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 214 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
Kalanick: Benchmark ran an activist war room creating weekly crises at Uber
“Benchmark was running a war room. They were an unspoken activist investor that was creating a once a week crisis.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons currently operates Evernote with about 20 people
“And by the way, today Evernote, we run it with about 20 people.”
Grady and Lin asked Leone back 30 days after taking over Sequoia
“It turned out the rule of step down, Pat and Alfred took over. They weren't the kings I chose, and 30 days into it, they came to my house, and they said, would you like to come back?”
Reil: Manned fighter jets will struggle against superhuman autonomous swarms
“Crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up Facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities, and it's not science fiction.”
White: Viacom Executive Philippe Dauman Threatened to Build a UFC Clone
“And then he tells us that he built the UFC, and if we don't like the offer he's making, he'll just build another one. That's literally what he said.”
Foroughi: AppLovin cut 40% of headcount while doubling revenue
“The business grew nearly a hundred percent year over year, and we fired about 40% of the team because I wanted to distill it down to these eight players.”
Andreessen: 2009 legacy VC firms were lone wolves who disliked each other
“All of the sort of legacy venture firms at that point, they were all like that. They were all just like tribes of lone wolves. And then the thing that we knew that was not publicly known was, generally speaking, inside the firms, they didn't even like each oth…”
Armstrong: Members of Congress told me Warren asked Gensler to curtail crypto
“My understanding, this is kind of what other people in the Congress told me, is that she asked Gary Gensler to go hard on crypto and like try to really curtail it in the United States.”
Iovine: AI will never write a song like Dylan's 'Blowin' in the Wind'
“AI will never be able to write Blown in the Wind by Bob Dylan. Not in anyone who's listening to this, or in my lifetime, for sure.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons generates roughly $3B in run rate revenue
“Currently we are roughly three billion dollars in run rate revenue.”
Ferrari: Bending Spoons cut Evernote's headcount from 350 to around 50
“So it was roughly 350 team members. We made it substantially smaller. I think a year and a half after the acquisition closed, we were more around 50 to 60 team members.”
Ferrari: Evernote's product development is three times faster under Bending Spoons
“If you look at the, it's difficult to precisely quantify innovation, but if you look at the timeline of, say, product improvements, features, before we acquired it in the, say, two, three years before and after, it's night and day. I feel very comfortable sayi…”
Staniszewski predicts conversational AI will deliver human-like dialogue within 12 months
“So, so I think 12 months from now, what will happen is, is similar as we are speaking. It's, I think the technology will be able to understand us at an incredibly better way, both our knowledge, both the emotional part of that conversation and deliver, deliver…”
Dell: Next 50 years of energy defined by solar, batteries, and software
“We think that there's a generational kind of paradigm shift happening in the energy industry, where the last five decades of energy were defined by coal and then Natural gas as the marginal megawatt. And the next five decades will be defined by solar batteries…”
Leone saw a startup with no product try to raise at $10B
“I came back from vacation over the weekend. I saw a memo. I won't tell you the name of a startup company that wants to raise money without anything at ten billion pre.”
Sequoia's investment in SpaceX has a shot at a $20B gain
“Yeah, it's SpaceX. Now, we haven't cashed out yet or whatever, but, you know, there's a shot of a twenty billion dollar gain or more, and so he ruined it for all of us.”
Leone hasn't lost a deal to a competitor in 30 years except on price
“You know, I really haven't lost an investment in 30 years in Silicon Valley. People have beaten me because of price, but I haven't lost otherwise.”
Reil: Future warfare will be autonomous machine battles where humans cannot survive
“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”
Reil: Sending humans into battle will become unethical, forcing ground robot adoption
“And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where …”
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: 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: 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: 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 Will Be Best Across the Entire Cost-Performance Curve
“At every point on the cost curve, cost performance curve, we will be the best.”
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 …”
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: 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…”
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 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…”
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.”
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 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 …”