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 967 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 26 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
Taylor: SaaS sector will likely lose value over the next ten years
“Will these companies be less valuable 10 years from now than now? I think the answer is probably yes. Will that be true for every individual company? I don't think that's true.”
Taylor: Database ledgers are durable against AI; systems of engagement are not
“My theory is the closer you get to literally the database is the value, i.e. A ledger, the more durable it is. The closer you get to be in a system of engagement, the less durable it is.”
Taylor: Pausing model development today still leaves trillions in unrealized economic value
“I think if we paused model development, we'd still have trillions of dollars of economic value. That have yet to be realized.”
Taylor: AI adoption is bottlenecked by startups building tools over business agents
“I actually think one of the main things impeding adoption of AI is the lack of existence of all those other companies. And so many of the startups, particularly around here in San Francisco are basically doing relatively rote kind of tools around the AI rather…”
Taylor: Software engineering shifted from the most scarce to most plentiful asset
“Software engineering was the most scarce access asset in a company, and now it's the most plentiful, and I don't think we've ever lived in that world.”
Taylor: Atomic unit of AI productivity is a process, not a person
“I think the atomic unit of productivity in AI is a process, not a person.”
Taylor: Automating entire departments is science; automating specific processes is engineering
“And my point on it is, if you look at it through the lens of like an end-to-end business process, you can turn science into engineering. And I think solving legal through AI, that's a science problem.”
Taylor: Generalist product engineers using AI are worth 1,000x other engineers
“With the presence of Codex, you can produce amazing results. Those people are truly worth a thousand X other people, because it's relatively easy to find someone who's a great infrastructure engineer. Not easy easy, but like relatively. Finding someone with go…”
Collison: High-agency, non-expert engineers are ascendant at Stripe thanks to AI
“High work ethic people. Who maybe weren't the best engineers you know, previously or now, those people are massively ascendant, as far as I can tell, because they suddenly got the exoskeleton, you know, and like, they always have the ideas as to what we should…”
Taylor: Most Silicon Valley companies will stop hand-writing code by mid-2026
“And then the other thing is I think most companies in Silicon Valley won't write code by hand.”
Langley: Flock Safety cleared over one million US crimes last year
“So we're, last year, we helped clear just north of a million crimes in America.”
Langley: Cartels fly night-vision drones to case Virginia homes
“In one of the counties we work with, it's an affluent-ish county in the Virginia area South American cartels fly illegal drones through these neighborhoods. They'll flip on night vision, look through houses to see if anyone's home, then go break in.”
Flock Safety avoids facial recognition due to controversy
“We don't do facial recognition for that reason, because it's too controversial, but that's, it's counterintuitive to me when the technology gets better every day.”
Langley: Body cameras exonerate officers in majority of foul play cases
“In the majority of cases that I see, where foul play is called, it is almost always the inverse. Where a law enforcement officer was just trying to do their job, and on the other side, there was other mental health issue, there was something gone wrong, and it…”
Langley: Cobb County solves 100% of violent crimes
“Cobb County would be one which is like the second largest county... If you commit violence in Cobb County, you will get arrested.”
Langley: VC-backed public safety tech startups will fail or be consolidated
“I see a new VC backed company every day, and I'm like, there's just a, all these things are going out of business, so there's just going to be consolidation.”
Flock Built AI Agent to Flag Vehicles Following Armored Cars
“So we built an agent that tracks armored cars. And so, at all times, it is literally saying, okay, here's our truck. If we ever see other vehicles tracking this car, flag them automatically.”
Langley: Majority of 911 calls do not require a human officer response
“Majority of the calls actually never need a human to show up.”
Langley: Unlike software, every major decision in hardware is an irreversible one-way door
“Every decision you make in hardware is millions of dollars at a minimal, and often tens of millions of dollars. And so when you grow up in this Silicon Valley mindset of, like, everything's a two-way door. Bullshit. Hardware, everything's a one-way door.”
Langley: Flock Safety's drone camera can read license plates nearly a mile away
“Like, we can zoom, we can read a license plate almost a mile away. Like, crazy specs. Great thermal.”
Langley: Legal privacy precedents collapse when surveillance tech becomes cheap
“The other analogy that would be the butterfly effect, which is like when things are much, much cheaper and much, much easier, a historical precedent gets thrown away.”
Pope: Google completely stopped publishing its AI research around 2022
“In twenty-twenty-two was about the time when just Google completely stopped publishing its research. And so all the good papers are from before that as a result.”
Pope: Model parameter counts will grow much faster than context lengths
“Really tied into this context thing, I think the context size will stay ballpark the same way it is, maybe a few times larger. But the parameter count will go up. Like, parameter count should grow much, much faster than context length, actually, just because o…”
Collison: Critics calling vertical AI startups 'LLM wrappers' miss the point
“Some people have called these startups LLM wrappers. Those people are missing the point. The O-ring model in economics shows that in a process with interdependent tasks, the overall output or productivity is limited by the least effective component, not just i…”
Collison: Stablecoin issuers will buy large amounts of US debt and strengthen dollar
“Stablecoin issuers will, in a similar way, be large buyers of U.S. Debt and create more dollar strength.”
Collison: GDPR reduced profits for small European tech firms by up to 12%
“GDPR alone is estimated to have reduced profits for small tech firms in Europe by up to 12%.”
Collison: Stablecoins make global-by-default financial services possible
“And this progress is in large part due to stablecoins, where borderlessness allows fintechs to set up infrastructure that works everywhere. Global by default financial services are for the first time a real possibility.”
Collison: Agents will likely drive most internet transactions soon
“In our view, agents will most likely soon be responsible for most internet transactions, and will likely need blockchains that support more than a million, or maybe even more than a billion, transactions a second.”
Glyman: Ramp customer support agents ship code to production
“We have customer support agents like shipping code to production too.”
Glyman: Majority of Ramp's 55,000+ Customers Have Adopted AI
“And we looked at our data and you know, we support over 55,000 businesses. We lean a little bit towards tech, but not heavily. It kind of resembles the distribution of businesses you would see in the States. And well the majority of businesses have used Used A…”
Glyman: Ramp differentiates from banks by selling time instead of money
“What it's evolved into, and I think is today probably the largest point of differentiation at the meta level between ramp and maybe the financial service providers that we compete with is they sell money and we sell time. They'll sell you a lower, like a loan …”
Rampell: AI reduces the marginal cost of arguing to zero
“One of the first or second or third order effects of AI is the marginal cost of arguing has gone down to zero.”
Glyman: Cutting unneeded corporate spend beats offering higher card rewards
“If you just try to say, I'm gonna have a better rewards program sure, maybe you can get that customer, you know, a dollar or a dollar 10 back, or some amount that pales in comparison to just helping them just like not spend that hundred dollars, like cancel th…”
Glyman: All modern fintech heads of risk came from Capital One
“Our head of risk Sri Srinivasan, he's amazing came from capital, we're the same boss 10 years apart, actually in, in some sense, and all the heads of risk for all modern fintechs that are, came from Capital One.”
Ben Thompson: Contextual chat ads limit inventory and provoke bias suspicions
“If you're using the easiest possible way to target ads, which is based on the context of the conversation, we're going to show you a roughly relevant ad. Number one, your market's way smaller because you have to hope someone starts a conversation that matches …”
Ben Thompson: Google should monetize Gemini data through YouTube and Search
“I think the ideal outcome for Google is they never put ads in Gemini, but they understand so much about you because of what you do in Gemini, that they can then manifest that through ads on YouTube, through ads on Google, through ads on their other properties.”
Ben Thompson: Advertising business models are fundamentally incompatible with being platforms
“And the problem is that I think being an advertising based model is generally incompatible with being a platform. The whole point of a platform is you're letting something else shine, something else bring to the surface. You're just on your, you're the support…”
Ben Thompson: OpenAI's strategy resembles AOL's closed aggregator portal model
“OpenAI wants to be the place you do everything. They want to be like the aggregator. I think a critic would say people compare them to Netscape. I think the better analogy if you're an OpenAI skeptic would be AOL, where they want to be sort of like the interfa…”
Ben Thompson: Meta's Facebook advertising is the world's most successful agent
“Actually the largest and most successful agent in the world today is Facebook advertising, which is exactly right.”
Ben Thompson: SaaS growth slowdowns will force severe valuation haircuts
“People saying they're going to zero are wrong. But if the assumption is you're fine, but you're not going to be growing indefinitely, like that shift from thought of as being a growth company to being a stable. That's a haircut, and again, it's combined with t…”
Ben Thompson: Independent subscription models cannot support long-form investigative journalism
“Like your traditional classic investigative journalism, six month sort of piece. It's not well supported by this. What did support that was the bundle. Having lots of different writers in one publication altogether.”
Ben Thompson: Top creators have no incentive to join Substack's bundle
“Yeah, the problem is the merchants who will drive, make that bundle valuable, have no incentive to join the bundle because they could make more just monetizing users directly.”
Ben Thompson: The tech industry faces a massive chip shortage around 2029
“I think we're looking at a massive short, shortness in chips in 20, 29 or so.”
Ben Thompson: Crypto will become increasingly important for digital authenticity
“And in that world, I think crypto as an identifier of Authenticity is going to be more and more important. Like at the end of the day, I want the original. I don't want a reproduction.”
Ben Thompson: Media subscribers pay for ongoing production promises, not individual articles
“What you're paying for when you pay for me is you're paying for my ongoing production. I'm making a promise to you. I'm going to write something every day. And you're paying for that promise. You're not paying for the actual content. The content is a byproduct…”
Ben Thompson: Apple builds great products but is a terrible platform steward
“The reality is when it comes to platforms, you have to build, the price of becoming a platform is making a great product. So Apple gets platforms so they make great products, and they're terrible stewards of the platforms. Microsoft is a great platform steward…”