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 365 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
Armstrong: NewLimit successfully reprogrammed human cells to restore function
“We've demonstrated successfully programming human cells for the first time to restore function.”
Fried: Moving 37signals Off the Cloud Will Save Roughly $10 Million
“David wrote this great article about like getting off the cloud. It's going to save us something like ten million bucks and whatever it is.”
Iovine: Music streaming economics broke by copying Apple's 70/30 download split
“If you look at those deals are reflective of the iTunes download market, 70, 30. That was the same business as the download market. So they just copied that, which is not a great bit model for that. Why? Because you have Not enough money in the streaming servi…”
Iovine: Spotify is worth $150B, double the entire record industry combined
“Of course, Spotify is worth a hundred and fifty billion, and the entire record industry is worth half that together.”
Lütke: Shopify Canceled 60% of Projects and Replaced Entire Executive Suite
“The moment I went through absolutely every project I did myself, took like many, like, 16 hour days, I canceled probably 60% of the projects, and over the course of the year, I turned over every one of my executives.”
Lütke: Promoting acquired startup founders to executive roles all succeeded
“I asked a lot of the founders to become my executives. In some cases, I took people from individual contributors in an engineering team and put them in charge of a very large thing. And you know what? At all, every one of those things worked.”
Lütke: Trendy, bloated tech stacks drove several Shopify merchants out of business
“Some of our customers went out of business because they got talked, they talked themselves into their own stack. They hired a CTO who brought in their own team. They used a set of technologies that they wanted to use because they are currently the in thing tha…”
VCs rejected Dyson's pitch, preferring to invest in fast food instead
“I went to various venture capitalists, the sort of people who ought to lend to startups, and the kind of response I got was well, you know, it's not a very interesting area. We're investing in restaurants, fast food restaurants at the moment, or we're not lend…”
Graves: Raising Cane's Is Valued at Over $20 Billion on 20x EBITDA
“We're trading on, not trading, we don't trade, but we're valued on over 20 times EBITDA, those company restaurants. Go into that. So the profitability that comes into all of it gets on that, that higher multiple. That's why we have the twenty billion plus valu…”
Staniszewski claims ElevenLabs built the first human-quality speech model in 2022
“Built all the audio models, starting with model to produce speech text to speech model. And that was that 20, 20 to the first model that could finally cross that human like quality.”
Staniszewski: Voice agents extract far more inbound lead data than web forms
“One, people are both making their things easier. They enjoy it more, but two, they leave a lot more information than they ever would for the dropdown form. They tell us so many about the problems, about the wider set of use cases, so we can connect them better…”
Leone slept in his car for a week after making Sequoia partner
“I remember when I was made a partner at Sequoia, I was down to zero money. I actually, I have never said that to anybody, but there was a time in my first month where I became a partner that I was homeless. I slept in my car for a week. I showered at 3000 Sand…”
Reil: AI algorithms already enable robust GPS-free drone navigation on frontlines
“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”
Reil: Helsing won a program of record 28 months after founding
“And this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program off record.”
Altman: ChatGPT has reached one billion users in under four years
“ChatGPT has only been out, like, less than four years. A billion people use it.”
Kalanick: Uber spent tens of millions monthly fighting Didi in China
“So we were spending, let's say tens of millions of dollars a month fighting DD in all these cities.”
Kalanick: Uber's peak fundraising involved five simultaneous rooms tiered by check size
“Five rooms, 12 hours, one week... So I'm in the two hundred fifty million dollar check or over a room. Then there's like a hundred million dollar room and a fifty million dollar room and a twenty five million dollar room. And there'll be a guy in the twenty-fi…”
Malka: AI remains largely disconnected from money and financial flows
“Like, today, token factories don't touch money that much. Money's been outside of AI, and we're on year four or five. It's funny, because money's supposed to be one of the first, most fungible things that should be playing the game, and it's not.”
Malka: OnePay powers all mobile payments and credit products at Walmart
“If you want to pay with your phone today, the only way to pay at Walmart is with OnePay. If you want to have a debit card, it's the only way you want to loan from Klarna. It goes through OnePay. If you want an installment loan, you want a credit card, it goes …”
DHH: Shopify Uses Autonomous AI Agents to Complete Work and Open PRs
“River, the current system that they have for you. Employing agents to do work and open PRs and everything. Like, everyone is working towards that. Shopify is already there”
Glyman: Ramp powers over 3% of US corporate card transactions
“Over three percent of all of the corporate card transactions in the United States are powered by ramp, and nearly one percent of all the corporate transactions are running through ramp.”
Ross: Jensen Huang never holds private one-on-one meetings at NVIDIA
“There is no circumstance at NVIDIA where there, where Jensen has one-on-ones with people and tells them one thing.”
Ross: Porting AlphaGo to TPUs jumped its ELO by hundreds of points
“AlphaGo running on GPUs had an ELO score of about 3200. Lease it all was about 35, 35 50. And I might be getting the first digit wrong. It might be 2000 instead of 3000. But like, you know, it was more than 200. And then when put on on TPUs, it actually went t…”
Ross: AlphaGo running on GPUs never found Move 37
“In the second game, there was this famous move called move 37, which was creative. It was original. It actually wasn't completely original. It was a one in 10,000 game move. It had been in the canon of games that we're trained on. But when we went back and pla…”
Ross: GitHub CEO asked Groq for LPUs amid GPU shortages
“When LLMs first started to become a thing, I remember getting a phone call from the CEO of GitHub basically saying, I need a bunch of GPUs. We've now gotten LLMs to be able to do code completion, even though, you know, we're part of Microsoft and everything yo…”
Ross: 80% of Groq employees took salary cuts to statutory minimums
“80% of the employees participated. And I think about half went to the statutory minimum salary by law. And remember, engineers get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars. These folks like cut their salary down to like 50, 60,000 dollars, whatever the statutory …”
Devin scored 13 percent on SWE-bench against a 3 percent baseline
“At the time the best known was like Three or four percent or something like that, but obviously, yeah, 13% still means you fail, you know, 87% of the time.”
Stoute: Nike missed lifestyle footwear by focusing strictly on performance
“What was clear was Nike wasn't doing lifestyle at that time. They just thought, like, Just Do It was all about athletes and performance, so what I was trying to do was tap into the truth, which was people were wearing sneakers, Not to perform at all. Just so i…”
LeBron James rejected a $10M Reebok signing bonus in high school
“His wife wrote a personal check for ten million dollars, and the driver, when we landed, had the check. We went to the meeting, And Paul says, LeBron, I know, you know, a hundred million dollars, you know, Adidas is gonna offer that when you go see them next, …”
Stoute: Ryan Coogler negotiated an unprecedented rights reversion deal with Warner for 'Sinners'
“The rights of that movie reverts back to him. So what he did when he negotiated his deal with Warner to put out Sinners, which he wrote and directed, was that he would only put it with a studio that would allow him to get the rights back in a certain period of…”
Stoute: Jay-Z wrote Snoop Dogg's parts on 'Still D.R.E.'
“Every line Snoop says in the hook is fucking Jay wrote. I was like, this guy's different. He wrote Snoop's parts on that song.”
Steve Jobs Fired Two Pixar Board Members for Never Disagreeing
“In that 10 year period, Steve fired two members of the board of directors at Pixar. The reason he fired them was that they never disagreed, and he said, if they don't disagree with me, then they aren't bringing any value to the company.”
Catmull: Steve Jobs acted as Pixar's outside corrective force
“We had to get another outside force, and the outside force was Steve Jobs.”
Catmull: Michael Eisner testified before Congress without understanding digital ripping
“Michael Eisner was testifying against without knowing what the term actually meant. So it was upsetting to Steve.”
Steve Jobs Considered Pixar's Initial Disney Contract His Worst Deal Ever
“Steve walked away feeling like it was one of the worst deal he's ever struck.”
Catmull: Jobs refused to renew Pixar deal while Eisner ran Disney
“Michael Eisner was still the CEO, and he would not have continued with Michael Eisner. So, since we were getting into the contract, he started discussions with other studios which would mean, you know, them doing the distribution.”
Bob Iger Won Steve Jobs Over by Admitting Disney's Weak Hand
“Bob Iger starts the conversation by saying, I've got a crappy hand, can we talk? And for him, it's like, that's a show of honesty that's unusual.
David Senra: Usually you don't start a negotiation by saying, hey, other party, you have all the leverage here.
…”
Catmull: Steve Jobs did not believe Pixar's success was solely his doing
“No. I think some people think he did, and I, that was interesting there, but no, he didn't. He was very, we talked about this. He was very clear about it. Like any project, you know, when you work on something, there are a lot of people around that are working…”
Söderström: New Co-CEOs completely changed management style from Daniel Ek
“We actually changed completely how we run the company from the way Daniel runs it.”
Ivanka Trump: 40% of US produce is plowed under for cosmetic reasons
“Planet Harvest, which I co-founded with my good friend, Melissa Ackerman, that's helping find use for the 40% of fruits and vegetables we grow in this country every single year that don't even make it out of the field. They get plowed under because they don't …”
Chobani sources all yogurt fruit from Ivanka Trump's Planet Harvest venture
“So companies from Chobani, now all of the fruit that we find in their beautiful yogurt products and smoothies, It's all sourced by Planet Harvest from small and medium farmers. That would have been a hundred percent waste. It would have been tilled under.”
Video Games Retain the Profitable Studio System Abandoned by Hollywood
“Video games to this day is a studio system. In success, you obviously pay your creative people, and we are, Incredibly generous in the way that we compensate our creative people for success, but the company also has an opportunity to create a return.”
BMG Sold Its Take-Two Stake for $14M Right Before GTA Released
“So we sell the stock in the open market for, wait for it, fourteen million dollars. So a month later, this public company launches the first property that we had completed into the market.”
Zelnick Won an 88% Shareholder Vote to Take Over Take-Two
“The general counsel comes into the meeting room that we're in, and he says, well, we don't have the final vote, but we have a provisional vote. You have 88%. He said, so will you accept that, or do you want us to keep counting? I said, we'll accept that. And t…”
White: Early UFC Was Banned From Pay-Per-View While Porn Was Allowed
“At that time it wasn't allowed on pay-per-view. You as a grown adult didn't have the right to purchase it on pay-per-view porn. Was on pay-per-view. Okay. But the UFC was not allowed on pay-per-view.”
White: The Ellison Family Aggressively Snatched UFC Rights From Netflix
“We were talking to them the whole time, and you know, what an incredible business they've built, and but the Ellisons are aggressive guys, you know, they're aggressive guys. Obviously, financially, you know, powerful, And at literally the half yard line, they …”