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
Langley: Flock Scaled First $20M–$40M ARR Solely Through Local TV News
“We might be the only company that for the first, let's call it, 20 or 30, forty million of ARR, strictly driven off of five o'clock news. That was our only growth channel.”
Langley: Flock covers over 6,000 cities and 50% of US population
“Yeah, so it's just over 6000 cities. So it's like well north of 50% of America that's covered by Flock.”
Langley: Flock is deployed in every major US city except Manhattan
“So there's about 17,000 cities in the U.S., and we have all the big ones outside of Manhattan at this point.”
Langley: Flock Safety reached $500M in ARR in seven years
“And then, you know, the business has gone from zero to, you know, about five hundred million in ARR in the last seven years, building cameras, drones, and selling it to the government, which is like three strikes are out.”
Langley: Stolen vehicles take 24 hours to reach the FBI database
“They will immediately put it in the Bay Area Flock hotlist immediately. It will take 24 hours to make it to the FBI hotlist. And that's a, you know, CSV file that gets sent around on FTP servers across the US.”
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: Federal law prevents police from shooting down criminal drones
“And then legally, even to today, law enforcement is not allowed to engage that drone. They can't take it down. It's FAA airspace. It's not law enforcement airspace.”
Langley: Tech sophistication for policing should scale with crime severity
“The framework that we use is, I don't know how you land this, is that the severity of a crime should be commiserate with the sophistication of technology.”
Langley: US crime rate is down and will continue falling
“It is down. I think it'll continue to go down.”
Langley: Oakland crime rose when San Francisco started adopting Flock Safety
“It's like when San Francisco started adopting Flock, Oakland crime went up. So then Oakland needed to adopt Flock.”
Langley: Lowe's retail shrink dropped an order of magnitude with Flock
“But like, you look at some of our partners like a Lowe's, you know, their shrink has gone down order of magnitude. It's not exactly, it's not really a problem anymore.”
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: Most towns using Flock drones eliminate vehicular police pursuits
“So for most of our towns that have adopted our drone program, they end pursuits. They don't pursue anymore. Send the drone.”
Langley: Flock Safety will generate hundreds of millions in operating cashflow this year
“Like we'll generate free cashflow, hundreds of millions of dollars of operating cashflow this year.”
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: Law enforcement customers do not regularly audit surveillance usage without mandates
“Not enough of our customers audit themselves on a regular basis. We can build software to make that easier, but we need to be pushed to do that. It was like, customers don't want it. They need to be told to do it.”
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.”
Flock Drones Cross a 30-Square-Mile Radius in Under One Minute
“Our average drone can cover a 30 square mile radius and get there within under a minute.”
Pope: The best AI inference chip is also a great training chip
“I think the best inference chip today will be a train, a really good training chip as well.”
Pope: MatX combines SRAM and HBM for cheap, low-latency AI chips
“It is actually possible to do both in the same chip. You, it's kind of an obvious thing. You say you take the HPM, you take the SRAM, put them together in the same chip, you put the weights in SRAM, and you put the all of the inference data in HPM. That is wha…”
Pope: Mixture of experts maps well to systolic arrays, attention does not
“The mixture of expert layer maps really well, but the attention does not.”
Pope: MatX splits large systolic arrays without sacrificing efficiency
“Take a really large systolic array, but have a way to split it up into pieces without losing efficiency. So sort of that is the core of the design for us.”
Pope: Chip tape-outs cost $30M and fail 50% of the time
“The ideal, which companies tend to hit about 50% of the time is that your first tape out costs like thirty million dollars your first... The ideal is that your first tape out is actually, is your production thing. So you do a tape out, you make maybe a thousan…”
Pope: AI labs apply RL to software code, not chip architecture
“Models are extremely good at Rust and Python. They've done a lot of RL on them. They have not done as much RL on Verilog. They've done almost none on, okay, write, write me a markdown file that describes a chip architecture.”
Stripe processes $1.4 trillion in 2024 payment volume, up 38%
“Businesses on Stripe generated 1.4 trillion in total payment volume in 2024, up 38% from the prior year and reaching a scale equivalent to around 1.3% of global GDP.”
Collison: 2025 AI agent startup launches on Stripe will eclipse 2024's 700+
“More than 700 AI agent startups launched on Stripe last year, a figure that we expect will be substantially eclipsed by the total in 2025.”
Collison: Stripe reached $1.9T in volume in 2025, up 34%
“Last year, businesses running on Stripe generated 1.9 trillion in total volume, up 34% from 24, an equivalent to roughly 1.6% of global GDP.”
Collison: Tech and data center capex drove nearly half of 2025 US GDP growth
“Economy-wide, demand for software, computers, and data center investment drove nearly half of all U.S. GDP growth in 2025, and will likely soon be a majority of all U.S. Growth.”
Collison: Startups reaching $10M ARR in 3 months doubled in Stripe's 2025 cohort
“The number of companies reaching ten million in ARR within three months of launch was double that of the 24 cohort.”
Collison: 2025 stablecoin payment volume doubled to $400B, 60% B2B
“In 25, the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously and is now 50% down from October, but stablecoin payments volume doubled to around 400,000,000,060 percent of which is estimated to represent B to B payments.”
Collison: Klarna is the first bank to launch a stablecoin on Tempo
“Klarna, whose CEO was once a self-proclaimed crypto skeptic, became the first bank to launch a stablecoin, Klarna USD, on the Tempo testnet, using Bridge's open issuance to facilitate faster and cheaper cross-border settlement.”
Collison: US small business loan approvals fell to 41% in 2025
“Only 41% of small business loan applications were approved in the US last year, down from 50% in 2015.”
Collison: Stripe Capital recipients grew 27 percentage points faster over one year
“Businesses that received and accepted capital offers grew, on average, 27 percentage points faster over the following year than the otherwise equivalent businesses who didn't.”
Glyman: Ramp surpassed $1 billion in annual revenue in six years
“You know, I think by the time we were
You know, six years and change.
The company had passed over a billion a year in revenue.”
Glyman: Non-card products will comprise majority of Ramp business by year-end
“I think by the end of this year you know, the second, third, fourth, fifth lines of business will comprise you know, in aggregate the majority of Ramp's business.”
Glyman: Ramp AI agent reviews expenses with over 99% accuracy
“Now you can have an agent functionally that does that, that takes that aspect of the job and so it has access to the full set of data that you, that, that you would, all the transaction related metadata, the receipt data, the timing data, the policy data, it t…”
Collison: B2B payments need a DNS-style central clearinghouse for bank accounts
“If you looked at the bill pay system from the outside, you would say, we should have DNS for companies.
So rather than a company
Like, sending you their bank account details.
You should, like, look them up in some central clearinghouse, and that way you confir…”
Rampell: Nobody is going to replace or get rid of Workday
“So, like, Workday, I think is, like, nobody's gonna get rid of Workday.”
Glyman: Ramp powers over 2% of US business card transactions
“I believe today, ramp powers more than two percent of all corporate and small business card transactions in the United States, which is amazing for a business that, you know, ah, the product you couldn't even sign up for it six years ago.”
Thompson: In algorithmic media, absolute volume of good content beats hit rate
“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, and what matters is absolute numbers. So it is better to have .one percent of your content is good if your content is like in the billions or trillions, as opposed to, oh, …”
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: TSMC cut capex for two years following ChatGPT's release
“ChatGPT comes out. Every hyperscaler starts investing like crazy. What does TSMC do? They actually decreased their capex year over year, two years in a row. They did, they, there was no market response from TSMC to the ChatGPT moment.”
Ben Thompson: Shared experiences and live events will appreciate under AI
“Things that are common experiences are going to be more and more valuable. Common content, common classroom time, live events, like shared experiences, because anything that's individualized is just going to be completely swallowed.”