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 1,156 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
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…”
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…”
Iovine: Music streaming services risk obsolescence by restricting artist communication
“So the streaming services, to me, are minutes away from being obsolete because of that. You can't rub against the artist like that. You just can't. You gotta give them what they want. They're driving this ship.”
Iovine: AI will never write a song like Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind'
“AI will never be able to write Blown in the Wind by Bob Dylan. Not in anyone who's listening to this, or in my lifetime, for sure.”
Iovine: Brilliant creators combine innate talent with early childhood trauma
“Well, to be really brilliant, I call it, there has to be a bend in the pipe. You know, whether it's through trauma or through your interpretation of yourself, of how that could happen... It's usually trauma from when they were younger... You put that trauma, c…”
Lütke: Staying private sequesters growth gains to accredited investors
“All these accredited investors accredited investor laws and stuff like this all they do is, like, make it so that
Like, when you're rich, you can invest in private company stock.
And when you're not, you can't.
And, well, where are the returns?
Like, of co…”
Mackey: Founders Must Never Give Up Control to VCs
“I always tell young entrepreneurs, don't give up control of your business to the VCs. They may talk a good game, but they're not fundamentally aligned with you.”
Dyson: Experienced hires from existing companies bring habits that resist change
“The older you get, the more you try to apply your experience. And if you've come from an existing company, we may have picked up bad habits. I'm not saying we don't have bad habits at Dyson, but I'm saying you picked up the habits of that company, which may no…”
Dyson claims he learned absolutely nothing from his £500M EV failure
“One of the, everybody said, you know, you must have learned a lot from that experience, and the answer is I learned absolutely nothing.”
Staniszewski: Deploying forward deployed engineers without product feedback loops equals services
“And I feel like the second part is always frequently missed was like first, okay, if these are, you know, doing effectively a lot of the hard integration work to solve the problem, but if you don't do the second step of how you actually learn the expertise and…”
Staniszewski predicts conversational AI will deliver human-like dialogue within 12 months
“So, so I think 12 months from now, what will happen is, is similar as we are speaking. It's, I think the technology will be able to understand us at an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation and deliver, deliver…”
Dell: US electricity demand CAGR will jump 5x to 10%
“Over the last 20 years, electricity demand has gone at roughly a two percent compounded annual growth grade, and, you know, we think it'll go to, you know, somewhere on the order of 10%, which is obviously a five hex, which on a base as large as energy is real…”
Dell: Next 50 years of energy defined by solar, batteries, and software
“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”
Dell: AI will soon be the world's largest consumer of electricity
“And it's now the fastest growing and soon going to be the largest consumer of electricity in the world. And its name is AI.”
Dell: Utility-scale batteries face fundamental interconnection and transmission constraints
“They're fundamentally constrained really by two things. One is interconnection capacity, so there's not enough places on the grid to go put these big shipping containers, and the second is transmission congestion.”
Dell: Residential battery companies are focused on the wrong business model
“The distributed architecture is the answer. And all the companies that are around that problem, they're focused on the wrong business model. They're focused on high margin upfront sales.”
Dell: Regulated utilities have no incentive to innovate, only grow rate base
“There's no financial incentive for them to come with new technology. Their only financial incentive is to go increase the size of the rate base.”
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: Every VC makes the mistake of selling winners too early
“Every venture investor has made the mistake of selling to early their winners, every single venture investors, because if you look at the great companies, they've compounded 20 years after the IPO.”
Leone: Companies must retain founders because losing them destroys company soul
“And what the trick is, is to retain that founder in a company forever if you can, and for as long as possible. Because once you lose that founder, you do lose the soul of the company.”
Leone: Meta might not exist today without its Instagram acquisition
“Think of what Meta would be Without Instagram. That company might be gone.”
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: 100,000 strike drones would destroy 3,000 invading tanks within hours
“The deterrence that you get out of having a very large number of strike drones at your border, I think is, is pretty is pretty strong, and the reason is that if you turn up with tanks on the other side, let's say you turn up with 3000 tanks, 100,000 strike dro…”
Reil: Future warfare will be autonomous machine battles where humans cannot survive
“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”
Reil: Sending humans into battle will become unethical, forcing ground robot adoption
“And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where …”
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.”
Reil: Europe lacks breakout companies because founders lack aggression
“And then we sadly have a continent where we don't have breakout companies because people just lack the aggression.”
Reil: Social media commentary is entirely worthless and net negative
“I think commentary is entirely worthless and it has almost, it has no positive contribution. The only thing that it does is It I think it drags some people down so it has a net negative benefit, and it obviously is, is encouraged through you know, the way the …”
Altman: Better AI will strengthen non-tech businesses offering authentic experiences
“The better AI gets, the more some businesses that have nothing to do with AI, I think will be harder to compete with because we'll really want these like authentic non-technological experiences, or we'll care more about Sports teams or whatever. So no, not, no…”
Altman: I was wrong to expect immediate software disruption after GPT-4
“When we got to GBT four, which was back in 20, 23, I think that very quickly after that, there was going to be much more disruption in software business being up for grabs right, right away than turned out to be. And the thing that I think I was wrong about a …”
Altman: AI Is Currently in Its Pre-iPhone Era
“The phase that we're in now reminds me of like smartphones before the iPhone. I was like an early adopter. I had like a Palm Trio in, you know, 2003 or four or whatever. You ever had a sidekick? I never had a sidekick. I thought they were super cool. I wanted …”
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 scientific discovery will be more important than task automation
“Like, I think this is, I think this will be one of the most important areas, even more important than automation of other tasks that AI can do just to help us understand more things.”
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.”
Altman: Superintelligence will not fundamentally alter human social wiring
“This is why I think, like, the world is, on the whole, not going to be that different. Even with superintelligence, like, people are still going to be very fundamentally wired to care about other people, to want to be around other people to interact with other…”
Altman: The two biggest AI risks are control loss and centralized power
“Maybe the two big risks that I'm most worried about with AI, which are a little bit in tension. One is like a loss of control where, you know, AI somehow just becomes too powerful in a way that we can't guarantee the control we want. And the other is power get…”
Altman: Public deployment and customer feedback is how you make AI safe
“The way you do things is to put things out into the world, get feedback from real customers, see where they break, see where they don't break. That is the way you make a good product. That is also the way you make a safe product.”
Altman: AI will drive the greatest small-business creation boom in history
“And we are about to see the greatest boom in people starting smaller businesses that we have ever seen. I think AI is empowering that.”
Altman: OpenAI Should Be a Platform Company Rather Than a Product Company
“Actually, I think we should be more of a platform company than a product company.”
Altman: OpenAI Will Be Best Across the Entire Cost-Performance Curve
“At every point on the cost curve, cost performance curve, we will be the best.”
Altman: OpenAI Killed Its Web Browser 'Atlas' to Refocus Talent
“We killed our web browser called Atlas, which, again, I think was a great product, it was the best web browser, but not as important for us to focus on as somewhere else we could put that talent.”
Altman: OpenAI would not have been possible without YC's ecosystem changes
“So if we, you know, ran the clock back to 2000 four and then projected technology forward to 2016 but not anything else about the shape of
Startup ecosystem, what it meant to be an entrepreneur, how capital flowed, all of the, you know, who got to run companie…”
Kalanick: Atoms builds specialized industry robots, not general humanoid robots
“It's I wouldn't call myself anti-humanoid. It's just what we're doing is not that. It's specialized robotics that it's not like we make robotics and anybody can have some. It's more like robotics and AI that go after an industry, one industry at a time.”