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
Handmer: AI Wealth Unlikely to Relieve Aging Populations Globally
“So it is certainly the case that AI seems likely to produce enormous additional wealth. Whether that wealth will find its way to alleviating the tax burden on the working class in, you know, the 200 countries on earth that don't have their own AI industry, see…”
Spending $20 billion on desalination could double the Colorado River flow
“If you spent twenty billion dollars on desalination, you could literally double the flow of the Colorado. So why? Five million acre feet.”
Sundheim: The biggest investing mistakes come from selling great compounders too early
“The biggest mistakes are selling the Costco's too early, because you know, the IRR is totally dependent upon what you assume the exit multiple is, like, and that is difficult to be precise about, you know, what the right exit multiple is for a business.”
Sundheim: Private market illiquidity is a huge benefit for holding great companies
“That's the nice thing about the private markets is that Once you invest, you can't sell, and usually for the best companies, that's a huge benefit ultimately.”
Sundheim: Hiring lateral portfolio managers from other funds almost never succeeds
“If I hire somebody laterally, who's a portfolio manager in another fund, that's rarely been successful, almost, almost never.”
Sundheim: Managing risk after a position moves destroys capital
“Risk management cannot happen after the fact. Like, anything you do after the fact is not risk management. It's actually just destroying capital. Risk management has to happen before the fact. Meaning, like, you size these positions so that, like, When it goes…”
Sundheim: D1 Capital does not use derivatives due to timeframe risk
“I don't use, I really don't use derivatives at all. The problem with derivatives is like, look, At the end of the day, when you break down, what is a derivative? It's just leverage and implied volatility. Like, if I want leverage, I can go, you know, get lever…”
Sundheim: US markets price turnaround stories far faster than Europe
“Like, the U.S. Is pretty quick at, like, seeing change happening, and then pricing in that change. In Europe, I find you know, once a company, like a company like Rolls had underperformed for so long, I guess that European mutual funds, they just kind of got i…”
Sundheim: Investors always make the most money from multiple expansion
“You're always gonna make the most money from multiple expansion. Just like it's hard to have that differentiated view on a company's growth rate.”
Sundheim: Gas turbines will face shortages for a very long time
“I think that gas turbines are going to be in shortage for a very long time.”
Sundheim: US electricity demand will grow 4% annually over 20 years
“Electricity demand in the United States grew at zero percent for the last 20 years. And so, if you think about the next 20 years, I think electricity demand will grow at four percent.”
Sundheim: GE Vernova trades at 2x Siemens Energy's enterprise value
“G Renova trades at two x the enterprise value of Siemens energy, just to give you a sense of like, and ultimately, there's no reason why the margin should be higher at G Renova. The revenue base is the same.”
Sundheim: AI market correction will hit when training returns asymptote
“At some point, they're going to say like, well, we're asymptoting out, like the returns on this new investment are actually not working. That's when I think you'll see a pretty big correction.”
Sundheim: SpaceX will capture more global telecom market than expected
“And I think that will continue in a way that probably surprises people, in that like, I think SpaceX will probably capture more of the global,
Telecommunications market than people expect.”
SpaceX can triple in value without relying on speculative new use cases
“Like, I look at it and say, like, I think the business can triple
Without having to make any big bets about people traveling 30 minutes across the world or, you know, data centers in space.”
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.”
Scaringe: Rivian is the best-selling SUV overall in California and Washington
“Interestingly, in California and the state of Washington, we have the best-selling SUV, electric or not electric, in California and the state of Washington.”
Scaringe: Vertical integration becomes a huge structural cost advantage at scale
“When you're producing less than 50,000 units a year, the engineering fixed cost and the operational fixed cost to run that is very high, so it's a structural cost challenge. But you reach an inflection. Well, just to run an engineering team to engineer all tha…”
Scaringe: Hands-Free and Eyes-Off Driving Will Be Expected Within Five Years
“Or in this, the next five years, we're going to see autonomy features where the idea of like hands-free or hands-free eyes off go from being something that a very small percentage of customers are looking for or using to something that's essentially expected.”
Scaringe: Every automaker except Rivian and Tesla relies on 50-150 computers
“And so, with the exception of two companies, Rivian and Tesla, every car on the road has, depending on the amount of content, anywhere from 50 to maybe a 150 little computers that run the car.”
Scaringe: Automakers without software-defined architectures will lose market share
“That must come, and if it doesn't, sort of like if manufacturers don't make that change, they're just going to lose market share, and the ones that do have that technology are going to gain a lot of market share in the next 10 years.”
Scaringe: Rivian steady-state vehicle sales will achieve 20% to 25% gross margin
“Vehicle sales, let's say that comfortably sitting it when we get to the right steady state, the 20 to 25% gross margin.”
Scaringe: Chinese EV Cost Advantage Stems from Government-Subsidized Capital
“What's driven the cost down is that you have the compounding benefits of much lower cost of capital across not just this, the manufacturer, the vehicle manufacturer, but across their whole supply chain. So tier one, tier two, tier three, everyone's cost of cap…”
Scaringe: Auto Production Will Shift to China Without Trade Friction
“If There's zero trade friction between, let's say, a country and China. More production in the fullness of time will shift to China because of those advantages. The lower cost of labor, the lower cost of capital.”
Scaringe: Legacy EV launches fail due to uncompelling products, not customer hesitation
“There's been a number of EV launches from Existing manufacturers that haven't gone that well, and I think we get the causality backwards. We say, oh, it's because customers aren't ready to buy EVs. And I say, well, no, it's because the EV is not that compellin…”
Lütke: Using third-party software forces adoption of vendor worldviews
“If you use software by others, you have to buy into their vision.”
Lütke: Internal software shapes companies faster and more effectively than policy
“It's the sort of missing ingredient people talk about, you know, people talk about incentives shaping companies, and then policies shaping companies. So, those tend to be the two tools. And I think then, sort of generally, like, if people are really insightful…”
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: AI platforms will become the new aggregation layer, disrupting legacy aggregators
“It feels like step one is, that's going to happen with agentic commerce is, I feel like existing aggregators, if just aggregation is their raison d'etre, then they're going to have a lot of, ah, questions that they need to answer, because ChatGPT and the AI ap…”
Lütke: Outperforming products come from places that reject consensus decision-making
“It's when something outperforms, it's usually the product of a place that doesn't make decisions by consensus, right, as we know.”
Collison: Stablecoin checkout is a few years from mass-market adoption
“I think there'll be something similar with stable coins where they'll be offered at the point of checkout way before people Become super familiar with them, but we're probably only a small number of years away from some mass market.”
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…”
Collison: People cannot be sufficiently optimistic about businesses that truly work
“People, people are not capable of being sufficiently optimistic about a business that really works. They, it just, it blows through all their projections.”
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: Advantages of any org structure occur immediately; disadvantages emerge over time
“Well, and the advantages of any organization structure occur immediately. The disadvantages only appear over time.”
Lütke: Canada ranks top three globally in every critical manufacturing resource
“It has in the ground basically as much, like, it's number one, two, or three on every single resource that is of value in, in the in, in the next manufacturing buildup age”
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: MBA hiring choices are the ultimate VC contrarian indicator
“This in turn is why the employment decisions of graduating Harvard and Stanford Business School students are such a great indicator. Yes. Possibly the best indicator of all of what's happening in the market, because if they go into tech market, it's, the marke…”
Songhurst: A Series A lead investor's status predicts a startup's success
“The single strongest correlation of how a company will perform is which, how high status a VC does a series A is within the stack ranking of VCs. It is far more predictive, sadly, than, you know, my own selection or any other variable I can find. It's almost d…”
Andreessen: Global AI development is consolidating into just two geographic hubs
“You see this in data, actually, already. It's AI was reconsolidating. You know, to basically two places on Earth and only one in the West.”
Andreessen: Westward expansion selected the most risk-tolerant people for Silicon Valley
“It's not an accident that both Silicon Valley and Hollywood are the place, places that they are because the people involved went west as far as they could before they were literally stopped by the Pacific Ocean. Right, like, it was the ultimate selector in the…”
Songhurst: Mega-cap tech companies are built by second-generation institution builders
“There is a trend where, if you go to the absolute cutting edge of tech, they're so sort of wilderness people that they don't have the conscientiousness. They, you know, go flying instead of turning up to the meetings. And it's almost like you get a second gene…”
Andreessen: The 2000 dot-com crash was almost entirely a telecom credit bubble
“It was almost entirely a telco bubble, and it was almost entirely a telco crash, and you know that for two reasons. One is the sheer amounts of money involved were so much greater on the telco side, and then the other is telco is where the debt came in. To get…”
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…”
Andreessen: Most AI computation will run on smaller, open-source models
“My guess is we, they're gonna live in a world in which most aggregate AI is gonna be executed probably on smaller, smaller form factors,
And probably most of that is going to be open source.”
Andreessen: Tokenizing real-world assets will work incredibly well beyond dollars
“The idea was a crypto token wrapping a real world asset. So that was one of the, part of the original thinking on all this stuff. It's worked incredibly well for dollars. I believe that will work incredibly well for many other kinds of assets.”