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
Andreessen: Backtests suggest VC firms should hold winning public stocks in perpetuity
“You know, there is a theory afoot, and Sequoia is pursuing it that basically the venture firms and the RLPs have left enormous amounts of money on the table by distributing too soon. And that, you know, the best strategy over, over, if you backtest over 50 yea…”
Andreessen: Transparency and peer-to-peer communication dissolve centralized institutional authority
“True transparency, true free speech is just, is a fundamental solvent basically dissolving all centralized institutional authority.
and the reason for that is centralized institutional authority is never perfect, and it often has problems, and in fact, it of…”
Songhurst: The centralized nation-state is downstream from centralized media
“The extreme version of this for good or ill is that the centralized state is an outcome of centralized media. The nation state is downstream from the newspaper.”
Osika: Non-coders are making hundreds of thousands from prompt-built production applications
“That's what we're seeing with people making hundreds of thousands of dollars having built production-ready applications, but just by prompting, not looking at the code ever.”
Osika: AI agent failure rates will drop tenfold within a year
“I think the, like, agents, they often get confused and trip over themselves, and we're in a year going to see that happening, like, by an order of magnitude less often.”
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…”
Wu: Enterprises measure 8x to 15x productivity gains using Devin for migrations
“I think in practice what we see with folks, especially in these kind of like enterprise migrations is, is, you know, when folks measure internally, they see something like an eight to 15 X gain for a lot of these use cases with Devon because, Yeah, as you're s…”
Wu: General AI intelligence alone will not solve messy software engineering
“Software engineering in the real world is so messy, you know, and there's all sorts of these things that come up. And I think in practice, you know, most disciplines look like this. And I would say the same thing about law or medicine or, and so on. And so whi…”
Wu: Solved AI benchmarks shift bottleneck to defining real-world benchmarks
“The thing is when that happens, I don't think what we end up with is just pure ASI end of humanity, human knowledge work or whatever. I think the thing that we end up in is basically a point where the hard question is, all right, now what is the benchmark, rig…”
Wu: Seat-based SaaS pricing makes no sense for AI agents
“Seats don't really make sense when it is like, the AI themselves are arguably seats as well, you know, like they're doing a lot of the labor too. And then on the other side, I think you know, usage obviously just goes so naturally with the cogs themselves beca…”
Wu: Language syntax will matter less than product sense in software engineering
“Yeah, I think what we find is, is, and I think this, you know, we'll see this trend generally in software engineering, which is knowing all the little, memorizing all the facts or knowing all the little details or being really good at Syntax of some language o…”
Wu: Developers will stop using code as primary interface in 2-4 years
“I think that there will come a point, and my guess on this point is probably in the neighborhood of, let's say, two, three, four years from now, where we stop using code as the main interface.”
Wu: The transition to AI will create far more software engineers
“Funnily enough, I mean, I think, if anything, we will have way more software engineers, not fewer.”
Collison: Everything will pass through a transformer model before consumption
“Everything will pass through a transformer model before it's consumed.”
Wu: Freezing AI models today leaves a decade of product progress
“I think you could freeze all the capabilities today and have no new models and no new research come out and there would still be like a whole decade of product progress to make.”
Wu: Sudden AGI singularity won't happen in the next few years
“My honest opinion is, I think there is some, you know, rapid, singularity, superintelligence thing that people kind of talk about. I would guess It's very hard to say. You know, nothing's impossible, but I would guess that that's not something that happens in …”
Levels: Personal wealth generally reflects total value added to society
“Getting rich is simply a representation of your added value to the world economy. In most cases, of course, as edge cases generally, The money on your bank account is how much value added to society.”
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…”
Vogt: Prior Robotics Standards and Tools Are Now Worthless or Outdated
“I think it would be that robotics today is a completely different field in a different industry than it was five years ago. Like all of the things we thought we knew, all the businesses that were tried and failed, all of the tools that have become best practic…”
Vogt: Modern Robotics Requires Adaptability via Neural Networks, Not Repeatability
“Today you don't need a robot that's repeatable. You need a robot that's adaptable, like powered by neural networks, and if it makes a mistake or doesn't approach this object at exactly the right angle, it doesn't matter. It can correct that.”
Vogt: Mimicry and LLM-Style Tools Make Domestic Robotics Tractable
“If you're willing to completely let go of that and embrace today's tools, it's not the programming thing. You have to show a robot how to do a task and it can mimic that and let, you know essentially chat GPT like technologies instruct these things at a high l…”
Vogt: Scaling from 80 to 400 people reduces per-person productivity by 90%
“When we go from. 80 people to 400 people, our productivity per person is going to drop by 90%. And are we going to sign up for that and understand that it won't get better until we're past 400 people? I mean, that's the reality of the situation.”
Vogt: Selling a startup to a legacy corporation cannot scale its vision
“I think my heart was in the right place, but I was naive about the ability to get like a large corporation, which is like, it's like an aircraft carrier. You can't steer it. You can't get it to change its focus. Yeah. It's going to do what it wants to do or wh…”
Snap is about to reach one billion monthly active users
“We're about to reach a billion monthly active users, which is a big deal for us.”
Snap is on the verge of net income profitability
“We're also on the verge of net income profitability, which is really exciting for us, especially as we invest really meaningfully in hardware and our specs glasses effort.”
Snap will launch Spectacles to consumers later this year
“Which is that specs are coming to consumers for the first time later this year. So after 12 years of investment in glasses and the next generation of computing and trying to make computing more human, it's actually coming.”
Large screen use cases will move to AR smart glasses first
“What I actually would estimate is that a lot of the large screen use cases are the first to move, right? So if you think about what's so interesting about specs, you can have a huge TV, right, with you almost anywhere. A giant screen with you almost anywhere. …”
The paradigm of manually operating computers all day is ending
“Like, I do think the paradigm that we all have to operate our computers all day long is going away, and I think that's hugely positive.”
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.”
Over two-thirds of new code at Snap is written by AI
“Now more than two-thirds of, you know, new code is written You know, by AI at Snap.”
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.”
Over one trillion selfies are captured on Snapchat annually
“Over a trillion selfies have been captured on Snapchat, right? And so I think when you know, in, in the, over the same period, and so when you.”
Platform value comes from close contacts, not total network size
“What Snapchat proved was actually that it's not about the size of your network or the number of people you can contact on your network, it's about who you actually talk to. And that tends to be a much smaller group than the total size of the Potential network,…”
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…”
Evan Spiegel fought hard for years to kill Snapchat streaks
“Streaks are one. Like, I did not like the idea of streaks, did not want to do it. I actually fought very hard to Killstreaks over the years. We've always been anti-metric at Snap.”
Snap builds the most sensitive Spectacles components in the US and UK
“We build,
You know, some of the most important components for specs in the U S and in the UK. So we've really thought about building some of the most IP sensitive components, some of the most sophisticated components in the U S and the UK, where we can sit th…”
Protecting hardware innovations is much easier than software in the AI era
“That is one thing I love about hardware. It's way easier to protect our innovations and our ideas compared to software, especially today in the age of AI.”
Xu: DoorDash is only platform saving drivers $1.40-$1.90 on gas
“And we're the only platform today to take care of Dashers when there is, you know, these increasing gas prices and making sure that, you know, we have their back and that we're actually trying to help them save a dollar 40 to a dollar 90 per gallon for Dashers…”
Xu: DoorDash cut COVID commissions 50%, costing over $100M
“Or in COVID, we were the only company to cut commissions by 50%. When we were not yet profitable as a company, that was an expense over a hundred million dollars.”
Xu: US food spend flipped from 80% groceries to 60% dining out
“It used to be that in the, you know, these are rough numbers, but in the 19 fifties when the government was measuring this, we would spend in this country, in America, maybe 75 to 80 cents on the dollar on groceries versus restaurants. In present day, you know…”
Xu: DoorDash's alert system warned NYPD of a Manhattan shooting first
“Within minutes of a Dasher seeing the shooter walk in to the building, you know, we have an alert system that doesn't just alert all Dasher's and consumers and merchants within that vicinity, but also all local law enforcement. And actually we were the first t…”
Staniszewski: Accents and emotion are emergent properties in ElevenLabs models
“And in our approach, effectively, you would give the model open-ended ability to select what those parameters should be. So it's not going to be British, Polish, Spanish, English speaker but the model will deduce them themselves. The same for other set of para…”
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.”
ElevenLabs expressive mode lets voice agents detect and match human emotions
“So today, finally, you can have both speed generation or entire voice agent experience With what we call expressive mode where the agent knows the emotions on the other side. So if the person is stressed, it can react and be reassuring and that's generating a …”
Staniszewski: Solving conversational voice AI inherently solves text agents too
“If you fix the voice agent, you'll have fixed text piece or like inherently as well.”