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 227 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 17 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: AI startups are raising at $600M valuations on zero revenue
“We're seeing four or five, six hundred million dollar deals get done on zero revenue, two, three million dollars in revenue”
Gerstner predicts up to seven tech IPOs in late 2023
“I think we're going to see five, six, seven IPOs, good size IPOs in Q four. We'll probably see closer to 10 in Q one, and then it will start opening up in the back half of next year”
Gerstner: US economy will experience a soft or medium landing
“The distribution of probabilities, the fat part of the curve is that we have a softish medium, you know, sort of landing here.”
Gerstner: Lawmakers say standalone U.S. tech visa reform is dead on arrival
“I sent that to two members of Congress, a Democrat member of the house, a Republican member of the Senate. And I got back nearly identical answers from both of them. They said no chance that happens here dead on arrival because nothing's going to move until we…”
Gerstner: Post-9/11 US wars cost $8T and caused millions of deaths
“If we look at the wars the U.S. Has engaged in since September, it's estimated three to four million people have died in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan. We spent eight trillion dollars. Inflation adjusted, we spent four trillion in World War II. Eight trillion re…”
Gerstner predicts US reliance on Taiwan semiconductors ends in five years
“I think most of the wealthy families I've talked to from Taiwan believe that five or six years from now, the US will no longer be in the position where they will need Taiwan and Taipei as much as they do today.”
Gerstner predicts 100 percent of 2022 unicorns will do down rounds
“There are 1400 unicorns at the end of 2022, and a hundred percent of them will likely do a down round. And if you said, what is the average that they're going to be down, it's over 50%.”
Brad Gerstner predicts Nvidia will beat earnings expectations through late 2023
“I don't think there's any problems with Nvidia. I think they're going to continue to perform. I think they're beat their numbers for the balance of the year.”
Brad Gerstner predicts AI will force Google to cannibalize search revenue
“The top of the funnel is up for grabs and all of those dollars over a period, again, a five years, seven years is going to get redistributed and make no mistake. Google is well positioned to make its claim for that, but its claim is going to come at the expens…”
Brad Gerstner predicts upcoming AI funding rounds will dwarf Mistral's €105M seed
“There are going to be a couple of monster rounds, I think announced next week, like that are going to make this one look like kids play.”
Brad Gerstner notes investors could wait until 2003 and capture search upside
“You got the internet right, you got search right, but you didn't have to invest a dollar in search until 2003, and you would have captured 98, 99%.”
Brad Gerstner predicts tech hyperscalers will each spend $100 billion on AI
“When you think about what these hyperscalers are going to do, they're not going to spend a billion, they're not going to spend ten billion, they'll spend a hundred billion dollars, right, in order to be in this race.”
Brad Gerstner claims antitrust regulations block tech giants from $1B+ AI acquisitions
“No hyperscaler can spend over a billion dollars to buy any AI company.”
Gerstner: AI is a platform shift equal to or larger than internet and mobile
“I mean, I happen to agree with Doug that this is a platform shift on the same magnitude as the internet or mobile itself. In fact, it may be bigger. Than both of those.”
Gerstner: Small VC funds without DPI will struggle as scale players expand
“I think sub-scale, small funds with no DPI they're gonna find a really, really tough time to Chamath's point about DPI raising capital. And you're going to see the scale player scale.”
Gerstner: Coinbase reported stock-based compensation equal to 70% of revenue
“Coinbase, I think just reported SBC, which Hold your hat, Saks, was 70% of revenue. Not 70% of their earnings. 70% of their revenue.”
Gerstner: Apple's IDFA changes 'pickpocketed' $2B from the advertising industry
“Apple's changes with IDFA literally pickpocketed the industry two billion dollars this year under the auspices of privacy.”
Gerstner: Tech faces two years of financial tightening without a V-shaped recovery
“We're gonna have two years of ringing out, right? Because there's no bailout here by the Fed. There's no V-shaped recovery for these companies.”
Gerstner: Hundreds of billions of dollars in venture portfolio markdowns are coming
“My hunch is that by the time the cash is actually distributed, the returns are going to revert to that orange line mean which means there are hundreds of billions of dollars in markdowns sitting in LPs and GPs portfolios that are likely to come because nobody …”
Gerstner: 90% of venture returns go to the top 10% of deals
“The huge difference between the venture market and the private equity market or the public market is that the venture market is unquestionably a power law market, okay? 90% of the gross profits and the returns go to 10% of the deals and 10% of the investors, r…”
Gerstner: Startup founders should default to a 90-degree course correction
“The default action by every founder today should be a 90 degree course correction unless they have very good idiosyncratic reason in that business in terms of their outperformance to stay the course.”
Gerstner: At least 3,000 startups will eventually end up on Layoffs.fyi
“But I'm, you know, there's 714 startups on this list. By the time we're done, there are going to be at least 3000 startups on that list.”
Gerstner: Mass public shootings are a uniquely American problem
“I would say that every fucking country on the planet has kids with mental health disorders, but not every country on the planet has kids getting shot up in schools and supermarkets and churches.”
Gerstner: Venture capital investments from 2020-2022 will produce lousy returns
“I think the vintage of the last 18 months will be lousy. So the capital deployed over the last 18 months won't have a lot of return.”
Gerstner: Tech valuations will not return to 2021 peaks without zero rates
“Pretend you never saw them, not in venture, not in the stock market, because that is a delusional place to think we're getting back there. We're not, unless we have another pandemic or a nuclear war and rates go to zero, and then we have bigger problems.”
Gerstner: VCs will only deploy 25-30% of dry powder over three years
“25 or 30%. Depends on price adjustment.”
Gerstner: Startups valued at 100x ARR will likely never reach those prices again
“If you were slapping a hundred X ARR revenue, or multiple, on a company doing fifty million in revenue, It's highly likely that they will never see that price again, whatever you paid for that asset, because the dilution and the deceleration and their growth r…”
Gerstner: Altimeter will not join startup deals at 75x ARR
“If somebody calls me up tomorrow and says, Hey, Tiger's doing this deal at 75 times ARR. Do you want to do it? They would have to pry the dollar out of my fucking hand with a crowbar. I'm not risking my money or my partner's money.”
Gerstner: Post-COVID inflation will roll over and long-term trends will resume
“I think the much more likely explanation is that the trends that existed for 20 years still exist. They were interrupted temporarily by us saving ourselves from a catastrophe with COVID. The transient thing that everybody has come to make fun of, right? Transi…”
Gerstner: Short everything if 10-year yield hits 7% and inflation stays at 5%
“If you told me you thought inflation was going to be five percent for the next decade and the tenure was going to seven percent, I would say short every tech company in the market. No, no, no. Short everything in the market and don't invest a dollar in venture…”
Gerstner: Tech growth stocks will be higher by May 2023
“We will be higher for growth stocks this time next year, but we may very well get there by way of lower and potentially meaningfully lower because the counterfactual to the hyperinflation argument is not, you can't deliver the counterfactual for at least four …”
Brad Gerstner: Global economy will avoid long-term stagflation and hyperinflation
“If I look out over the five, 10 year horizon, I don't believe in global stagflation. I don't believe that we're in this new hyperinflation environment.”
Gerstner: Most companies IPOing in the next year will be down-rounds
“I think the vast majority of companies that come public in the next 12 months are going out below their last round's valuation.”
Gerstner: Late-stage private venture financing market is closed
“Broadly speaking, the late stage private financing market in venture is closed because there hasn't been, right, we're in this buyer-seller standoff.”
Gerstner: Real late-stage VC price discovery will begin in fall 2022
“This fall is when we'll start to see real price discovery.”
Gerstner: Tech market valuations will not bounce back to 2020–2021 peak levels
“Let me be absolutely clear. There is no bouncing back to where we were the last 18 months. That was the outlier. That was the make-believe.”
Gerstner: China will not supply weapons to Russia
“This is why they're not going to supply the Russians with weapons.”
Gerstner: Growth equity multiples face an additional 10-20% drawdown
“I suspect that there's another 10 to 20% to go, right? For a 10 year that's going to be sitting here at one eight.”
Gerstner: Federal Reserve interest rates drive 80-90% of market performance
“If you ask me, you know, we get all excited about the election, we get all excited about stimulus and tax policy, but the biggest elephant in the room is the Fed and rates. That's the 80 to 90% factor in the market this year”
Gerstner: US will see largest economic migration in country's history
“I think we're going to have the single largest migration of economic the single largest economic migration in the history of this country.”
Gerstner: Prop 22 will become the regulatory model for New York and other states
“You're going to see if Prop. 22 passes, which I think it will tonight, it's going to be the architecture that New York and many other states follow. They're certainly not going to follow the disastrous AB five Example.”
Gerstner: Nadella reports over 30% ROIC for Microsoft token infrastructure
“Satya is out this week saying, you know, citing Morgan Stanley's report and saying they're seeing over a 30% return on invested capital in tokens as a service, right?”
Gerstner: Vast majority of AI compute offtake comes from 3 companies
“So the vast majority of the offtake commitments are coming from Anthropic, OpenAI, and NVIDIA. Right. When you hear about the hyperscalers building all of this, you know, this computer, they're building it out to sell to the people that we you know, that we ju…”
Gerstner: Anthropic could potentially IPO around October 2026
“We're gonna be within 30 days of an IPO, you know, potentially of Anthrop.”
Gerstner: Software companies cannot keep top talent from fleeing to AI
“It's almost impossible for a software company today to keep any decent sales people to keep any different, decent product development people, because they all want to go work on AI.”
Gerstner: Altimeter passed on Airtable's last three funding rounds
“We passed on this in the last three funding rounds, right? Which I think we're at 2,000,000,005 1,000,000,011 billion.”