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 136 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
Balaji Srinivasan: A COVID-19 vaccine could have been deployed in one week
“This is actually at the beginning of the pandemic, by the way, we could have had a vaccine in a week. Why? Because mRNA vaccines could be printed out. All that time over those nine months was not spent, I mean, some of it was spent manufacturing or whatever, b…”
Kalanick: Uber's 2017 board battle would differ with Andreessen or Horowitz
“That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.”
Andreessen: Mel Gibson's Passion sequel wouldn't be greenlit under Kamala Harris
“Mel Gibson finally got greenlit to do his sequel to Bachelor of the Christ, which is the resurrection movie, and which he's making right now. At least my friends in Hollywood are like, yeah, that never would have happened. Like, that never would have happened …”
McCune: Regulating AI like nuclear power would cause U.S. to lose to China
“Had we done the same thing in AI in that period of time, then you don't have the medical advancements. You don't have the breakthroughs. You don't have all of the things that come from this that are incredible. But beyond that, we lose to China. Full stop.”
Perault: Proposed AI regulations would have entrenched market incumbents and stifled startups
“Many of the politicians who are put, were pushing concepts that would have really put a stranglehold, I think, on AI startups and would have led to more monopolization of a market that already tends toward monopoly because of the high barriers to entry already…”
Horowitz: Seven software engineers could outperform 86,000 IRS agents
“You could have just hired seven good software engineers and they would have done a far better job than 86,000 agents at figuring out who was cheating on their taxes because it's like, it's a data, it's a forms problem.”
Andreessen: Russia could not fund Ukraine war if nuclear wasn't banned
“Quite frankly, it's one of the reasons why Russia is able to do what it's doing in Ukraine is it has this flow of money from oil you know, which in, in a counterfactual universe where the world by now had cut over to civilian electric Like they wouldn't have t…”
Andreessen: 200 million people are alive today because of nuclear deterrence
“And so there are probably something like two hundred million people alive today who would not be alive had Oppenheimer not admitted The bomb.”
Horowitz: Deploying nuclear energy would have prevented the current climate crisis
“Had we deployed it, we would have sidestepped the whole climate change issue that we're in currently.”
Uber staying in Houston led to harsher rideshare regulations nationwide
“I would dare say that The decision for our competitor to stay in that city actually led to more cities and more jurisdictions trying to follow the lead that Houston put out there because they believed, and rightfully so, that, hey, a company can clearly operat…”
Clifford: Entrepreneur First's model would have failed in Silicon Valley
“I actually think we would have never got off the ground in Silicon Valley because the people would have just said, you know, you just can't do this.”
Horowitz: Uber would dominate food delivery and autonomy if Kalanick stayed
“Uber would be I'll just say considerably larger and more important and more central company today. There's no question. I mean, first of all, it would have won food. No question. Uber was dominating food at the time, and it would have also been, for sure, a le…”
Goldman Sachs should have prevented KKR's rise in private equity
“There was no reason, really, that a KKR or a Forsman Little that were the big players back then should ever have existed. Your old firm Goldman should have beaten them.”
Solomon: Goldman Sachs would resemble Lazard without 1999 IPO
“If the firm hadn't gone public in 1999, it would have missed kind of the global expansion of capital markets and probably would look more like, not to pick on anybody, but just to pick any more like Wazard. Today than like Goldman Sachs.”
Sherman Wu: Replicating OpenAI's flagship model inference performance is extremely hard
“Even if we just like, you know, open source, like if we just literally open sourced GPT-V or something, it would be really, really hard to inference it at the level that we are able to get it to do.”
Horowitz: Closing bathhouses early would have prevented 75% of AIDS deaths
“Like those kinds of measures would have worked or, you know, would have prevented probably 75% of the deaths.”
Sinofsky: Apple argues the iPhone could not have started outside China
“Apple would just argue there was no way we could even have started the iPhone anywhere else.”
Horowitz: OpenAI could not have completed its giant raise in public markets
“And then the public markets have become. I would say very difficult and dysfunctional to the extent that, you know, OpenAI just did a giant raise in the private markets, which I don't think they could have done in the public markets.”
Acharya: Voice assistants should prioritize emotionality over intelligence to win consumers
“And I would argue even for the Alexis and series, like even if they didn't invest a lot more in intelligence and capabilities, if they over invested in emotionality, They might actually get a lot of the way there in terms of consumer experience. And yet I have…”
Cuban: Five Fortune 50 companies leaving major PBMs would force immediate systemic reform
“If five of the Fortune 50 companies walked away from the big three insurance companies and the big three PBMs, they'd have to change their business models, and immediately, immediately the entire healthcare system would change.”
Blattman: AI image progress depended on open-sourcing Stable Diffusion
“Open sourcing, like a foundation model as stable diffusion initially, that led to a whole lot of research on these models, which was, yeah, it was in, in retrospect, extremely important to do this. I think otherwise we wouldn't have seen the improvements we sa…”
Ghodsi: AI progress would be far behind without Meta releasing Llama
“If the original Llama was never released, What would the state of the world and our view of AI be right now? We would be way further behind, right? And A, it was a big model you know, by what existed in open source and it was open sourced. And both of those th…”
Luckey: Pre-arming Ukraine with advanced weapons would have prevented invasion
“If the Ukrainians had an arsenal of advanced technologically sophisticated weaponry from the start, if we'd been able to equip them and make them a prickly porcupine that nobody wanted to step on, then this conflict likely never would have even started.”
McCullough: Spotify-style music streaming could have existed as early as 1999
“You could have had a Spotify in 1999 or 2000 at the very least.”
Hennessy: Silicon Valley's dominance has widened despite expectations of rival U.S. hubs
“If you had asked me 1520 years ago, will there be another Silicon Valley in the U.S., I would have said yes, for sure. In fact, just the opposite has happened. The Valley's lead has gotten bigger.”
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.”
Dixon: Oculus would never have been funded without initial crowdfunding
“We were investors in, in Oculus, and I don't think Oculus would have ever gotten initially funded had it not been for the crowdfunding.”
Benet: Twitter as a protocol token could have sustained third-party developers
“If you instead thought of Twitter as a protocol token, Twitter, the company, or like the group developing the protocol could totally continue to exist just fine with as many developers on top as you can think of.”
Mian: Shared responsibility mortgages would have prevented 2008 foreclosures
“We argue in the book that if we have those kind of arrangements, a significant or substantial portion of the foreclosures and the resulting economic losses from those foreclosures could have been avoided.”
Buterin: Ethereum developers would have built replay protection before the DAO fork
“Had we known that things would turn out the way they had turned out, there were things that we would have done differently. So like one of them would have been Including, you know, transaction replay protection straight into the protocol directly”
Levine: Activist Investors Would Have Blocked EMC From Buying VMware
“Because activists were involved with current EMC, if EMC were now, it was 15 years ago, and EMC were faced with buying VMware, and they had activist pressure on their board, they would not be allowed to buy VMware”
Schafer: AAA Game Studios Would Never Have Created Minecraft
“I don't think a AAA studio would have created Minecraft, for example, you know, and I don't think that followed any sort of rules that existed before it, you know, but I think when people have the ability to kind of make these smaller, personal, more risky pro…”
Targeting aging directly could extend average human lifespan to 113 years
“That would get the average lifespan up to 113 by targeting aging directly rather than targeting individual diseases one at a time. And what's really key too is this would be an additional 30 years of healthy life.”
Blockchain transparency caught corrupt federal agents who stole Silk Road Bitcoin
“And I'm here to tell you that without it, we never would have caught these guys. In fact, without the blockchain, they would have still been sitting in the federal government today instead of in the federal penitentiary.”
TrialPay Should Have Built Core Payment Infrastructure Before Promotional Features
“If we had to do it over again, the way to have potentially built trial pay would have been to say, let's build Stripe first, and then after that gets critical mass, after we have distribution for this thing that is In many respects, a commodity. I mean, I don'…”
Chan: The Apple iPhone would not exist without China
“Without China, the Apple iPhone would not exist.”
Masad: Replit would have died without a narrative larger than the company
“Raffle would have probably died if I wasn't telling a story that is larger than the company itself.”
Rowan would repeat his public campaign against UPenn leadership identically
“But on balance, I would do it all again in exactly the same way.”
Adam D'Angelo: AI would be far more disruptive in a 1990s corporate landscape
“I think if you had an environment more like we had in, say, like the nineties, I think this would actually be more disruptive than the current hyper, hyper competitive world that we're in now.”
Andreessen: Oppenheimer and Teller prevented at least one world war
“By building bombs that could destroy the world, they prevented at least one, you know, major world war.”
Misra: LLMs trained on pre-1915 physics could not discover relativity
“Any LLM that was trained on pre-nineteen-fifteen physics would never have come up with a theory of relativity.”
Sinofsky: Chinese smartphones would lead US market share if permitted
“If they were to be able to sell them here, which, you know, is a challenge, you know, those phones would all be these share leaders, and it wouldn't just be Samsung and the AT&T store, for example.”
Boyle: Today's open media culture would not exist without Substack
“Where we are today would not be, like, we would not be where we are today without Substack.”
Andreessen: Nixon's nuclear plan would have accelerated electric cars by decades
“It would, by the way, it would have gotten us to electric cars, you know, probably 3040 years faster. And would have completely separated us from strategic involvement in the, in, in the Middle East for energy.”
Fanelli: Slow DoD onboarding turns away breakthrough commercial innovators
“That translation piece has been very expensive, And so product market fit is slow, and at times we turn away people who or companies that would have brought in breakthroughs”
Jain: Moving 11x from London to San Francisco earlier would have accelerated growth
“Yeah. I mean, there's just so much development happening here and like we learn so much from our peers. Right. Everyone is facing similar problems. Right. And then the rate at which we can accelerate by kind of being in this Mecca, having you know, this collec…”
Horowitz: Delayed browser creation would have enabled proprietary network monopolies
“If you had not had the idea when you had it, The internet as we know it probably doesn't happen in that the kind of Microsoft alternative, the Oracle alternative would have had an opportunity to gain a network effect. And so the chance of all this getting buil…”