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 379 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
Staniszewski: Voice generation was entirely robotic and unconvincing prior to 2022
“No, I mean, everything was poor. Everything was robotic. Everything was pretty robotic. It was still, you know, it was still like you could immediately tell it was like a robotic voice and nothing really crossed that uncanny valley yet.”
Dell: Grid is massively oversized for peak demand, driving up costs
“The grid is a system by which the transmission distribution happens, and it's built for the peak, so it's massively oversized, which means that you have a bunch of inefficiency, and that it's not being used all the time. It's not being highly utilized, and whe…”
Dell: Base Core battery is custom-designed and manufactured in-house
“It's called the base core, and it is our custom-built battery, and it is the output of the last three years of learning how to install, operate, and manage tens of thousands of distributed home batteries. It's completely designed by us from the ground up. It's…”
Sequoia historically owned 20% of Nvidia and 10% of Google
“And you know, we own 20% of NVIDIA. Think about that. I mean, you know, we own 10% of Google. And there's many others, you know. Apple. Are you kidding me? We were the first investor of Apple, in Apple. Cisco. We own a quarter of Cisco systems.”
Sequoia sold its 25% stake in Cisco for only a $90M gain
“We sold our Cisco shares for cash for the total gain of ninety million. We owned a quarter of Cisco systems.”
Reil: Drones can find and strike artillery 40-50 km away
“And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front, ah, to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones.”
Reil: Europe had no defense tech champions like Anduril or Palantir in 2021
“The US had companies like Andrew and Palantir that were very forward looking defense companies with a big focus on, AI, cheaper hardware, and abundant hardware and the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing, and so we felt we have to do this”
Reil: Daniel Ek invested €100M of personal money into Helsing
“Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end, so we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel you know, put in a hundred million euros of his ow…”
Reil: Helsing and Saab won German Eurofighter electronic warfare contract using AI
“We came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recover that ability to interpret those radars, and it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against, you know, a l…”
Reil: Germany's defense budget is growing to over †150B by 2029
“It's also the country that has in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty two billion euros last year to originally, I think, hundred and fifty three billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over one hundred and …”
Altman: DeepMind was one of only a few AGI efforts when OpenAI launched
“In late, late, when we were starting OpenAI, there were very few AGI efforts in the world. There was DeepMind, one or two others that I can think of. It was like a very non-consensus thing to do.”
Altman: OpenAI's GPT series originated from its unsupervised sentiment neuron paper
“You know, what started as the unsupervised sentiment neuron paper turned into GPT-ONE and then eventually GPT-whatever.”
Kalanick: Meituan's Wang Xing warned him entering China was "worst idea ever"
“It's actually when I first met Wan Shing at Meizuan, actually. And he told me I was crazy. Don't do it. It's the worst idea ever.”
Kalanick: At one point, Uber's top 10 global cities were all Chinese
“At some point, probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities. That's wild. In rides. Yeah. Not in revenue because the rides instead of like at the, in my day, 13 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever they were, these were like three bucks, two bucks type stuff.”
Kalanick: Pre-Uber, NYC taxi drivers paid $40k yearly for half-time rentals
“When Uber rolled into New York the driver was getting a 12 hour shift seven days a week.
But there are 2:12 hour shifts.
Each of those drivers was paying 40,000 dollars a year to rent a car for half time.”
Ovitz spent a year cultivating Japanese relationships while impatient American peers failed
“In the early eighties, I was going to Japan once a month for business, and friends of mine were going, and they'd come back, and they'd call me, and they said, my God, I just had the greatest meeting in Japan. I'm going to close. And I'd start laughing, and th…”
Ovitz: Magic Johnson was the first contemporary athlete to build a business
“He came to me and said, look, I want to be in business. No other athletes at that time said that, and they did their service, and 35, they were done. Irvin said, when I'm done, I want to be able to be a businessman, and we went and set that course.”
Ovitz mailed weekly CAA movie star signing announcements to rival agency partners
“Every time we signed a movie star, which was once a week, we took out a full red page ad in Variety. This is when there was no computers. People actually read and took out every Friday. Every time we signed a movie star, I took that ad, tore it, put it in an e…”
Ovitz: CAA once represented 46 of the top 50 box office filmmakers
“At one time, CAA representative of the top 50 grossing variety box office filmmakers, we had 46. 46. And I was upset, because I didn't have all of them. There were four I couldn't get, and it really upset me, and it gnawed at me my whole career there.”
Malka: Revolut CEO Nikolay Storonsky maintains 20 direct reports
“He still has 20 people direct report to him.”
Zalaznick: Carbone Miami generates $30M annually, quadrupling the prior tenant's revenue
“The floor plan was the same as the restaurant before it, and that restaurant with the same floor plan was doing about, you know, call it seven million dollars in revenue, and when we opened Carbone with the same exact seats, right, I mean, that restaurant does…”
Glyman: Typical business cuts expenses by over 5% with Ramp
“And I think the most useful piece of information is that like, you know, the typical business that adopts Ramp is able to cut their expenses by over five percent per year.”
Glyman: Ramp customers grow revenue at 16% median annual rate
“The typical business that adopts Ramp is growing their revenue a median of 16% per year. The U.S. Average is three to four percent.”
Glyman: Pre-Ramp Corporate Card Industry Relied on Rewards Counter to CFO Interests
“If you kind of look at the credit card industry which is where we started even just seven years ago, everyone had agreed that the best way to earn business was through these points and rewards
Go spend more money. You can earn points and multipliers will have …”
Glyman: Ramp has seen five consecutive quarters of accelerating revenue growth
“Like, we've had five quarters in a row of accelerating revenue growth while you know, doubling the business and doing it on a multi-billion dollar scale, and so that part of it has been incredibly energizing.”
Ross: Groq's NVIDIA deal closed within three weeks of first call
“The call where the idea was first floated was about three weeks before money was in the bank.”
Ross: Learning to manage people cost Groq three to four years
“The first thing that you have to do as a founder is you have to go from the technical thing that you know how to do and that you can add value with to learning how to manage people. And for me, that probably cost Grok three to four years.”
Ross: Groq Faced High Turnover Over Skepticism About Fast Inference
“There was a lot of pushback on, like, we had a lot of turnover at this point. A lot of people were leaving. This was probably three or four years ago. And so a lot of people were leaving, saying there was no point to fast inference. It wasn't going to add any …”
The uninterrupted task horizon for AI agents doubles every few months
“And that's just doubled every, you know, every couple of months basically. And now we're talking about like, Hours of work. So, so basically an AI can just take a task that would have taken humans hours of work to go do.”
Stoute: Beats by Dre video placement was inspired by Men in Black
“The idea that Jimmy was putting the Beats headphones in music videos was literally a derivative of that idea.”
Stoute: Coca-Cola Turned Down iTunes Partnership Deal Twice
“Jimmy was trying to get a deal done with Coca-Cola. An executive at Coca-Cola, Steve Hyatt, turned it down twice.”
Stoute: Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl
“Usher was the first independent artist to play the Super Bowl.”
Catmull: Disney signed initial Pixar deal expecting small boutique films
“Our contract with Disney, an initial contract, was to make three movies. And at the time it was signed Disney perceived that Pixar was going to produce boutique films, their word, much as they would consider A Nightmare Before Christmas, a stop motion animated…”
Jobs Secretly Previewed the First iPhone While Disclosing His Terminal Cancer
“It's actually when he showed us the first iPhone when it was a secret. And we're on this bridge between the one building and there's a bridge over that goes between another tall building next to it. And the secret lab is where they're designing it. And he told…”
Catmull: Disney never inspected Pixar's processes despite contractual rights
“That contract gave them the right To look at everything we did and all of our processes. As we started to become successful, nobody from Disney ever came and said, what are you guys doing?”
Catmull: Pixar completed 21 of 22 films started; Disney completed 10 of 11
“Before I left, we completed 21 of the 22 films we started. So, but it's just bizarre in that world, and at Disney we completed, by the time I left, 10 of the 11 that we'd started.”
Söderström: Apple Podcasts held 98.5% market share before Spotify's entry
“And when we looked at their usage, I think Apple podcast was still like 98 and a half percent.”
Söderström: Gen Z users value nearly 90% of time spent on Spotify
“We were actually the lowest regret content sort of on the internet in terms of the platforms we asked for, or if you flip it around some of the time most well spent on the internet with, you know, Gen Z saying that they value almost almost 90% of the time they…”
Söderström: Almost 70% of Spotify users work out with the app
“Almost 70% of people on Spotify work out with Spotify.”
Spotify launches 'Save to Spotify' for private AI-generated podcasts
“So this is something I'm working on at Spotify, and we released this just a few weeks ago, something called Save to Spotify. When you sit in your code code or codex or something, you can just, you know, you can ask these agents to go out and look at informatio…”
Ivanka Trump says her former fashion brand topped $800M in annual sales
“My fashion brand, we were doing over eight hundred million in sales annually.”
Donald Trump never spent a night in D.C. before the White House
“He'd never spent a night in Washington until his first night in the White House.”
Ivanka Trump says her Child Tax Credit push benefited 40 million families
“Forty million Americans Benefited, on average, 2500 dollars a family by the expansion of the child tax credit.”
Rubin: Jay-Z is the only artist who composes entirely in his head
“He's the only person I've ever seen do that.”
Historical Network TV Production Resembled Lottery Economics
“Let's not go into deficit network television production. Just a bad economic business. Different today than it was, but it was really bad then, where you would deficit these shows in hopes of creating enough episodes that you could syndicate them. And if you d…”