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 1,220 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
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.”
Kalanick: Politicians only allow regulatory progress under threat of disruption
“And the only way to get progress In a democracy is for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat. When there is a threat of disruption or instability is the only time you'll get progress in Western democracy.”
Kalanick: Well-funded challengers can force market leaders to burn cash
“Anybody who's a small player in a market, Has a natural advantage if they're well-funded is that you can gain market share very quickly and you can force the big guy to burn money.”
Kalanick: Dominant platforms crush rivals using targeted driver sign-up bonuses
“The other way where there's asymmetric going the other way is recruiting drivers. So for instance, I could give subsidies to drivers. If I'm the big guy, I can give subsidies to drivers that are like they're like thousand dollars. If you join Uber and you're, …”
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: Taking the first term sheet slows fundraising and risks deal failure
“If you just go take the first term sheet, Getting around done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives. You don't have alternatives. And then it gets weird. And then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more, more,…”
Kalanick: Excessive analytical rigor in pitches hurts founders during tech super cycles
“When it's average, it's super important
To tell a beautiful story that's woven, like that, that, that's like a story that numbers are woven through.
It's a beautiful, entertaining, interesting story with analytical numbers woven through it.
And you basically g…”
Kalanick: Founders should start fundraising auctions with intentionally low prices
“The right way to do it is to start with a low price... So a lot of entrepreneurs, they go and they say, they really have a, remember I said, attached to a process, not a price. So a lot of entrepreneurs will get attached to the price and not the process. And y…”
Kalanick: His biggest mistake was running too close to the line
“The problem was that I ran too close to the line in too many situations that it, when you are big and important,
The scrutiny and the expectation is that you don't run that close to line, even if it's correct.”
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.”
Kalanick: Pricing in transportation is the sum of all strategy
“Pricing in the transportation space is the sum of all strategy.”
Tech leaders smiling while warning about AI job displacement destroys public trust
“If I'm telling you that you are potentially going to lose status, purpose, income, and security. And I seem just fine, and I'm smiling as I say it, automatically there's no trust between us. You don't even think of me as, barely as like the same species, but y…”
Culture is abandoning a decade of aesthetic relativism for objective beauty
“People are allowed to care about objectively beautiful things again. We had probably a decade or the better part of a decade where we had to take this aesthetic relativistic view of everything is beautiful in someone's eyes, and this piece of art that is like …”
Relying on AI writing tools reduces above-average thinkers to baseline mediocrity
“When you use a template, you are giving up on the possibility that you could be better. And I say this sometimes about AI writing. Your AI is a wonderful tool. I use it all the time. But if you are relying on AI to write for you and to generate ideas for you a…”
Ovitz: Creative companies die without leaders who intrinsically understand talent
“My thesis about all these companies, if you don't have someone that understands talent running the company, because you can always get an operator, if you don't have someone who understands talent, that company's gonna die”
Malka: AI will connect to money via blockchain smart contracts
“I think it's going to be that intersection between probably what blockchains will do and AI will do, because you will need to have intelligent smart contracts that will do stuff on your behalf”
Malka: Founder-led fintechs like Stripe and Nubank will win AI race
“I think it comes from them. Because first, they're still founder-led, or Revolut, also. They're still founder-led. Those founders are pushing the boundaries of all of this. They are at an age, and they are at a place, and if you talk to them, they're still as …”
Malka: Dee Hock considered Visa a failure because it lacked smart contracts
“For him Visa was a failure, if you talk to him, because he only got to release The simple version of it, which was payments, he wanted to do a lot more, which looked a lot like blockchains and smart contracts are today, but he was probably 60 years ahead of hi…”
DHH: Unlimited Resources Inevitably Produce Bloated Software
“If you have unlimited time, unlimited money and unlimited people, you're going to build a blob.”
DHH: AI Acceleration Likely to Cause Even Lean Teams to Overbuild
“So this is why I'm quite skeptical about all this new AI acceleration we're having is even us. I think it's quite likely that we could use it wrong to build too much software to get too far away from less software, learnable software that still has to fit in t…”
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: Windows is the epitome of having no design taste
“Apple for the longest time Was the undisputed leader in that, especially when you compared it to Windows, which was the epitome of having no taste, of having no sensibilities about how things should look, and having no cohesive vision for what a computer shoul…”
DHH: High-impact product ideas initially sound stupid and counterintuitive
“All the best ideas that actually turn out to have an impact on something, they sound stupid at first. They're not intuitive because that's where all the Value has been locked up. It's been locked up in this misconception about what people actually want, becaus…”
DHH: Users must pay you to earn the right to give feedback
“If you want to tell me ill-considered feedback on anything I make, you gotta pay me. And you can do that with Basecamp, and you can tell me.”
DHH: Rich entrepreneurs have a moral obligation to buy Italian supercars
“If you sell a product or service and you make a lot of money on it, put that money back into the system, send some of that money to the craftsmen of Italy to create you a beautiful Ferrari, right? Like, there's someone who has to stitch that seat such that it'…”
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…”
Zalaznick: Restaurants cannot be financially successful serving lunch because nobody drinks
“The truth is that restaurants can't be successful serving lunch.”
Zalaznick: Only expand into cities with multiple restaurants generating $20M+ annually
“If you tell me, is this an interesting city to open a restaurant in? All I say is, you know, find me two or three restaurants doing twenty million dollars or more. And then it's an interesting city. There's not that many cities in the world that have restauran…”