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 1,082 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
Michael: DOD diversifying AI vendor base following software terms dispute
“So that set off a series of events of, whoa, are we single-threaded on a vendor who's concerned about how we're using their software after the most successful military raid and the terms of service do not comport with the future world? We've got to get other p…”
Patel advised Intel board member Lip-Bu Tan to fire an executive
“I explicitly told Lip Bhutan. He had never talked to the guy because it was like four layers down. The company has like absurd amounts of hierarchy. It's like four layers down. He goes and talks to the guy and he's out, right?”
Horowitz: The SEC has sued over 30 a16z portfolio companies
“So they've sued, I think, over 30 of our companies.”
Andreessen: White House officials claimed they could classify math to control AI
“And literally this was, this is verbatim. This is we did, we classified a whole entire areas of physics in the nuclear era and made them state secret. Like, of the, like, theoretical physics, science physics. We classified them and made them state secrets and …”
Sinclair: Metformin and NAD boosters reduced calculated biological age from 57 to 31
“I took metformin, Kristen mentioned, which is a diabetes drug. I took another molecule that we've worked on called, it raises NAD, we call them NAD boosters, and I saw that my bio-age, according to this algorithm, went down to 31.4 from 57 point something, and…”
Morell: Backed Apple over FBI in encryption debate to avoid vulnerabilities
“On the encryption debate, I was actually not where you would expect me to be. I was not on the side of the FBI. I was on Apple's side, because by forcing Apple to create a key for its keyless encryption, you were creating another huge security vulnerability.”
DoD preparing counterattack framework against major cyberattacks on US firms
“We are also working on which combination of defense, intervention, and even counterattack In order to tell people that if they attack Americans in cyberspace, at a certain level, we're gonna regard that as an attack.”
Moe: Developers abandon proprietary models due to false-positive safety guardrails
“A lot of our developer within Infrax and for VLM are like retreating from using Fable five because you have a two hour job and you trigger the red line, which is false positive. And then you have to lose all of your work. And so a lot of our developer are usin…”
Kalanick: Uber ran internal program 'shoplifting' to recruit Lyft drivers
“We had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called sho…”
Kalanick: Uber declined to acquire Lyft over cultural integration challenges
“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”
Rowan: Apollo hires based on individual merit and distance traveled
“We've stuck with the same formula. We hire for merit. Adjusted for distance traveled. And distance traveled is not about your immutable characteristics. It is about you as an individual, not your class, not your group.”
Rowan: Apollo's climate investment policy permits financing hydrocarbons
“We're gonna make it better, not worse, but if that includes financing hydrocarbons, we're gonna finance hydrocarbons.”
Horowitz: Employees who refuse to support US defense work can leave a16z
“You're gonna decide that those people who are sacrificing their lives, putting their lives on the line to protect us, don't get the best technology? Like, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. So, like, you don't have to work here if you want to do that.”
Schimpf: Anduril found virtually no American-born tier-one manufacturing executives
“Looking for a great head of manufacturing. There's basically no like tier one execs we could find that were American born. We ended up finding someone who was from Canada, but everyone I found who was like great thinking about this differently, like really nov…”
Wang: All 24 surveyed a16z startups use Cursor, driving up to 10x productivity
“This year I was pretty blown away by the answers that we got. They spanned from, call it, 30 to 50% on the low end in terms of productivity gains to, I kid you not, one CTO told us that he had seen a 10 X productivity lift from himself and his team. They were …”
Anduril is partnering with OpenAI on counter-drone defense systems
“This is one of the areas we're partnering with OpenAI on”
Horowitz: Dozens of a16z portfolio companies were debanked under Choke Point 2.0
“And we had, you know, dozens of companies kicked out of the banking system simply for In a very legally compliant way trying to build a company, you know, that would, you know, employ people and, you know, make the country strong.”
Andreessen gave a $50,000 Bitcoin grant to AI bot Truth Terminal
“I gave it a 50,000 dollar no strings attached grant this summer in Bitcoin.”
Horowitz: Proposed federal compute limits threaten rapidly growing foundation model startups
“For little tech, which is, by the way, you know, everything that we've invested in foundation, not everything, but almost everything is growing incredibly fast and doing incredibly well, and these will be snuffed out by this kind of regulation.”
Andreessen unilaterally created the HTML image tag as a fait accompli
“We weren't making progress on it, and then I just did a, because I controlled, you know, I controlled Mosaic at that point, so I just did a fait accompli, and I just declared it, and I created the image tag.”
Mulchandani: CIA has deployed large language models for open-source intelligence
“We're public with the fact that we actually have LLMs in production at the agency. We have it in production in the open source team.”
Cuban: I refuse to hire Harvard grads, preferring state school talent
“I don't. Give me Texas Tech and UC. Indiana, right?”
Andreessen knows of only two Trump supporters in Silicon Valley
“I know of exactly two Trump supporters in Silicon Valley.”
Thiel keeps three quarters of his net worth in illiquid tech stocks
“I probably, three quarters of my net worth is in illiquid tech stocks in Silicon Valley, and it's because I believe there's a giant bubble centered on government bonds, and this is the furthest I can get from it.”
Litt: Prompting AI generated three correct algebraic geometry papers in one hour
“Here's an experiment you can do, you can take codecs, you can say, go online, find five recent conjectures in algebraic geometry and prove them, and ok, I've run this experiment, and with some back and forth, I was able to, you know, in an hour, get like three…”
Tech Founders Reported No Deteriorating Business Metrics in July and August
“My standard question is, can you tell me one quantitative data point in your business that's getting worse? Just one. That's my standard question, and it's at least in July and August, I haven't been able to find a single person.”
Kalanick: Atoms is one of the main companies building industrial AI systems
“Systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate operations of entire industrial sectors. Ok, that's what we do. I don't know if anybody else does it. I mean, there are people doing it that they don't call it this. We're one of the main guys doi…”
Kavak Bet AI Agents Could Outperform Its Best Human Hires
“And this is the second bet that we made that, that we could build superhuman agents. This means that by every dimension that matters, like conversion, lifetime value customer experience, our agents would outperform the best human we had ever hired.”
Kavak Scrapped Two Years of AI Infrastructure for Newer Models
“So we decided to like destroy everything we had been building for two years that was working, that brought us to profitability, that brought us amazing growth. And start over with a harness that we thought would be robust and scalable and leverage recursive se…”
Horowitz: a16z stopped publicly attacking VC rivals after scaling
“When we started the firm, we were the upstart, and I talked just fucking crazy shit about the other VCs, and this and that, and, you know, call them bitches. But, like, at some point, like, I could feel it turning, and I remembered what happened to him, and I …”
Kalanick: Uber renamed Lyft recruitment program from 'shoplift' to 'NACS'
“The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for, like, a ten-year-old basketball team. So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We call it the NACS. And we had a whole very heavy-duty initiative called th…”
Horowitz: a16z introduced Adam Neumann and Flow to Saudi government and investors
“So we're able to take a company like Flo, Adam Newman's company, bring him to Saudi Arabia, introduce him to the right people in the government, introduce him to the right people in business, introduce him to the right investors,”
Rogers: Represented NRA in prominent financial debanking and selective enforcement case
“I represented the NRA in a prominent case where, The regulations being enforced were ostensibly viewpoint neutral ones, but there was strong evidence that they were being enforced disproportionately against banks that allowed pro-gun groups to contract for fin…”
Sankar: Tech leaders Bosworth, McGrew, and Weill joined U.S. Army program
“So I was proud to join the army with three other colleagues. So we have Bob McGrew, chief, former chief research officer at open AI Boz, the CTO of Meta and Andrew Weill, the former chief product officer of open AI, head of science now.”
Sankar: Enterprise CEOs seek AI for market dominance, not headcount reduction
“You know, the CEOs I deal with, None of them have asked me, Hey, I want to fire a bunch of people, or how do I get rid of these people? Maybe because we're too expensive for that sort of bullshit use case, but they come to me and say, I want to dominate my ind…”
Dabkowski: ElevenLabs eliminated job titles to filter out high-ego applicants
“We removed all the titles, and it's a great way, both initially, of filtering for people who are very low ego, and so if you're coming in, yes, I want to be VP of blah-de-blah, you're not going to get VP, and so it actually will turn off those people, but I'd …”
George: a16z is lenient on AI startup gross margins expecting cost drops
“Relative to like mature SaaS apps, we probably are a little bit more lenient on assessing a company's gross margin today, because we strongly believe that their input costs are going to go down over time.”
George: Portfolio Coding Startups Will Instantly Switch Models for Better Performance
“If there's a new coding model that comes along, that's better than the latest version from Anthropic, like, Our coding companies will just switch and it's pretty easy to do because it's an API call.”
George: a16z was the first outside investor in xAI after Elon Musk
“XAI. First outside money in beyond Elon.”
Rampell: a16z Rejects Consensus Voting Committees for Investments
“We don't have a committee where we, everybody votes, and then you have to have this many votes, and then it's all this political horse trading.”
Horowitz: a16z rejected ESG verticals in favor of American Dynamism
“I don't think we got that serious with them, but the other one was kind of ESG kinds of things, you know clean tech green energy, this and that and the other. You know, we thought that the right lens on that was much more going to be American dynamism one beca…”
Horowitz: a16z's American Dynamism Originated as a Marketing Idea
“Yeah, AD is a good marketing idea. And I think what, right, when they presented it internally, they presented the marketing idea, and I was like, well, I want to know what the fund idea is. You know, like, how do I make money? Like, we have investors, we got t…”
Athena prototyped an AI that monitors screens to auto-delegate tasks
“We've built an internal demo of this. It's not live for customers, but the way it works is we build something that watches your screen as you work, and it screenshots the screen, and when it identifies things that you should be delegating to your assistant, it…”
Sherman Wu: OpenAI previously believed a single model would replace fine-tuning
“I remember like, even with an open AI, the thinking was that there would be like one model that rules them all. And it's like, why would you, I mean, like this kind of goes to the fine tuning API product. It's like, why would you even have a fine tuning produc…”
Sundar Pichai Described Project Maven Backlash as International AI Revolt
“Oh, they all, like, yeah, it was like a revolt from, I remember Sundar described it to me, a revolt from the international AI community.”
Andreessen Horowitz Is Actively Seeking Investments in Offensive Space Weapons
“And so I think anything to do with offensive space both on the software side and the hardware side, we're very excited about.”