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 18 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Gerstner (in 2022): Snowflake can reach a $500B valuation by 2029
“I think this company can be worth over five hundred billion dollars over the course of the next five to seven years.”
Gerstner: Competition in venture capital will compress average returns while concentrating elite gains
“Like, what do I expect that, you know, will happen over the full arc of time in venture, right? We're going to compete away returns. We've already witnessed it over the course of the last couple years, right? But that just means the returns that go to the prem…”
Gerstner: Seeding investment accounts for every newborn would cost under $20B/year
“It doesn't cost a lot of money, right? In the scheme of things like this is less than twenty billion dollars a year for the federal government.”
Gerstner: Retail aggregators drive a growing share of crossover fund raises
“And if you look at the retail channel, The accredited investor retail channel, through Goldman, through Morgan Stanley, through these other aggregators, as a percentage of the fundraise for Tiger, for Kotu, for Altimeter, it's going up dramatically relative to…”
Gerstner: HBS students shunned McKinsey and Goldman interviews in 1999
“And, you know, McKinsey and Goldman couldn't get anybody to show up at their interviews at HBS in 1999.”
Gerstner: Value legends did crossover investing long before the term existed
“Paul Reeder, who started Park Capital, was doing private investments before Brad Gerstner showed up. Seth Klarman at Bellpost was doing private investments, you know, before we coined the term crossover, right? David Abrams in Boston. So I had a lot of legenda…”
Gerstner: Altimeter led Snowflake's round at a ~$175M enterprise value
“I don't remember what the exact share price was. I think the enterprise value at the time was somewhere around a hundred and seventy five million dollars.”
Gerstner: MongoDB struggled to raise its final private round at $1B
“When David Charia took over, you know, Mongo, I mean, it was famously hard for him to get that last private round of financing done at a billion dollars.”
Gerstner: Tiger Global did 70 to 80 early-stage rounds in H2 2021
“Tiger did, I don't know, 70 or 80 series A's, and You know, seeds in series A in the back half of last year.”
Gerstner: Top 10% to 15% of venture captures 80% to 90% of returns
“The top 10, 15% of venture is going to take 80 to 90% of the returns, ok?”
Gerstner: Only 30% of Americans belong to the ownership society
“We only have 30% of people who belong to the ownership society.”
Gerstner predicts tech ideas over next decade will dwarf past 10 years
“I think when we look back at this system in 10 years, it's gonna be more vibrant, more capital, more access, more ideas, and I think the secular curve around creative destruction and innovation has never been steeper, and the ideas over the course of the next …”
Gerstner: USA Networks acquired NLG and Expedia concurrently in 2000–2001
“Between October of 2000 and May of 2001 we put together a deal where USA Networks would be renamed IAC, bought both NLG and Expedia.”
Gerstner: Tech growth multiples crashed 50% in early 2022
“Just look at what's happened over the course of the last eight weeks, right? Growth multiples are down 50%. Risk premiums have changed dramatically.”
Gerstner: Bill Miller sold his private Zillow shares back in 2008
“Bill Miller of Lake Mason famously invested in Zillow in 2000 and six or 2007, and then in 2008 sold all those shares back to the company because everybody was unwinding their private positions”
Gerstner: Database software market cap was roughly $1T in 2000
“In 2000, if you aggregate the total enterprise value of companies that were principally driving their revenue from databases, it's about a trillion dollars in market cap in 2000.”
Gerstner: Google desktop search turned negative year-over-year in late 2012
“Google's desktop search, I think, didn't go negative
Until 2012.
Maybe the fall of 2012.
That's when there were fewer people searching on desktop, you know, on a year-over-year basis because people were switching to their mobile devices, okay?”