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 69 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Kalanick: Founders definitely should not raise capital from Benchmark Capital
“You definitely shouldn't raise from benchmark capital.”
Kalanick: Benchmark ran an activist war room creating weekly crises at Uber
“Benchmark was running a war room. They were an unspoken activist investor that was creating a once a week crisis.”
Dell: Elon Musk's greatest contribution is training engineers to build companies
“It's the most incredible contribution I think anyone has ever made to humanity. It's not just the company that he's built, but the engineers that he's trained that have gone on to build other great companies. It's like I said, he's the greatest technologist of…”
Glyman: OpenAI and Anthropic will pass $300B combined revenue in a year
“And if you play out what they and OpenAI, just the two labs, are on track to do in revenue and call it a year's time I think it'd be reasonably conservative at this point to say they're gonna pass more than three hundred billion dollars a year in revenue, whic…”
White Calls PFL, Bellator, and ONE Championship "Failing Companies"
“PFL, Bellator, One FC, many, many other failing companies.”
Armstrong: Gensler and Warren unlawfully tried to kill US crypto
“And so it turns out in the past, this ambiguity about where crypto assets set, you know, sit between the two federal regulators, that lack of clarity was really weaponized and by Gary Gensler, the former SEC chair, and Elizabeth Warren and people like that who…”
Armstrong: Elizabeth Warren is a socialist who wants government running financial services
“Well, ok, so Elizabeth Warren is you know, in my view, she's a socialist. She believes the government should be running all financial services.”
Mackey: Musk and Rockefeller are among the greatest heroes in history
“And somebody like Elon Musk, he gets a very, very, very tiny sliver of the value that he creates for the whole world. I mean, He's created, he and people like Rockefeller, they're lambasted as the villains when they are the greatest heroes that have ever, ever…”
Ferrari: Experience degrades capability when workers normalize low performance standards
“You can actually get worse through experience. If you're exposed to low standards, for example, of performance, you'll normalize those over time and you'll actually be a less capable team member than someone who has never been exposed to any standards and mayb…”
Ferrari: Promising employees should have far more work than feels comfortable
“Everybody at the company, certainly the people who have shown promise. They should have way more on their plate that then feels even remotely comfortable.”
Leone: Parents must inject misery into kids' lives to preserve their hunger
“I think you have to inject some misery in your kids' lives so they have that hunger. It can be fake because they know it, but you can't give them everything because otherwise they won't be hungry.”
Leone: Boards must honor signed term sheets over higher late offers
“A term sheet is not worth the paper it's written on, but once you sign it, Both sides, I think you have to honor it. You know, many times we're out, we're, I'm on the board of a company, and we signed a term sheet with an investor, and then three days later, s…”
Leone estimates that only 20% to 30% of VCs are competent
“Out of 10 venture folks, and I've said this, and I've taken Shifford, maybe 30% are incompetent. They don't know what they're doing. Another 40% I call them no ups, no damage, no anything. They nod, you know, they nod with a group and maybe 30% of fewer, maybe…”
Reil: The era of military tanks is probably over
“And so I think the area of tanks is probably over.”
Reil: Manned fighter jets will struggle against superhuman autonomous swarms
“Crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up Facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities, and it's not science fiction.”
Altman: AI safety advocates asking humans to surrender autonomy are anti-human
“I think there are some people in the AI field who effectively say we're going to give the world a cure to all disease and we're going to make stuff really cheap in exchange for people giving up their autonomy and impact over the future and power and also in th…”
Kalanick: Lyft remains smaller because Uber executed better on network efficiency
“This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of this, the thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes.”
Kalanick: Uber never passed anti-competitor regulations or donated to political campaigns
“We had never at Uber, we never
Got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor.
We never would do that.
That's just not how we rolled.
We never donated to a campaign.
Ever.
To try to get something passed.”
Kalanick: Elite founders are grandmasters; VCs are just enthusiasts checking in quarterly
“The way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a we…”
Kalanick: VCs reflexively attack struggling founders like lions hunting limping antelopes
“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on t…”
Kalanick: Only 10% of VCs "do no harm," just 1% are helpful
“10%. And then the one percent is helpful.”
Palmer Luckey was pushed out and fired from Facebook for supporting Trump
“This was when he was kind of persona non grata in tech and mainstream for supporting Trump and not supporting Hillary while he was at Facebook. So it was pretty soon after he was pushed out, fired for political beliefs at Facebook, which is kind of mind blowin…”
Traditional PR is dead; filtering corporate messages through intermediaries fails
“The key idea in the manifesto is that traditional PR as we know it is dead. Maybe you can see the body, but it doesn't have a pulse. And it's a good thing, because traditional PR meant that you would have to filter your message through somebody else's prism.”
Ovitz: AI music platforms Suno and Udio construct songs using copyrighted IP
“We've seen it, what's going on with Suno and Udio, where they're taking IP that other people own, even 10 seconds of it, and Constructing custom-made songs.”
DHH: Taking VC funding would have destroyed 37signals without Bezos's backing
“We could not have gotten Jeff's offer, and six months later, some VC would have given us a massive check that sounded super impressive, and it would have destroyed the business, and then we would have sold our independence, and we would have been fucking miser…”
DHH: 37signals offered six months severance to employees rejecting politics ban
“If you can't see yourself at a company where we're not going to discuss fucking Palestine during work hours with your random coworkers, we will pay you up to six months salary to go somewhere else.”
Ross: West Coast VCs act like lemmings, East Coast VCs think independently
“Well, the way I like to put it is typical, typical, not all, but typical West Coast VCs are more like Lemmings, and typical East Coast VCs all think that they're smarter than each other.”
Stoute: Labels Avoided Spotify Fan Data Deals to Preserve Power
“The record companies, I believe, never negotiated that when they had that leverage, because they didn't even want to have to share that information with the artist.”
Jack Welch Gutted GE and His Disciples Later Damaged Boeing
“It's split up into pieces. And it was completely fragile. Not robust because he gutted it of the future research. But the people that were there were hired and considerably valuable because they'd grown up in that system. Two of them which went on to become le…”
Söderström: Apple's aging senior leadership missed the shift to AI
“Maybe this is one of the challenges that Apple had with machine learning and AI. So on average, they were slightly too old to see that probably people in their org knew all about it. We're all over it. It was too late to see it. They should have, like, gotten …”
A Take-Two Competitor Once Faced 500 Sexual Harassment Claims
“So one of our competitors at one point had 500 sexual harassment claims at their company.”
White: Viacom Executive Philippe Dauman Threatened to Build a UFC Clone
“And then he tells us that he built the UFC, and if we don't like the offer he's making, he'll just build another one. That's literally what he said.”
White: Traditional Media Lost All Influence to Young Digital Creators
“The media does not have the influence anymore. They're gone. Nobody trusts them. You know, they're all full of shit. They're always, you know, lying and they don't have the trust of the people the way that they used to. These young kids are the influencers. Th…”
White: I Told a Sponsor to Drop Dead Over a Trump Video
“It started with, I posted a video supporting Trump on my social media. And they called and they said, you need to take that down. And I said, are you out of your fucking mind? Who the fuck are you to call me and tell me who to vote for? It's not coming down an…”
Foroughi: High cash-flow companies should buy back shares, not hoard cash
“I never believed in saving cash for a rainy day. I feel like I'm a big believer in what we're building. I believe in where we're going. So if I believe in the future, and we're a really high cash-generated business, We should always be buying back our shares.”
Spiegel: Meta needed Luxottica partnership to camouflage its unpopular brand
“I think Meta needed to partner with Luxottica because the Meta brand, I think, is not something that people want to put anywhere near their face. So I think I think that Meta really needed it. I think what's, what's challenging for Luxottica is they took like …”
Spiegel: Studies prove Snapchat boosts well-being unlike Instagram and TikTok
“What's fascinating is when Snapchat is studied separately from social media, there's study after study, independent studies that show that Snapchat makes a positive impact on people's friendships, on their wellbeing, that is fundamentally Different from social…”
Andreessen: Psychedelics Cause Stressed Founders to Find Peace and Quit
“We see at Silicon Valley where, you know, kind of there, these guys get under pressure and, you know, they kind of feel anxious or whatever, and they decide that, you know, somebody tells them about psychedelics and they try it and they kind of come out the ot…”
Andreessen: Century-old manager-led institutions are fundamentally collapsing
“What's happening is all the old edifices, all the old incumbent institutions in the last hundred years that are run by managers, they're all in some state of fundamental collapse. Like, they're all collapsing in, like, trust and credibility because they can't …”
Andreessen: 2009 legacy VC firms were lone wolves who disliked each other
“All of the sort of legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of lone wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not publicly known was, generally speaking, inside the firms, they didn't even like each oth…”
Armstrong: Members of Congress told me Warren asked Gensler to curtail crypto
“My understanding, this is kind of what other people in the Congress told me, is that she asked Gary Gensler to go hard on crypto and like try to really curtail it in the United States.”
Armstrong: Around 300 Coinbase employees staged a walkout over BLM stance
“This erupted in Slack and basically 300 employees did a walkout. In protest.”
Armstrong: Coinbase stays strictly apolitical unless an issue impacts crypto mission
“Outside of work, people can do whatever they want. You can go protest. You can be left or right or whatever. But just inside the workplace, we're not going to be political. We're just going to focus, unless it has to do with our mission, crypto and economic fr…”
Fried: Treating Startups as Financial Instruments for Exits Is 'Repellent'
“I think playing entrepreneur is like spinning up businesses all the time, making all sorts of stuff, and giving it a name, and giving it a logo, and trying to raise money, and coming up with valuations, and talking about all this stuff, and there's like nothin…”
Fried: Companies Should Settle Into Orbit Rather Than Pursuing Endless Growth
“You gotta get off the ground, and you gotta break free of gravity, but then there's a point where you actually just want to sit in orbit and sort of maintain. You want to be within a certain range and fluctuate a little bit up, a little bit down, but be in thi…”
Fried: Startup Stock Options and RSUs Are Largely Bullshit
“No options, no RSUs, no stock, no, like, any of that BS. I find almost all that to be pretty much BS, unless you're like a really well-established public company.”
Fried: Raising Venture Capital Eliminates Almost All Exit Options and Off-Ramps
“The moment they go raise money, they've cut off almost every option. They think they've expanded their experience and their opportunities, but they've cut off almost every possible off-ramp outcome because now they have to be in big business or they fail. That…”