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 233 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Roblox aims to capture 10 percent of the entire global gaming market
“We've said publicly, we want to get to 10% of global gaming on the platform.”
Xu: DoorDash started in-house autonomous vehicle development in 2019
“Actually, when we started the autonomous project, the autonomous vehicle project, we started with the belief that we did not have to build the vehicles. And in partnering with a lot of different companies We ultimately realized that nobody actually wanted to b…”
Xu conducted final engineering interviews while doing deliveries in his Honda
“On the engineering front, we looked for engineers who certainly were great at coding, but we looked for engineers who would be willing to do deliveries with us. In fact, the interview with me, if you're an engineer is the final round interview, was we would go…”
Armstrong: Coinbase spent $50M–$100M fighting the SEC
“I think the total amount we spent
On legal and all that was maybe in the 50 to a hundred million range as a result of that law.”
Coinbase requires pre-submitted town hall questions and excludes off-topic issues
“We had this culture of this open mic thing, but I realized that later we actually don't really do that. We just have people pre-submit questions. And if we think we take hard questions, but if they're like just way off topic or someone's pet issue, we just don…”
Coinbase uses internal VC pitch process where a single executive can greenlight projects
“Twice a year, any employees can come pitch and say, hey, I think we should be doing this, and I have the team to go do it... What we've tried to set up internally is we call these next bets, but you can come in and pitch. So each of the product group leaders h…”
Fried: 37signals Intentionally Avoids Enterprise Customers to Focus Exclusively on SMBs
“Our customers are small business owners, and I just, I don't care about enterprise customers. I don't want them. I like small, medium-sized businesses. They're more like me.”
Fried: 37signals Caps All Project Planning Horizons at Just Six Weeks
“So at our company, we typically think about six weeks in advance and that's about it. There's some occasional projects, maybe a few over the 27 years that we've done, that we needed to think further ahead. Like we just recently left the cloud, left AWS, and we…”
Fried: 37signals Sets Zero Sales, Revenue, or User Growth Targets
“We don't have revenue targets, except for like, I want to be profitable. I don't have sales targets, revenue targets, user targets. I don't have any of these things. We just do the best work we can.”
Fried: I Lack the Stamina and Hunger to Build Another Software Startup
“I wouldn't want to try to do this again, because I don't think I could. I don't think I could. And I think it's totally fair to admit, like, I don't think I'm good enough again to do what I did before. I don't have the stamina. I don't have the drive. I don't …”
Fried: 37signals Relies Exclusively on Gut Intuition Over User Testing and Focus Groups
“I go by gut. I go by intuition, whether it's a pricing or a product decision or a feature or a new product or a name or whatever it is. We don't test things. We don't do focus groups. I don't, we occasionally AB test for fun, but not like, cause it matters.”
Iovine: Apple's rigid structure prevented him from experimenting freely in music
“I couldn't just wake up in the morning and do whatever I wanted to do, because they're a giant company, and they don't want the, I'm in the music side of it, but they don't want the tail wagging the dog, you know, and I don't blame them, right, because I come …”
Lütke: Top engineers at Shopify can earn more than VPs
“In engineering, if you're insane, like, if you're a hundred times better than other people are in, in, in this discipline usually you can make more money than a than a vice president.”
Lütke: Shopify lets employees adjust cash vs equity compensation quarterly
“So we rebuild our compensation system to completely work the opposite of what everyone else does. We give people, here's your annual salary. Here's an internal system. You go in, you look at it. This is a number. Now you get sliders. You can say, how much do y…”
Lütke: Shopify executives must present annual conference talks on operational differentiation
“I require my executives to I mean, at least tell me, but actually do it. Go to a podcast, some international conference, and talk about how Shopify does. The thing the conference is about differently, and why that's better every year. If they don't have a good…”
Shopify deploys AI trained on Lütke's past reviews for mock meetings
“There's software that manages all this kind of thing. They can use an AI to preview what the transition will like, be like, because it's trained on all the other reviews I've ever done. So they can sort of mock do it and figure out what I will probably say. Th…”
Senra: I operate without a team because I do not trust anyone
“It's like, it makes sense why I don't have a team, because I don't fucking trust anybody.”
Dyson: Dyson Institute pays 170 undergraduate engineering students $45,000 annually
“Yes, there's tuition. We teach them two days a week. And they work with us three days. We pay them. They pay them 45,000 dollars a year. They have cars. They go on skiing holidays. Those are normal people. They're not students. They're in a student group. We h…”
Dyson refuses to sell motors to third parties despite lost profits
“It's not a good commercial decision that, by the way, the one I've taken. Because I could have a division that dealt with other people, supply matters to other people, which I'm sure would make money.”
Ovitz: Rigid VC guardrails are counterproductive when investing in creative talent
“I frankly invest off people, not off all these insane rules that a lot of my friends that are venture capitalists put up, these kind of
guardrails that they won't go outside of. I've never seen a guardrail I don't try to jump. And I think that's the worst thi…”
Jacobs requires a five-year lockup and backloaded vesting for executive equity
“And I give people tons of equity. But there's a catch. It could vest, but you can't sell it for five years, and most of it vests in the last two years.”
Ek: Gustav Söderström runs product at Spotify better than I do
“So what happened with Spotify is sort of against all the common wisdom and wealth, which is I don't really run product anymore. Because what happened was I got this guy called Gustav that you now met and he runs product. And he's actually way better than me at…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs runs on autonomous teams of under ten people
“To be honest, you know, and you started with this question, this is not too dissimilar from how I think about how we run 11 Labs today. It's very much like there's a focused research lab, there's research engineering on bringing that to the product work, and t…”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs refuses to build for knowledge work or coding
“We explicitly are not planning to touch any of the intelligence or knowledge work or coding, not our strength, not our domain”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs embeds forward deployed engineers in product, not GTM
“In our case, FDs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are part of the product team. They are deeply embedded on understanding what's the roadmap of the product.”
ElevenLabs operates as a no-title organization
“They also were very very much of no title organization, which we carry over at 11 Labs”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs has received three or four concrete acquisition offers
“Like concrete ones, three or four.”
Dell: Base Power is building a 100-megawatt battery fleet for CoServe
“So for CoServe Electric, for example, we have built them or in the process of building them a hundred megawatt and soon to be expanded fleet of batteries that they use in the same way that we do in the deregulated markets.”
Dell: Base Power signs 10-year 'megawatts as a service' utility contracts
“The reg business is, we are a vendor to the utilities. We build in these battery fleets, and then we sign ten-year contracts with them, and they pay us for that fleet over time. It's megawatts as a service.”
Dell: Base Power puts a physical turtle on the bottleneck employee's desk
“So the turtle is a literal physical turtle. Now there's actually a couple of them that goes on the desk of the person that is on critical path. That turtle can only be moved when critical path is resolved.”
Dell: Valor's Antonio Gracias focuses every board conversation solely on constraints
“The first year or two of working with Antonio, basically every conversation I had with him, and still to this day, this is, you know, the main focus of all of our conversations, every conversation was the same. Hey Antonio, how's it going? Good, how are you? W…”
Dell: Base Power co-founders never discuss good news in weekly strategy meetings
“Justin and I, every Sunday, you know, our one-on-ones are on Sundays, and we have these kind of strategy conversations on Sundays, and we don't ever talk about what's going well.”
Leone admits to feeling miserable three months into his return to Sequoia
“I'm quite miserable at Sequoia right now, not because of what anybody else does, because I feel that three months into it, I'm really good for nothing.”
Sequoia closed its Instagram investment just days before the Facebook acquisition
“We closed the investment in Instagram on a Thursday, and he sold it on a Sunday. Great IR, but we didn't make any money, really.”
Leone: David Vélez is my only founder friend; others are strictly business
“Well, you know, I think the closest friend I have as a founder is Velez. All the other founders are pure business. I don't socialize with spouses or anything with any of my, with any of the founders.”
Reil: Helsing manufactures up to 3,000 HX-2 strike drones monthly
“We had to go from dozens of HX-II per month to a baseline of 1000, and it can now search to In the small factory that we have to 3000 a month”
Altman: I Still Manually Do Email and Tasks Despite Having Codex
“The thing to me that feels most psychologically inconsistent about myself is that I have for 20 years been using computers the same way. I now have A magic thing called codex. So do you, so does everybody. That means I should completely be using my computer in…”
Altman: Paul Graham and Peter Thiel are sounding boards for non-obvious problems
“In, in terms of questions of just, like, you know, business and the world, for a long time in my career, Paul Graham and Peter Thiel have been two of the people that I have learned the most from about lots of different phases of my career and are still the two…”
Ovitz consulted for Steve Jobs on Pixar during its earliest days
“I consulted for years for him on Pixar when he first had the idea, and it was some of the best times I ever had because he's whip smart, unbelievable memory, totally unstoppable with an idea,”
DHH: 37signals promises to maintain legacy software products indefinitely
“And this is one of the promises we've made to the customers we have. We're going to keep it until the end of the internet. That's our moniker for this. Either that, or as long as we're in business. Whatever comes first.”
DHH: 37signals has no board or investors directing founders
“Jason and I have structured our entire business around that concept of pure independence. We don't have any investors who get to tell us what to do. We don't have a board to tell us what to do.”
DHH: 37signals still pays Jeff Bezos quarterly dividends on his early investment
“Like we've given him his money back many, many, many times over, and he still owns the plot. And every quarter or so we send him another check. Here's your dividends. And we keep on doing that.”
Zalaznick: Major Food Group spent over $40M restoring Seagram Building restaurants
“We spent about 40 plus million dollars.”
Eric Glyman plans to work on Ramp for his entire life
“I want this to be the last company I ever work on. And I want to work on this for the rest of my life.”