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 379 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: 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.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons currently operates Evernote with about 20 people
“And by the way, today Evernote, we run it with about 20 people.”
Grady and Lin asked Leone back 30 days after taking over Sequoia
“It turned out the rule of step down, Pat and Alfred took over. They weren't the kings I chose, and 30 days into it, they came to my house, and they said, would you like to come back?”
Helsing: AI took full control of Gripen fighter jet in dogfight test
“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Foroughi: AppLovin cut 40% of headcount while doubling revenue
“The business grew nearly a hundred percent year over year, and we fired about 40% of the team because I wanted to distill it down to these eight players.”
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: 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 voted against building USDC before it generated ~$800M in revenue
“There's actually been examples where I voted no on something and it turned out to be a massive success. And an example of that is like USDC, which is the stable coin. I actually, Embarrassed to admit, I voted no on that idea. Luckily, somebody else funded it o…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons generates roughly $3B in run rate revenue
“Currently we are roughly three billion dollars in run rate revenue.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons cut Evernote's headcount from 350 to around 50
“So it was roughly 350 team members. We made it substantially smaller. I think a year and a half after the acquisition closed, we were more around 50 to 60 team members.”
Ferrari: Evernote's product development is three times faster under Bending Spoons
“If you look at the, it's difficult to precisely quantify innovation, but if you look at the timeline of, say, product improvements, features, before we acquired it in the, say, two, three years before and after, it's night and day. I feel very comfortable sayi…”
Leone saw a startup with no product try to raise at $10B
“I came back from vacation over the weekend. I saw a memo. I won't tell you the name of a startup company that wants to raise money without anything at ten billion pre.”
Sequoia's investment in SpaceX has a shot at a $20B gain
“Yeah, it's SpaceX. Now, we haven't cashed out yet or whatever, but, you know, there's a shot of a twenty billion dollar gain or more, and so he ruined it for all of us.”
Leone hasn't lost a deal to a competitor in 30 years except on price
“You know, I really haven't lost an investment in 30 years in Silicon Valley. People have beaten me because of price, but I haven't lost otherwise.”
Reil: Banks grouped defense in the same bucket as porn and gambling
“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”
Altman: AI compute is becoming the most expensive infrastructure project ever
“Finance what is probably already, or at least rapidly becoming the most expensive infrastructure project in history.”
Altman: OpenAI faced widespread intellectual criticism over AGI and LLM focus
“I mean, we just got, you know, hammered in the, by like all of the intellectual giants of the field for saying that we were going after AGI. And then when we started really focusing on large language models, we got hammered again saying this is completely ridi…”
Altman: AI is currently solving novel math problems and making discoveries
“We're finally at the moment where AI is solving novel math problems. It is discovering other stuff. It is, you know, you can argue about how good or not, I would say not very good, but it is writing poetry.”
Kalanick: Post-departure NYC regulations turned Uber into an expensive taxi system
“And if people are taking Ubers today in New York and wondering why it's so expensive, And why it's getting more unreliable. It's because after I left Uber, they started passing a bunch of laws that are turning Uber into the taxi system. They've, they have a li…”
Kalanick: Chinese sovereign funds poured billions into global rivals to drain Uber
“And what happened is the sovereign wealth their sovereign wealth funds in China started pouring billions of dollars into my competitors, Uber's competitors in different regions, so that they would subsidize in those regions and drain my resources.”
Kalanick: Automating a gold mine increases annual output by 20%
“Because we can go to a gold mine right now, go to a gold mine CEO and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year. Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output.”
DHH: 2004 Basecamp version still generates millions in annual profit
“The version we launched in 2004, we stopped selling in 2010. 16 years ago. We still have customers on it. As an individual business, it's still making millions of dollars.”
DHH: Twenty out of sixty employees resigned after 2021 workplace politics ban
“We're a small company, 60 people so at the time, 20 took the offer. 20 left. Like, that's almost a third of the company that decided to leave in that moment”
DHH: Marc Andreessen sent a Frankfurt School syllabus during 37signals' 2021 crisis
“And what Margaret also did was he gave me a syllabus for understanding the history of wokeness, going all the way back to the sixties and beyond, that this didn't just come as lightning from a blue sky. This had an institutional grounding that was set in motio…”
Glyman: Ramp Was First to Unify Corporate Cards and Expense Systems
“It's part of why we're the first in the industry to go look at expenses and say, like, why are there two systems involved in buying every single thing you do?”
Ross: Marginal cost of software code is approaching zero
“What I'm seeing is that code is becoming almost free. It's, it, the marginal cost is approaching zero.”
Engineering teams using Devin ship software ten times faster
“And in practice, what it looks like is that teams use Devon to ship 10 times faster and to do 10 times more.”
Scott Wu confirms initial Devin launch videos were real, unstaged runs
“All of those like demos that we showed, you know, in, in, in our launch announcement were like actual runs of Devon that we had done ourselves and like run into and been like, holy shit, this is insane.”
Scott Wu admits AI agents did not work generally during early deployments
“Let's be real here, ok? Agents did not work generally, ok? And so, there was a lot of like, how do you make it work for you very specific?”
Stoute: Independent music has outgrown major labels in frontline new release market share
“So I guess the good news out of all of this, since we started United Masses, is that the independent music space, and there's a lot of us, have outgrown on the front line The major labels. So if you talk about new releases, market share, the independents have …”
Steve Jobs Was Excluded From Pixar's Braintrust Due to His Overwhelming Presence
“Steve had such a powerful voice that it didn't matter when he spoke,
Ed Catmull: He was going to have this extremely strong effect on the dynamics of the room, and he understood that.
Ed Catmull: So, it was the reason he didn't come.
Ed Catmull: I said, you…”
Steve Jobs Never Gave Film Notes That Others Had Not Already Voiced
“There was nothing that Steve ever said that had not been said by some of the, somebody else before in one of those meetings.”
Söderström: Internal surveys show users regret 60% of time on rival platforms
“Without naming which ones on many of the big platforms, people, people regretted almost 60% of the time they spent or more.”
Söderström: Steve Jobs tried to kill Spotify many times
“This is the Spotify story of access versus, versus ownership, for example, which is, by the way, why I would also love Steve Jobs to be around, but also not because, you know, he tried to kill us many times.”
Söderström: Apple internally gave Spotify six months to survive Beats acquisition
“That's what they literally said in their internal meetings. They gave us six months.”
ZMC Executed a Hostile Takeover of Take-Two Without Personal Capital
“The way we did this deal has never happened before, and I'm pretty certain it will never happen again, because we essentially did a hostile takeover with no money.”
Foroughi: AppLovin's $6B buyback generated $50B to $60B in value
“And so for the following 18 months, we ended up deploying somewhere around six billion dollars of buybacks of our own capital, and we leveraged some to buy back shares in the company. And over time, that ended up creating somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, s…”
AppLovin restructured a $1B Chinese buyout into debt to pass CFIUS
“We ended up doing it so that instead of their billion dollars being an equity investment for 70% where they would get control, which is what triggers this scrutiny, we ended up pivoting it to a billion dollar convertible note that if on conversion we pay them …”
Foroughi: AppLovin may capture over 50% of mobile gaming ad spend
“Probably, I don't know how big, but maybe even almost the over 50% of the marketing dollars in the space go back to our platform because the developers on the other side are seeing the best returns that they've ever seen in their existence on the dollars that …”