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 316 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
Serhant Hires Executives for Raw Intelligence Rather Than Real Estate Experience
“What I like to do, especially with our executive hires is I hire for a function and I hire for raw intelligence and I hire out of industry.”
Sanchez: Every hire who badmouthed a past employer failed
“I always say if, like, the person you were gonna hire, if you ask them, like, tell me what happened in your last job. Like, why did you leave? Why did you choose to move on? If they start going negative, the company was terrible, the boss was awful, everything…”
Codie Sanchez Enforces Age and Weight Minimums When Hiring Nannies
“And my two main rules are, I have age and weight minimums, and they're pretty high.”
Mel Robbins Never Looks at Her Podcast Rankings or Analytics
“I do not have the back-end data to what's happening in the podcast. I don't ever look at the rankings.”
Liemandt: Alpha School teaches financial literacy from kindergarten through 12th grade
“In, in our schools, we start teaching about money in kindergarten. Right. And so we have a whole financial literacy program that starts in kindergarten all the way up through 12th grade to teach all the good habits that people need to have.”
Liemandt: Alpha high schoolers are designing a curriculum to make $1 million
“In our high school, We have a set of students who want to create a new curriculum for next year and the curriculum they want to start is how to make a million dollars in high school.”
Liemandt: Alpha School charges $40,000 to $75,000 in annual tuition
“So alpha school is expensive. So our tuition is 40 to 75,000 dollars.”
Just: PEAK6 held a $13B valuation investment that went to zero
“I mean, you know, we've had some serious investments that have been Really big valuations that have gone to zero. Like we're talking, thirteen billion, a zero.”
Lyon: Flipping a Coin for Caffeine Creates Friction Against Dopamine
“I love caffeine, I love loud music, and then I'll go work out. But all of that helps with dopamine release, so it fuels to that drive of wanting more. I flip a coin. Heads I get it, tails I don't.”
Michalowicz mandates a four-week vacation for every portfolio business founder
“Oh, we do, with every business we invest in, we immediately schedule a four-week vacation for the business owner within one year of today.”
Sanchez: Placed vending machines in multiple locations without paying rent
“Like we did this whole experiment with vending machines where we put vending machines in a bunch of different locations. And then we did videos about them and shared the numbers. And everybody was like, you left out the rent. I'm like, I didn't pay rent.”
Koerner's tree trimming company owns zero chainsaws and subcontracts all work
“And so we really, we didn't own a chainsaw. We still don't own a chainsaw. We just found subcontractors and subbed it all out to them.”
Masad: Replit received major acquisition offer from big tech company in ~2019
“Maybe 2019, we got this acquisition offer from a really big, big company.”
Masad: Replit is working to automate prompting using intermediate AI
“What we're trying to work towards is for us to do the prompting for you. So having another AI kind of take your, what you've said and kind of, you know, transform it in a way to give it to another AI pre-prompted.”
Masad: Every Replit fundraising deck includes a slide on why not to invest
“Every time I go fundraise, one of my slides is why you shouldn't invest in Replit.”
Codie Sanchez: I have never lost money for other investors
“I have never lost money for other people, which is always, like, kind of the line that freaks me out, you know, and that's probably a bad thing in some ways, I should probably get more comfortable with losing.”
Daymond John: First-year Shark Tank legal fees hit $750k before software
“I spent about 750,000 dollars in attorney fees alone just to look at the deal. Now I put it through a VC software, it cost me 10,000 dollars to do everything.”
Daymond John structures angel deals as options to avoid K-1 filings
“Also, you know, I look at a lot of the deals I do options on the deals. Because, you know, I'm not trying to fill out all this corporate filing and stuff like that, and especially if you're late on your K ones, and I'm late and all kind of stuff like that. So …”
Gary Vaynerchuk: My biggest executive flaw was struggling to give critical feedback
“When I realized, you know, five to seven years ago, that lack of candor, which is crazy, because Gary Vee's candor's off the charts, but Gary Vaynerchuk, the executive, when I realized lack of candor, I struggled giving critical feedback.
Yeah, and then the fi…”
Sanchez aims to build a multi-billion dollar Bloomberg competitor
“I want this business to be a multi-billion dollar media and investment firm. I want it to be like the Bloomberg plus CNBC plus like the trusted investment firm of our generation.”
Sanchez uses media content to source deal flow and institutional investors
“We have, ah, Contrarian Thinking Capital, our venture capital firm, where we let some large institutional investors come in and invest alongside us. So from the content, I get deal flow. I get investors, and I get to fulfill our mission. That's our flywheel.”
Sanchez: Adverse regulatory shifts killed four of her past businesses
“I had a business in Argentina, business folded. I had a business in money markets. Change one regulation made the company unprofitable. I had a business in Brazil. The 51% owner, because you have to have that locally there, took over the small business through…”
Sanchez tells her employees their exact phrasing dictates their pay level
“I get on our Monday morning meeting and I say, hey, by the way, guys, if you say these sorts of lines, you get paid this sort of level. If you say these sorts of line, you'll get paid that sort of level.”
Sanchez lists 22 portfolio businesses, but directly operates only one
“You can see them all on Main Street Holding Company. You know, I think there's like 22 listed on there, and I only run really one.”
Sanchez: Most portfolio companies review pricing every three months
“Inflation is the benchmark, but most of my portfolio companies are on a three-month rotation. So every single three months, we look at the right pricing.”
Sanchez: Company rule prohibits employees from ever speaking badly about customers
“We have a rule at our company that you're never allowed to talk badly about a customer ever.”
Sanchez: Pushed out of two firms for outshining superiors
“I was pushed out of two companies before. And both times, it's because I violated rule number one.”
Ladjevardian: OpenAI's $200 Model Replicates a Branding and Pricing Specialist
“I don't know anything about pricing or branding, but I've become a branding and pricing specialist just by using opening eyes, latest a 200 dollar per month model, which sounds ridiculous, 200 dollars per month for a model, but it's like having. A consultant a…”
Ladjevardian: Delphi Seeks to Hire Top 0.1 Percent Craft-Obsessed Artists
“We hire two kinds of people at Delphi. Either those that are the top .1% in what they do, and how do you know they are the top .1%? They are more artists than scientists. They're like Rick Rubin vibes.”
Ramsey Solutions operates entirely debt-free and uses zero corporate credit cards
“We really don't borrow money, and we really live on a budget, and we really live on less than we make, and we really don't have credit cards. We really do the stuff we teach.”
Sanchez: Employees must wait a full year before discussing equity opportunities
“Every single employee at my companies will have an ability to earn in or invest into one of our companies, but they don't get it for an entire year. So your entire first year here, we're not even talking about it.”
Levesque charges $7,500 annually for his all-inclusive, alcohol-free Sweet Honey Farm
“7500 for the year, and you get everything. It's, I'm just putting, you know, I'm not serving alcohol there's no drugs, it's just very, come and feel good.”
Levesque: I Reject Any Opportunity That Conflicts With My Five Values
“Cody, if there's something on my schedule that doesn't lie with one of those fives, a person, a place, a thing, a business opportunity, an investment, I'm just not doing it. I don't give a fuck. I'm not doing it. I'm just not doing it. It's, that's how stubbor…”
Perkins: I pay at the top of the market to retain talent
“I'm like, what is the market? And then I pay at the top of the market. You know? Golden handcuff them.”
Codie Sanchez Refuses to Buy Team Food or Coffee from Big Corporations
“I'll buy any of their food that they want, you know, while they're at the office working or whatever coffee you know, lunch, whatever, but not from a big corporation. I'm like, if you want a coffee, it's not from Starbucks. It's from the local coffee shop.”
Voss: Deception by omission permanently destroys trust and relationships
“When I find out that you deceived me by omission, I'm probably not going to be angry with you, but I'll never trust you again.”
Kennedy always shares meals with management candidates to judge their character.
“Especially for like middle management, Or above, I always go and eat with them. I always want to share a meal with them. I want to see how they treat the staff. I want to see how long it takes them to bite, to pick what they're gonna eat.”
Kennedy: Every employee firing brings immediate relief within 48 hours.
“I have never let someone go in a layoff or fired somebody that I was not immediately relieved within 48 hours that that was the right thing, and I wish that I had done it months prior.”
Galloway lost a $5M investment in a VC-backed healthcare startup
“Two weeks ago I found out, I made a, one of my biggest, I invested five million dollars in a tech space healthcare company, tier one VCs, baller CEO, best investors, had to elbow my way to get in, that's a big investment for me. It went out of business last we…”
Rad: Tinder had a strict rule against calling itself a dating app
“You know, we actually, we had a rule against saying that Tinder is a hookup app, a dating app, a marriage app, an anything app. Like, we did not want to define it because we saw ourselves as this very effective tool of making an introduction.”
Rad turned $5K into $1M day trading at 16, losing it all
“I was day trading when I was 16. Took, like, my bar mitzvah money, and I took, like, 5000 dollars and grew it into a million. Yeah, day trading. And then I lost it all.”
Sanchez: Employees must leave meetings if they are not adding value
“Now, at our companies, I say, if you're not relevant, leave. If you don't send a brief, start. How can we waste less time?”
Patrick: I got secret breast implants while racing to avoid looking insecure
“I got them when I was racing, so I was like, this seems counterintuitive for an athlete, and it shows I'm insecure about something, you know, like, I'm just not trying to advertise that.”
Patrick: I retain 100% ownership of my businesses to avoid partners
“I have businesses, but I own all of them. It's because I was, you know, so gun shy from doing this deal and getting bit that that I just, it's just so much easier to not have to answer to anyone or anyone answer to me.”
Joshua Weissman earned $40K monthly on YouTube while making $11 hourly
“Totally overshadowing when I was making 11 dollars an hour. At the time, I mean, obviously we've scaled this into like a substantial business, but at the time, when you're just one person, you're making like 40 K a month, it's like, what the fuck is going on? …”
Sanchez: Loving Tim Grover's 'Relentless' predicts employee fit at her companies
“Tim wrote a book called Relentless, and I think it's a really good screen. If people love that book, they're gonna like working in my companies. If they don't, they're not.”
Weissman: Primary goal of creating content was never to teach cooking
“My whole goal when I started doing this was never to convince anybody to cook.”
Sanchez: Turning down $100M to avoid building institutional small business rollups
“It is very alluring when people call you and say, hey, do you want a hundred million dollars to go invest in all these small businesses? And instead I got to kind of check myself because I do have an ego and I do think I'm kind of good at this and say like, ac…”