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
Ek shadowed Mark Zuckerberg for a week, attending all his meetings
“I asked him, hey can I come and learn from you? And he was incredibly gracious and we've obviously been friends for a long time, and he said sure. And so I spent the better part of what I believe the first time was like a week literally in pretty much all of h…”
Ek focuses on energy management rather than time management
“A lot of entrepreneurs seem to be obsessed about time. I'm really not. I'm more obsessed about energy management.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs released a model that translates speech across languages
“Just a week ago we released finally a model that is able to do that extremely well and finally bring the content from one language to another.”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs only builds products where audio is the bottleneck
“And, like, when we think about new product, the big question is, do we think we have a unique advantage by applying our audio models in that product experience? If the product experience doesn't have a big bottleneck in that audio and the voice communication s…”
ElevenLabs caps organizational depth at four to five layers
“At 11 Labs, we have a couple of five today, like maximum Depth of how many layers there should be”
Staniszewski: ElevenLabs grants nearly all employees access to all internal documents
“We took a choice to be extremely transparent with a lot of the data that we have, a lot of the docs that we write, so everybody has almost access to all the docs that are there in the company”
Staniszewski: Conversational Agents and Creative Tools Drive Most ElevenLabs Revenue
“The biggest nines are on the agent side. And the creative side. So the number of use cases that deploy conversational agents is, is, is just skyrocketing today for us.”
Staniszewski: Most ElevenLabs staff is in Europe, working on AI sovereignty
“Most of our team is in Europe, spend a lot of time with the European teams and governments of how we think about building sovereignty and how important this will be.”
Dell: Base Power only optimizes existing power delivery via batteries
“So with our current product set today focused on battery storage, we're not making more electricity. We're just using it more efficiently to drive the cost down.”
Leone: Work at Sequoia felt like an unconquerable challenge until age 65
“No, it felt like an overwhelming challenge that I didn't know how to conquer, and I felt that until the day I stopped working at 65.”
Reil: Helsing's HX-II strike drone is often AI-controlled
“And strike drones often travel over longer distances and like the HX-II, which is our drone quite often they're AI controlled.”
Altman: OpenAI used internal leaderboards to simulate missing customer signals
“One of the things that worked actually is during the Dota two days when we were trying to use RL to beat this video, beat people at a video game, we put up like a leaderboard and people could just see how different ideas were performing and what was You know, …”
Ovitz used three AI platforms for six hours of active deal research
“I went down a rabbit hole on three AI platforms. I spent Six, seven hours, two different days. I was, ah, I had so much information that I needed to add to my instinctual information because I'd been around that business so long.”
Ovitz defaults to twenty-minute Zoom meetings instead of standard hour blocks
“When someone says to me, I have to take an hour of Zoom, I kind of laugh at them. I said, what law is there on the planet that says a Zoom has to be an hour? I said, frankly, if you get free Zoom, they cut you off in 45 minutes. I said, so what rule is it that…”
Ovitz instituted 90-day meetings requiring 200 CAA employees to pitch ideas
“We had a set up where every 90 days we put 200 people in a circle with their chairs tied to each other, and everybody had 30 seconds to pitch an ID and you couldn't pass.”
Malka bought his first Berkshire Hathaway share in 1987 at age 13
“So I bought my first share of Berkshire when I was 13 years old in Venezuela.
It was November of 1987.”
DHH: Ruby on Rails was created as a function of procrastination
“This is also one of the reasons why I got so into building software tools, Ruby on Rails, everything else. Many of these tools are functions of procrastination.”
Ross: Groq gave every employee a challenge coin targeting 25M tokens/sec
“So everyone at Grok had a challenge coin that said, twenty-five million tokens per second and had a little graph of it going up, and everyone knew that was the thing to do.”
Cognition aims to complete enterprise customer deployments in three months
“We're saying that these cycles typically take 12 to 18 months. We try to get deployed with folks, you know, in like three months.”
Stoute: Left a multimillion-dollar salary at 29 for $150K agency role
“When I left the record business, you know, I was making a couple million dollars a year at 29. And I went to an agency in which I got paid a 150,000 dollars and 20% equity.”
Söderström: I won't work for anyone except Daniel Ek again
“I worked for Daniel for almost 18 years, and I don't think I'll work for anyone except Daniel again.”
Söderström: Spotify optimized for a single app experience despite backend complexity
“And so one thing we chose to optimize for was the single experience. We're really good at building a single experience that actually does a billion different things, and most people don't even realize that On the back end, it's even more complicated because yo…”
Söderström: Spotify acquired The Echo Nest to gain MIT-adjacent AI talent
“When AI started happening, or what was called machine learning back then, I felt that we just weren't strong enough in deep learning specifically. We knew the old school matrix factorization stuff. So we did an acquisition of a company called the Econest in Bo…”
Ivanka Trump reveals investments in AI, biotech, robotics, and space
“So whether it's incubating companies from for-profit to non-for-profit businesses investing in companies and founders that are really right at the edge of transformation, whether that be AI. Biotech, neurotech, robotics, ah, even space.”
Ivanka Trump consciously chose not to rejoin the Trump Organization
“I actually made the choice not to go back to our family business, not to restart my fashion brand, because I wanted a new adventure and a new experience, and I was a different person.”
Ivanka Trump and Elad Gil's Project Alexandria will AI-translate 1,000 classics
“We're calling it, we haven't launched yet, but we're about to launch with the first 1000 works, and we're gonna learn a lot, and people will give us feedback on each of the translations, but imagine now meditations will be translated into most of the world's s…”
ElevenLabs is powering audio for Ivanka Trump's AI translation startup
“The voices are amazing, so 11 Labs is helping.”
Rubin: Fanatical Obsession Drives His Search for the Best Version of Anything
“Well, I'm not a researcher in a professional way, but anything I'm interested in, I want to know everything about it, whatever it is, and even mundane things. If I drink coffee, I want to taste a million coffee. I want to find the best coffee. I want to read w…”
Rubin: Johnny Cash living room demos sounded better than studio band sessions
“The most interesting version of this to me is when he's singing alone, which is really the demos in my living room, him singing me songs. That sounded better than when we went into the recording studio with musicians and played them with the band.”
Rubin: Longevity comes from meditation and acknowledging creativity isn't personal
“I think the fact that I learned to meditate when I was young and always had a grounded, and I, and the fact that I know it's not me, that's, it's like those two things, like I'm grounded and I know I'm lucky to participate in this magic that's happening. I get…”
Rubin never listens to music he produced once it is finished
“I never put on music I worked on, which is funny because I'm making it to be the perfect version of what I wanna hear. But in the process of doing that, there's so much listening involved that it's not fun to go back and listen to it for me. I want to hear som…”
Zelnick Left 20th Century Fox for a 95% Pay Cut
“I left. I took a 95% pay cut and moved my family from our beautiful house in West L.A. To Atherton to a rental house that was going to be torn down.”
ZMC Was Launched With $300K and Unpaid Staff
“So I put in 300,000 dollars of my own money. I convinced people to work for free. We borrowed offices. We had one fewer chair than we had people.”
Take-Two Deploys Enterprise ChatGPT and Claude Across 200 Projects
“We have hundreds of projects going on, and we already have promulgated enterprise software, so we have enterprise versions of ChatGPT and Claude that are available to everyone to use, that are fully licensed and paid for, and then we have about 200 projects go…”
White: UFC Aims to Be First to Adopt New Production Technologies
“When new technology comes out, we always try to be first or one of the first to use it, but the show is dialed now.”
White: We Launched Power Slap With $3M in Initial Capital
“We put up three million bucks and it's killing it.”
Foroughi: AppLovin hit a $1M monthly run rate within eight months
“So we raised four over twenty five million dollars pre as a convertible note to common in, in November. The business by that point in time had gotten a million dollar a month run rate. So we went from launch To a million dollar a month run rate and profitable …”
Baszucki: Roblox was founded to merge 3D co-presence, communication, and storytelling
“We thought three-d immersive digital stuff would combine communication, being in the same place with storytelling, and the rest, that's kind of how we got our launch.”
Baszucki: Immersive 3D simulations have a 20-to-50-year trajectory
“When we sold Knowledge Revolution and we started Roblox, I was thinking that immersive, three-D, physically simulated stuff should have a 20, 30, 4050 year trajectory.”
Baszucki: Roblox is structured internally as nine separate companies
“We think of our company as the system and the company Roblox is really running almost as if it's nine separate companies.”
Baszucki: Roblox Employs Dedicated Engineers to Optimize Internal Company Operations
“We have a group of engineers working not on Roblox, but on the Roblox operating system. Looking at who are the various teams, how we're organized, how we do all of our things in the company.”
Baszucki: Roblox Group Leaders Operate as Autonomous Mini-CEOs
“How does the leader of an individual group like that game engine cloud thing, how do they actually operate almost like a mini CEO? How do they run that vertical stack? How do they control the types of engineers and product managers, how they compensate them? T…”
Baszucki: Roblox's safety group is arguably its largest internal organization
“There's a very large group, arguably the largest safety and civility group, engineering, product, policy, and live ops under a single threaded leader, chief safety officer, Matt, who can just run that whole thing and make decisions.”
Baszucki: Roblox operates by benchmarking against an imaginary competitor
“We have to run the company almost as if we're imagining a virtual other company who really loves this space. So we have like an imaginary competitor. So we literally think about running the company that way.”
Baszucki: Roblox aims to reduce game entry time to near zero
“We want to get the time to jump into any Roblox game down to zero, basically. And that's very technically complicated. But we do believe it has long-term growth aspects to us.”
Baszucki: Roblox open-sourced a voice model and Sentinel safety model
“So there's a consortium actually with some various companies involved in safety. We've open sourced one of our voice models. We've open sourced one of our Sentinel models.”
Baszucki: Roblox Studio is embedding AI features and opening Cloud to MCP
“I would say we're getting close and I'd say right now, Roblox studio is starting to embed a pile of AI capable type functionality. The beauty though, that we have all of our Roblox cloud open to MCP server and all of that stuff. We're now we're just seeing dev…”
Roblox helps creators value their games for third-party rollup funds
“There is a market out there. I think if anything, we're trying to get the message out to our creators, like our DevRel team can help you assess what your game might actually be worth, because a lot of them are worth a lot of money.”