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 85 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
Nadella: Microsoft refused OpenAI requests for dedicated multi-gigawatt compute clusters
“Sometimes you may have to say no to some of the demand, including some of the open AI demand, right? Because sometimes, you know, Sam may say, hey, build me a dedicated, you know, big, you know, whatever, multi-gigawatt data center in one location for training…”
Nadella: Microsoft's bottleneck is power and warm shells, not chip supply
“Quite frankly, the biggest issue we are now having is not a compute blood, but it's a power, and it's sort of the ability to get the bills done fast enough close to power. So if you can't do that, you may actually have a bunch of chips sitting in inventory tha…”
Gurley Plans to Advise Every Company He Is Involved With to Leave Delaware
“I read this, and I think, you know, any company that I'm involved with, I'm gonna encourage to leave because this is radically different Then why I was told we were supposed to go to Delaware.”
Gerstner: Altimeter projected Cursor could exit the year at $10B revenue
“Our own, ah, projections were that they could exit this year at up to ten billion dollars of revenue, so they were growing very fast, ah, ah, one of the leading coding agents.”
Altman: OpenAI would still rely on Microsoft distribution even with superintelligence
“Brad, to say the obvious, if we had super intelligence tomorrow, we would still want Microsoft's help getting this product out into people's hands and we want them like, yeah.”
Nadella: Microsoft has royalty-free access to OpenAI IP for seven years
“Not only we have the exclusivity of the model in Azure, but we have access to the IP. I mean, having a royalty free, let's even forgetting all the know how and the knowledge side of it, but having royalty free access all the way till seven more years gives us …”
Huang: NVIDIA is partnering directly with OpenAI to self-build infrastructure
“This new partnership is about helping OpenAI, working, partnering with OpenAI to build their own self-build AI infrastructure for the first time. And so this is us working directly with OpenAI at the chip level, at the software level, at the systems level, at …”
Huang: Hyperscalers support NVIDIA's direct purchasing deals with AI labs
“But they would like to have the same direct relationship with us, direct working relationship, and direct purchasing relationship. Meta, just as what Zuck and Meta has with us it's exactly a direct. Our relationship with between us and Sundar and Google, direc…”
Huang: NVIDIA is hiring across the board as AI boosts productivity
“My engineers, every one of them use AIs continuously, and we're hiring more engineers, we're hiring more people, we're hiring across the board. The reason for that is because we have more ideas. We can now go pursue more ideas. The reason for that is because o…”
Nadella: Microsoft Will Not Run Redundant Pre-Training Duplicating OpenAI
“Well, what we won't do is do it twice, right? Because after all, we have the IP from, like, it would be silly for Microsoft today, given the partnership with OpenAI to do two unnecessary-”
Gerstner: Bipartisan budget committee members want to support DOGE
“Over the weekend, I talked to several members of Congress, both in the Senate and in the House on, on the Budget Committee, and I will tell you there is strong agreement, and it wasn't just from Republicans, right? There were people who were trying to figure o…”
Gerstner: Musk and Ramaswamy Called a 4-Year Balanced Budget Plan Unambitious
“And I shared that with Vivek and Elon, and they both had separate and independent reactions, which is not nearly ambitious enough, right?”
Huang: NVIDIA never tracks or discusses market share internally
“NVIDIA is a market maker, not share taker. If you look at our company slides, we don't show, not one day does this company talk about market share, not inside.”
Gerstner: Altimeter pushed to sell Lacework despite having hundreds of millions remaining
“We had a company that wasn't performing at the levels that you know, it previously had been. It had been priced at many billions of dollars in, you know, at the peak of Zurb in 20, 21, a company called Lacework. And we ultimately, you know, we pushed to sell t…”
Gerstner: Altimeter banned the term ARR for AI revenues
“I've banned the use of the term ARR within altimeter when we talk about AI revenues, because they're certainly not recurring.”
Altman: OpenAI will keep stateless APIs exclusive to Azure through 2030
“We are keeping what Satya termed once. And I think it's a great phrase of stateless APIs on Azure exclusively through 20, 30 and everything else we're gonna You know, distribute elsewhere.”
Altman: OpenAI has no IPO date or formal decision to go public
“No, no, no, we don't have anything that specific. I'm a realist. I assume it will happen someday, but that was I don't know why people write these reports. We don't have like a date in mind. We don't have a decision to do this or anything like that. I just ass…”
Altman confirms OpenAI is developing new computing device form factors
“That's one reason I'm very excited that we're doing new form factors of computing devices, because computers were not built for that kind of workflow very well.”
Nadella: Microsoft does not plan to sell its OpenAI stake
“You could also say, hey, the hundred and thirty five billion dollars that is, you know, today are equity stake, you know, is sort of illiquid, what have you. We don't plan to sell it, so therefore it's got risk associated with it.”
Nadella: Microsoft manages compute capex as a single unified outlay
“My capital allocation is for the cloud from whether it is Xbox cloud gaming or Microsoft three, six, five, or for, Azure. It's one capital outlay. And then everything is a meter, as far as I'm concerned, from an MSFT perspective. It's a question of, hey, the b…”
Nadella: Microsoft will grow headcount, but with far higher leverage than pre-AI
“I will say we will grow a headcount. But the way I look at it is that headcount we grow will grow with a lot more leverage than the headcount we had pre-AI.”
Huang: 100% of NVIDIA engineers and chip designers use AI agents
“Every single software engineer, every single chip designer in our company already has AIs working with them. A hundred percent coverage.”
Godement: OpenAI PMs stopped writing PRDs to vibe-code prototypes instead
“We started, like, essentially not doing, like, PRDs, like, product requirements documents. You know, classic PM thing. You write, like, five pages, like, my product does that, et cetera. And, you know, PMs have been basically VibeCoding prototypes.”
Gerstner: Groq is raising a huge new round and Altimeter is an investor
“Sonny's going to raise a huge new round here. We're happy to be investors with Sonny as well.”
OpenAI will enter and compete in new product categories, says Kevin Weil
“And that's an opportunity for us in places where we think we can play a role. We, where we think we have a perspective. We'll go compete.”
Gurley and Gerstner offer to fund alternatives to proxy advisors
“I would encourage any of our listeners. There may be someone already doing it. That's already working on our alternatives to these two companies. And if you are reach out to us, we could help fund it, help promote it.”
Gurley Confirms He Was Not Involved in Benchmark's Manus AI Investment
“I'm no longer A GP on the new funds at Benchmark, which means I'm not involved in new investment decisions. So I didn't, I wasn't part of the decision to invest in Manus and I, you know, found out about it after the fact.”
Gerstner: Altimeter backed OpenAI at $260B pre-money valuation
“Altimeter participated along with several others who were reported, and the valuation was like 260 pre which would make it, if all the money were to come in, a 300 post valuation”
Gerstner: Altimeter Lost Money Investing in Cloud Security Startup Lacework
“Altimeter was an investor
with Sutter Hill in a company called Lacework.
Right.
Right.
And it was competing in a very, very similar space.
This was the thesis of Lacework.
Lacework raised a lot of money, too much money, I would argue, you know, at the ti…”
Gerstner: I am holding half my normal equity exposure amid macro uncertainty
“My risk profile is lower than our standard risk profile. What do I mean by that? Very simply, you know, I own half as much as I would normally own at a point in time.”
Nadella: Microsoft allocates capital to unified cloud infrastructure rather than product silos
“To me, I've never, I don't allocate my capital thinking here is the Azure capital. Here is the M. Three, six, five capital. Here is you know, gaming. I kind of think of, hey, there's a cloud infra. That's the core theory of the firm for me. On top of it, I hav…”
Nadella: Microsoft tried for 10 years to secure an Apple search deal
“Like, I've been trying to get an Apple search deal for, like, 10 years. And so, when Tim finally did a deal with Sam, I was, like, the most thrilled person, which is better, it's better to have ChatGPT get that deal than anybody else, because we, you know, we …”
Nadella: Microsoft Partnered With CoreWeave to Catch Up to ChatGPT Demand
“That, that we did because we all got caught with the hit called ChatGPT and OpenAI APIs, right? Yeah, we were completely, I mean, like, yeah, it was impossible. There's no supply chain planning I could have done in you know, what is it, you know, like none of …”
Nadella details the four pillars governing Microsoft's OpenAI partnership
“I think of them as, hey, as an investor, what are their interests and our interests, and how do we align them? I think of them as an IP partner and because we give them systems IP, they give us, ah, model IP, right? So that's another side of it where we are, a…”
Huang: NVIDIA shares roadmaps years ahead with CSPs building ASICs
“When we work with all the GCPs Azure, we present our roadmap to them years in advance. They don't present their ASIC roadmap to us, and it doesn't ever offend us.”
Huang: NVIDIA aims for 50,000 employees and 100M AI assistants
“I'm hoping that NVIDIA someday will be a 50,000 employee company with a hundred million, you know, AI assistants. And they're in every single group.”
Gerstner: Altimeter cut directional market exposure from 9 to 3 units of risk
“So we had much lower units of risk. What's that mean? It means we sell some of our longs, or we put edges on, or we add to our short positions so that our net exposure directionally to the market, right, is three units of risk, not the nine units of risk that …”
Gerstner: Altimeter passed on Character.ai due to unsustainable CapEx requirements
“I would say that we looked at both inflection and character. We really liked what we saw at character. We wanted to be involved in it, but it was really hard to underwrite it for exactly this reason. We said the most likely outcome is that they're going to be …”
Gerstner: Altimeter reduced net exposure by adding shorts and trimming longs
“We've turned down our exposures a little bit, taken a little bit of our net exposure, so added to some shorts, taken some of our longs down a little bit”
Gerstner: Altimeter Passed on Many AI Startups Over Unjustifiable Multiples
“We passed on, you know, on a lot of these companies simply because we couldn't get comfortable with the entry multiples, given how opaque it still is at this moment.”
Jain: Glean abandoned internal model fine-tuning for pre-built models
“Some of our fine tuning work, building, building models for a specific use case within our product, like, you know, didn't really pan out for us. And ultimately the choice was that, you know, we can go with already built models, whether they are small open sou…”
Jain: Glean records every internal and external meeting when permitted
“In, in Glean, we have this policy where we record every single meeting, internal meeting, external meeting if our customers allow because there's so much information, you know, in there.”
Nadella confirms Microsoft-OpenAI revenue share runs until AGI or term end
“Yeah, we have a rev share, and I think as you characterized it, is either going to AGI or till the end of the term.”
Nadella: Seeing Codex in GitHub Copilot triggered Microsoft's 1-to-10 OpenAI investment
“Then seeing the early codecs inside of Copilot, inside of GitHub Copilot, and seeing just the code completions, and seeing it work, that's when I would say we, I felt like I can go from one to 10. Because that was the big call, quite frankly. One was controver…”
Nadella: Microsoft is currently bringing up NVIDIA GB300 hardware
“We now have GB 300 bringing, you know, that we're bringing up. So you don't want to have ordered a bunch of GB 200 that are getting plugged in only to find the GB two, 300 are in full production.”
Gurley steps back from co-hosting BG2 podcast to focus on policy
“I apologize that I'm not going to be doing it anymore. I came across this quote that was really inspiring to me. It said, life begins where your comfort zone ends. And there were a number of people that helped push me to write the book. It's taken up quite a b…”