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 11 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
Scott Wu: AI output-based value breaks traditional seat-based SaaS monetization
“AI is changing the value prop of software. You know, it's kind of doing two things at once. One, it's like the software is not doing work on your behalf. And so the core value of the software is not who in my org has access to the data. It's like, what can thi…”
Scott Wu: Companies need a pricing dictator, not a pricing council
“My main thing is like, you don't want a pricing council. You want a pricing dictator. You want someone who is telling you what the right pricing is.”
Wu: Seeking one fixed AI pricing model is a category error
“Basically, sometimes people are like, what's the right pricing model? And I'm like, that's a category error. Like there is no right pricing model. The only thing I know is agility is the only thing that's rewarded in this environment.”
Wu: Usage-based software companies must meter out performance optimizations to protect revenue
“Add a company that's a user-based company, take like a snowflake. That engineer is not allowed to ship that optimization. Why? Because basically if you decrease the cost of computation by 50% overnight, suddenly your revenue on your like one of two, you know, …”
Wu: Internal billing systems are where engineering careers go to die
“I think the kind of, I think billing is one of those, if you like talk to people who've worked at companies, billing is always like where engineer careers go to die.”
Wu: 99% accuracy in financial billing data is equivalent to fraud
“The 99% accuracy is fraud in a financial sense, and so you actually have to have really golden data pipelines in order to solve this problem, especially at public company scale.”
Scott Wu: Billing is a product surface, not a monthly workflow
“Billing was really honestly more of a product surface than a, like a once a month workflow.”
Wu: Usage-based pricing converts software billing into a data infrastructure problem
“In usage, it's like now you're like, okay, I, you know, we have a trillion queries on ChatGPT, and what we're doing is we're pricing per token, but if it's like above this token amount, it's priced totally differently. And so actually now the complexity of the…”
Scott Wu: Pure usage-based pricing is difficult due to unpredictability
“Moving to pure consumption is actually kind of a challenging thing to do because seats and subscriptions is really simple and easy to understand. Usage is not nearly as simple and it's really, it's much harder to predict for good reasons.”
Scott Wu: Product teams directly drive revenue in usage-based SaaS
“And so actually in a lot of ways, your product team becomes almost like a revenue driving team in a way that in seat subscription, you kind of had enough buffer that you could kind of like be like, eh, okay, product's probably providing value in these usage ba…”