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 111 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
Stablecoin skeptics would not survive long at Stripe, says John Collison
“I don't think they would survive the company very long if someone's walking around like, I don't know, I don't think the stable going thing is going to be a thing.”
Handmer: By-right permitting on private and BLM land would best accelerate solar
“The single biggest intervention you could allow is by right development of solar panels on private land and ideally even like BLM land would be great.”
Handmer: The idea the US is intrinsically uncompetitive in manufacturing is crap
“This whole idea, like, comparative advantage, that the United States should just be intrinsically bad, or, like, uncompetitive at certain kinds of things, is crap. Like, this has every advantage it could possibly want.”
Sundheim: Elon Musk is an even better businessperson than inventor
“I think he's a better business person than he is inventor.
He's amazing at both, but like, people don't understand, like, he just naturally understands, like, just get the cost down, and that's very hard to compete against.”
Sundheim: Premier private companies like Stripe should not go public
“I mean, if I ran a private company like Stripe, I wouldn't go public.”
Public stock markets have become less efficient despite universal access to information
“It should be correctly priced because everyone has access to the same information. It's actually gotten less efficient over time, for sure.”
Collison: Small Shopify merchants outperform large retailers in e-commerce experience
“Thanks to Shopify, we are now, I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're living in an inverted world where the very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have, you know, worse systems and lower converting websites than Small busine…”
Collison: Silicon Valley over-valorizes unrelated second acts compared to vertical focus
“I think second acts are kind of a bit over-valorized in Silicon Valley somehow, where everyone talks about, oh, we want to do, like, a new AWS is kind of the coolest thing ever, where you do a second thing that is completely unrelated to the first thing, versu…”
Lütke: Functional org structures produce vastly better products despite executive friction
“It is significantly harder for executives. It's very unpopular for executives because obviously they just don't own, like, the entire shebang that they can, you know, make all decisions in, and that's requires a lot more collaboration, which feels strong and f…”
Lütke: Canada could be the richest country in the world
“I think it can be richest country in the world if it chose so, and it just needs to make a decision that it wants that”
Andreessen: AI is computing's first fundamental architecture change in 80 years
“Because it's literally, it's the first major reinvention of the fundamental model of what is a computer in 80 years. Going from the von Neumann architecture to the neural network... And so we've successfully unlocked computer industry V-II. It's 10 or a hundre…”
Wu: Devin performs on average like a junior engineer
“We like to call Devon a junior engineer today. There are some things that an AI, of course, is way, way better than all of us at, you know, especially encyclopedic knowledge and just pulling facts and things like that. There are some things that it's, you know…”
Levels tells Collison: Stripe's API grew overly complicated after COVID
“I think it wasn't going well after COVID. There was a few years where things were getting, the API was getting more and more complicated. We all complained about it. There was every, it felt like it was being run by engineers, not by people who actually use St…”
Android is too bloated to work effectively on smart glasses
“Android is way too bloated to work effectively on a pair of glasses.”
Consumers will not realistically carry compute packs for AR glasses
“We just don't think it's realistic for, you know people to carry around a compute pack to use glasses.”
Snapchat primarily competes with messaging services, not entertainment networks
“I think our competitors are primarily messaging services. So I think that's, you know, the core of the service is messaging. When we launched Snapchat, it had no social features beyond messaging. I mean, that's always driven the growth of the service.”
OS-level parental controls are more effective than government app bans
“All of these settings are available to parents at the operating system level, which is a much more resilient way to implement this sort of policy. So I think a lot of the noise in the ecosystem today and a lot of the concern obfuscates the fact that, like, the…”
Collison: Text LLMs passed Turing test, but voice LLMs are nowhere near
“That's the simpler way of saying what I'm saying is that we have passed the Turing test with text LLMs a long time ago, and we're actually nowhere near that on voice LLMs.”
Pichai: Google was behind in frontier LLM models
“So to me, we were behind in terms of frontier LLM models. But we had all the capabilities internally, and we had to execute to meet the moment.”
Pichai: Only two to three labs push the AI frontier
“I think there are two to three labs who are pushing each other pretty vigorously.”
Pichai: Google shares the same foundational AI outlook as rival labs
“There are a lot of small attributes, which can probably make a difference, but I don't think at a foundational level, there is a difference in outlook on what the curve is.”
Gil: AI Coding Supply Could Expand the Software Market 10x
“And to some extent, I think that market has been so demand constrained for great software engineers that suddenly adding supply can 10 X that market, right? In other words, I think the market for software engineering and coding is dramatically bigger than anyb…”
Cacioppo: GDPR remains as vague for engineering implementation as ever
“The theory at the time was GDPR is written by lawyers at a very high level. You see, it's like not a spec you can handle an engineer, like comically kind of bad as an engineering spec, but like, it's fine. We will clarify that in court over the next 10 years, …”
Langley: Physical surveillance faces unfairly higher privacy standards than digital tracking
“Because we operate in the physical world, we are held to a higher standard, which I think is a shame because personal opinion, what I do online is way more interesting and telling about my personality and my life than what I do in the real world.”
Langley: Flock Safety has a $5B-$15B domestic US revenue opportunity
“When I look at the domestic opportunity, you know, we should be able to get to five, 10, fifteen billion of revenue. In America”
Langley: Communities should deploy abundant cameras alongside strictly restrictive usage controls
“For me at least, we should have an abundance of cameras and have an incredibly restrictive controls of how and when they're used.”
Langley: Surveillance laws banning specific use cases like marijuana are unenforceable bad policy
“To me, the worst bill is an unenforceable bill. So you can imagine a bill that's like, this product cannot be used for vile possession of marijuana. Like, how, who's gonna enforce it? How, how, and it's like, you might believe that, and that's great, but someo…”
Langley: Government RFPs are almost always tailored to a single vendor
“Everything goes to RFP, but the RFP is written for one vendor, so all it does is wind up taking an extra year, six months. That's like, that's, I get why RFPs exist, but they're not actually RFPs. I've never seen an RFP that's not written for one vendor. I'm s…”
Langley: Selling to local government has more negatives than positives
“Like it's, I would not wish upon anyone Selling to local government. It's more negatives than positives, always.”
Ben Thompson: Google search has gotten worse due to recency bias
“And so I think I can say pretty authoritatively, Google has gotten worse. And I don't think it's Google's fault. I just think there's just, it's harder. What is Google's fault is they got so biased towards recency.”
Ben Thompson: Meta demonstrates the best execution among Big Tech companies
“Meta's probably, in my experience, Been the best execution. There's, I mean, you just see stuff like interacting with PR or executives. Like, they just run such a tight ship.”
Iqbal: US celebrates failed founders while UK press brings doom and gloom
“Just in the U S you get praise. If you're a second or third time failed founder, another investor will bet on you again, because okay, you've done it two, three times here. It's just doom and gloom. If you fail, the press are all over you know?”
DeWahl: NRC regulatory headwinds are overestimated today
“I think it's an overestimated headwind, certainly today. I think if you go back five years ago, 10 years ago, for sure, I mean, they hadn't licensed anything in decades.”
Ricks: Lilly conducts early clinical trials faster and cheaper than any biotech
“There is no doubt in my mind. We are faster, more robust, probably cheaper than actually every biotech out there trying to do their own early phase clinical trials.”
Ricks: Healthcare systems should pay a premium for generic drug resilience
“And we probably should pay a little bit more for generics. You sometimes read about injectable generics in particular that run short. That's a more complicated manufacturing process. So if you do it cheaply, you run into more problems. We probably should pay a…”
Tether operates like a hedge fund retaining all yield, says Stern
“USDT is like a 100 hedge fund. Like they keep all Of the carry for you which speaks to how, like, much people want stable currency across the world.”
Stern: Tether does not need to pay yield to stay dominant
“I don't think they have to in order to stay dominant.”
Handmer: Taxing aviation fuel is regressive and hurts marginal travelers
“That's actually super, like, regressive because people like you and I will still be able to afford to fly. We're not super price sensitive when it comes to, you know, flying, flying United, but actually it's the people on the margin who could, you know, it mak…”
Working at SpaceX causes the same psychic damage as grad school
“The psychic damage is the same, but the pay is better at SpaceX which is hard to believe, but true.”
Handmer: JPL is America's space science jewel but has been allowed to wither
“Which is a real problem because it is, it's really the jewel of space science in the United States and much of our technology besides but it has been allowed to wither.”
Sundheim: Short selling opportunity is the best in his career
“I would say that the opportunity for short selling is better than it's ever been in my career.”
Sundheim: Warren Buffett intentionally curates a specific public persona
“He is a brilliant guy, but he actually does like to portray himself in a certain light.”
Osika: The US has far more experienced SaaS talent than Europe
“There is much more people who've built SaaS and like startups before that you can, that have like very, very good expertise that you can hire in the U.S. And much less so in Europe.”
Collison: Big tech incumbents leave fewer AI opportunities on the table
“Clearly, all the large companies these days, they're very aware, they're very connected with the ecosystem. If you look at Asatia or Mark Zuckerberg, they are very aware of everything that's going on AI, and they're paying a lot of attention to it. And so, yea…”
Wu: High school and college students should still study computer science
“People often ask us, like, my son or daughter is in high school or has just started college. Should they even be studying computer science? And my answer is always absolutely yes.”
Wu: AI landscape is polarized toward becoming a hyperscaler or bust
“Like maybe one of my hot takes is like, I think for a lot of the big, of course there will be, you know, many medium sized outcomes in AI, but I think In this space, a little bit more so than previous ones, it's a little bit more polarized towards, like, you b…”