that they need to grow the business in the private markets.”
Kupor: Hedge funds and buyout firms structure late-stage deals with ratchets
“Certainly, you know, the ones we've seen, particularly where you start to get to either, you know, the hedge fund community, or in some cases, you know, buyout firms who are now kind of doing these later stage private rounds, you definitely see more structured…”
Kupor: Choosing between 40-year civil service or private careers is outdated
“This idea that at 22 years old, you have to decide, like, am I going to go be a forty-year career, you know, civil servant, or am I going to go be a forty-year private sector person, I just think that's an outdated mode of thinking of employment.”
Kupor: OPM goal is making operational efficiency a top government metric
“My primary goals for our organization is, number one is, I want operational efficiency to actually be a real first class metric in the government, right?”
Kupor: Participating Liquidation Preferences Are Rare in Silicon Valley Deals
“Now, participating is slightly different, and it's actually much more advantageous to the venture capitalist, and quite frankly, deleterious for the entrepreneur. We generally do not see it very often, particularly in Silicon Valley, but it's good for you to u…”
Kupor: Founders overlook anti-dilution terms despite severe down-round risks
“So this is a term that I think most people don't spend a lot of attention on but can actually have very material economic consequences Particularly in cases where the company may not be performing as well as could be expected.”