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 432 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
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?”
Glyman: AI tooling will reduce functional sub-specialization in companies
“In a world where, you know, someone who develops the product can use technologies that helps them sell more effectively, that helps them track That helps them track outreach, that helps them write with a better pitch on the first go, and these are real tools t…”
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.”
Scott Wu predicts humans will soon stop interacting directly with code
“We're not always, I mean, we're not gonna be interacting with code for that much longer, you know, or programs might not be the right, like level of abstraction, but I think what is always true probably is that it will be the human computer interface.”
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 predicts intent-to-execution AI development will be solved in five years
“But I honestly, I mean, I think we'll have solved most of that over the next five years or so.”
Scott Wu predicts AI systems will eventually work unassisted for a year
“And yeah, I think that's true, and I think we will get there.”
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: A direct-to-fan creator data platform will emerge within three years
“The next evolution of this in the next three years, I have to be able to go direct, and I have to be able to collect that fan data. I want to send out the newsletter. I want to send out the fan, the sort of correspondence. Like, it's the platform you own. I no…”
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.”
White: TKO Will Build the Biggest Combat Sports Company in History
“We're gonna build The biggest combat sports company to ever exist. And that will probably ever exist. That's my goal in the next 10 years.”
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 …”
Foroughi: Well over 80% of AppLovin's code is written by LLMs
“Over, I think it was about a year and a half ago, over 80% of our code was LLM written, and now it's much higher than that”
Baszucki: Roblox will develop the best AI safety tech across text and voice
“Like I believe we will end up with the best AI tech for text, for voice, maybe for video, doing a wide range of safety things, either monitoring for critical harms, Flagging, adjusting, all of that.”
Baszucki: Money flowing to Roblox creators will increase despite AI concerns
“The thing we've said is we believe that money flowing to creators is going to increase, not decrease”
Spiegel: More Selfies Are Taken on Snapchat Than on iPhone in Total
“The, you know, I think there are more selfies taken on Snapchat than on iPhone in total, right? Which is a crazy stat.”
Spiegel expects companies to adopt flatter structures and wider spans of control
“Yeah, and I think, you know, generally speaking, I would expect the world to move towards flatter structures and much larger spans of control because like the communication and organization tax today is like night and day what it was 20 or 30 years ago. Like, …”
Spiegel: Snap funded 12 years of smart glasses R&D without VC patience
“What's very unique about Snapchat is we've been able to do that now for, you know, we've invested in glasses for 12 years. We've been able to very consistently invest in a way that no VC would ever in a million years support.”
Senra: Wolt Founder Passed on a $1B Term Sheet to Sell to DoorDash
“If I remember the number correctly, he was getting like a bill, he had the ability to raise another fresh billion dollars of capital. Yeah. And he was looking at the term sheet, thinking about signing it, and then he said, involuntarily, something came out of …”
Andreessen: AI will probably produce more single-person companies
“But like, AI, there will probably be more, there will probably be more like single person companies, you know, from here on out.”
Armstrong: Coinbase paid zero fines and won SEC lawsuit
“Oh, and I should mention we won that case. It was, so we didn't pay a single dollars, a single dollar in fines. We didn't have to change a single thing about the company. The judge Actually, the SEC withdrew it under this new administration, and several judges…”
Armstrong: Five percent of Coinbase staff took exit package after blog post
“We put out the post, and I said, anybody who's not aligned with this new direction, we'll give you a good severance package. You can fill out this form and accept it by Friday or something. And five percent of the company took the exit package.”
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.”
Iovine: AI will improve music without thwarting top creative talents
“AI is gonna make music better. AI is not gonna thwart great people. There will always be the next Billie Eilish. There will always be the next Kendrick Lamar. There will always be the next great talent.”
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…”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons received 800,000 job applications and hired under 300
“We got 800,000 job applications last year. We hired fewer than 300 people.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons has never been outbid on an acquisition in five years
“I don't believe to this day that we have ever been outbid. I don't remember a single case, at least not in the last five years in which we put forth an offer and then the seller sold to someone else.”
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…”
Dell: In year 30 Base Power will almost certainly make cells
“In year 30, it almost certainly will.”
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…”